Avoid Self-Abandonment by Staying in Your Own Boat

Those of us who struggle with low self-esteem don’t always realize just how much we abandon ourselves. Generally speaking, self-abandonment is when we ignore what we need and want and feel in order to prioritize someone else’s needs and wants and feelings.

When we abandon ourselves like this, we automatically send ourselves the message that we deserve to be abandoned and that we don’t deserve to prioritize ourselves. This clearly reduces our self-esteem. If we can learn not to abandon ourselves, we’ll guarantee an increase in self-esteem – and self-empowerment, as well as a more fulfilling life!

Let’s learn more about what self-abandonment looks like so we can learn not to do it.

When we people-please, we abandon ourselves. People-pleasing is when we focus on making the people around us happy, or happy with us. We focus on their feelings, not ours. We’re making sure they feel good, while ignoring or deprioritizing our feelings. Classic self-abandonment.

When we say, “I don’t care” instead of giving our opinion (on the restaurant, the vacation, etc.), we abandon ourselves. When we deprioritize our opinion or we don’t say what we actually believe because we fear that the other person will be disappointed, get mad, or disapprove of us, we abandon ourselves.

When we act as emotional caretakers, we abandon ourselves. Being an emotional caretaker is when we make it our mission to make sure a person or people are not just surface-level pleased, but emotionally stable. We focus on taking care of their needs, not ours. We compromise ourselves for them.

All of this is reasonable every once in a while, but when it’s a consistent pattern or your go-to way of being, it means you’re not centering yourself in your life. That’s not good for your self-esteem or life satisfaction.

Chronic self-abandonment is an indication that it was a survival tactic when we were young. For so many of us, our emotional survival depended on our parents’ emotional stability, so we focused on keeping our parents as happy and emotionally regulated as possible. If our parents were happy or less stressed, then we were treated better or our environment felt safer, so we did whatever we could to make this happen. This involved prioritizing them over us. As a result, we knew our parents’ moods and needs much better than we knew our own.

We abandoned ourselves to save ourselves.

The problem, of course, is that the more you abandon yourself, the more you believe you’re worth abandoning. You don’t learn to shift the focus back to yourself because you never learn that you’re worth focusing on. You never learn that you are worth prioritizing.

The goal is to focus on and prioritize yourself, in part to reinforce the belief that you are worth focusing on and prioritizing. That belief is self-esteem. When you believe that your worth is not dependent on what anyone else thinks or feels, you can build self-acceptance. When you know that you not only have the right, but are supposed to impact your life by making choices based on your preferences and values, you develop self-empowerment.

Sounds good, right? Your next question – rightfully so – is, “How do I do that?” 

I’m going to answer that question using my current favorite metaphor! It’s a boat metaphor: Imagine we’re all floating down a river, and we’re each in our own boat. I’m in my own boat, my husband is in his own boat, you’re in your own boat. Some of us are at the rapids, some of us are at a calm part of the river. Some of us are good at piloting our boat, others are not so skilled at it. The point is that we each have our own boat, and we’re each responsible for our own boat.

The goal is to stay in your own boat at all times.

Do not get in someone else’s boat. If someone else needs help, you can paddle over to them and hand them oars and tools, and you can give them guidance. But you can’t get in their boat.

Getting in their boat would mean leaving your boat, and the moment you do this, you lose your grounding. You lose your ability to steer your boat; you are now at the mercy of the boat you are in, which is not yours. You may have some influence on where this particular boat goes while you’re in it, but you definitely don’t have total control over it because it’s not yours. When you’re not in your boat, you’re not in control of your stability. You lose power to influence your life. That’s not good. You give up a lot when you get into someone else’s boat.

Leaving your boat and getting into someone else’s boat is self-abandonment.

Here’s the thing with self-abandonment: we do it all the time without realizing what we’re doing. It seems like we’re just helping someone else, and that’s a good thing, right? Or maybe we see that we’re helping this other person in order to try to keep ourselves emotionally stable. We haven’t yet learned that as adults, our stability doesn’t depend on another person’s stability (except in extreme cases).

When we were kids, our stability may well have depended on our parents’ stability. We don’t have a lot of power or autonomy when we’re kids. We can’t make big decisions for ourselves, we can’t move out and take care of ourselves. Sometimes we’re not even allowed to have our own opinions. Now that we’re adults, we have much more power over ourselves and our emotional stability, regardless of how the people around us are doing (again, except in extreme cases).

The way we maintain emotional stability is to take responsibility for our boat: to stay in our own boat and learn how to pilot it.

We have to prioritize keeping our boat upright and being able to steer it. Again, from the stability of our boat we can help others, so this isn’t about not helping anyone, but it is about not consistently choosing someone else – or everyone else – over yourself. It’s about not losing your footing while you help others.

To not abandon yourself, you need to stick by yourself. You need to claim yourself. You need to choose and prioritize yourself. You need to recognize that you and your needs and thoughts and beliefs and feelings and wants – you matter, and you’re as important as everyone else.

You also need to recognize that it’s by prioritizing all this stuff that you create a life that actually supports and serves you. That’s not being selfish, by the way – that’s aligning with and choosing yourself. We’re supposed to do that. We’re supposed to be the main characters in our own lives (it wouldn’t make sense if we weren’t, right?).

Sometimes when people try to prioritize their feelings, wants, needs, thoughts, and beliefs, they realize that they don’t know what they are. That makes sense – if we haven’t spent a lot of time in our own boat, we’re not going to be very familiar with it.

To get familiar with yourself, start from the premise that your needs, wants, thoughts, beliefs, and feelings are important. I’ll add that your values are also important information about you.

So your job is to keep checking in with yourself by asking these 5 questions:

• What do I need right now?
• What do I want right now?
• What do I think right now?
• What do I believe right now?
• How do I feel right now?
• What is important to me right now?

We’re not trying to solve any problems by asking these questions; we’re just trying to gather information about ourselves. The more we ask these questions, the better we will know ourselves and the more we will learn about how to prioritize ourselves.

Once you get some information about yourself, practice prioritizing yourself. Practice aligning with your beliefs, not the beliefs of the person you’re with. Practice not abandoning your needs and feelings for someone else’s.

To be clear, I don’t mean that you should always get what you want and the people in your life should never get what they want. But you should take up your space; you should show up in your life in a way that aligns with you and feels meaningful. You can only do this when you haven’t abandoned yourself.

When you claim yourself and align with yourself, you are the owner of your truth. You acknowledge your worth. You have the information and power to make choices that make a fulfilling life.

So, to decrease self-abandonment and increase self-esteem, stay in your boat and learn to pilot it. When you’re at the rapids or a tricky part of the river, keep your focus on your values and your truths; they are your rudder. Do the stuff that feels most supportive and meaningful. When the water is calm, you have time to get curious and do some self-exploration. Learn what buoys you. Learn what keeps you grounded in rough waters. Identify your boundaries; they are crucial for keeping your boat afloat and on course. Don’t invite anyone into your boat, and be wary of anyone who tries to get in.

If it feels like a lot, take one step: notice when you abandon yourself. Then you can start to make changes