Death By a 1000 Cuts: Understanding Self-Abandonment
Many of the things that bring us pain aren’t so much the big, traumatic experiences that occur in one singular moment but are the cumulative events ignored or otherwise allowed to wear us down until we’re forced to take notice.
And to say that humans wait until things get really bad before taking action is a HUGE understatement.
Just look at the climate crisis and how difficult it is for governments to take action or look at Europe’s ignorance of Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and how that spurred a full-scale invasion in February 2022.
Part of the human condition seems to be that we’ll put up with the bad until they get really bad, and we’re forced to take notice. In the interim, we’ll turn a blind eye or find temporary comforts to ignore the pain.
Or at least, that’s been what I’ve observed from the world and my own experience with my personal troubles.
Some would call the ultimate moment of realisation “rock bottom”; others might call it a result of ignorance, but I like to call it death by a 1000 cuts.
There are many areas in life where we can suffer a death by a 1000 cuts, and when it comes to relationships, self-abandonment can be one of the most painfully heartbreaking and difficult to recover from.
I’ve always said that it’s hard to manage any breakup, but a breakup where you’ve lost yourself in the process of loving and losing someone else can be a terribly painful experience.
So, what is self-abandonment, how does it show up in our relationships, and why do I call it death by 1000 cuts?
Self-Abandonment in Relationships: The Origins
Self-abandonment is the act of pushing our wants and needs aside in favour of the platonic or romantic comfort we get from someone else, be it people-pleasing or the consistent requirement of a warm embrace from a loved one over knowing when we should take care of ourselves.
Self-abandonment is a hallmark of insecure attachment styles, but in today’s article, we’ll talk more about the anxiously attached person: the people pleasers, the “clingy” partners, and the people who habitually make others their world. No judgement towards these people; I am one!
To start, I was going to say that anxiously attached individuals learn to self-abandon in childhood, but in some cases, anxiously attached individuals aren’t given a chance to develop a stable, independent sense of self in the first place.
This could be true in instances where a child grew up with an overbearing or intrusive caregiver. It’s difficult for a child to develop a stable sense of self when their caregivers aren’t letting them explore the world and their interests. The caregiver may exclaim, “Don’t do that! It’s too dangerous!” about the child’s desires to try something new. This instills a belief over time that it is unsafe for them to be themselves or try something new. At some point, child needs to learn for themselves what is right or wrong, be allowed to explore the world, and trust their caregivers are there for them when they need help.
Additionally, a child will struggle to master their own emotional world if they feel responsible for their caregivers. In this, we can become chameleons, which requires a translucent self, with changing beliefs and actions, in order for us to succeed in our role of the people-pleaser.
You can’t be a religious people-pleaser if you have a solid base in who you are and can healthily express an opinion as being yourself is bound to create some conflict with others who don’t agree with your point of view (and that is ok!).
The result of learning early that it is not safe for us to be independently ourselves can leave us afraid of carving our own paths, and in extreme cases like my own, it can lead to a fear of being alone.
Growing up, I didn’t trust my thoughts or my ability to deal with my own emotions and, as such, required others to make me feel good, which meant learning to put my needs aside to gain other people’s approval.
I was only as OK so long as the people I cared about were OK.
To not self-abandon in relationships, you need to like who you are and have a life full of nourishing friendships, hobbies, and pastimes that aren’t worth losing.
When we lack the ability to follow our intuition and tend to our own needs, we’re unlikely to have an independent life that fulfils us, and even if we do, we risk falling into self-abandonment when romantically intertwined with someone else.
How Does Self-Abandonment Show Up in Relationships?
When I was in habit of self-abandonment, it amazed me how quickly I could lose myself when I started to date someone new. My independent life would crumble when I got into a relationship — but to be honest, I didn’t have much of one to begin with.
In relationships, I had a difficult time expressing my needs (setting boundaries), and I feared being alone. These two together, coupled with the cocktail of feel-good hormones that come with loving someone, meant I would choose someone else over myself more often than not.
This meant consistently overriding my intuitive sense of what I should do over what I thought I needed to do. It also meant choosing the short-term comfort of spending time with someone else over time with friends or alone. My partner’s interests became mine, their friends became my only friends, and time alone was replaced by time with them.
Why would I want to spend time alone if I disliked being alone? Better to be around someone 24/7, I thought, or at least, that’s what my body would tell me.
Once we begin self-abandoning, a runaway effect can occur. For example, if we fear being alone, then spending less time alone will likely make us fear being alone more, leading to an increased desire to be with our partner and to avoid ourselves. Because of this, we become dependent on them, and enmeshment occurs.
The crux of all of this is that a relationship where both partners are in each other’s business 24/7 is likely to be a tense and resentful one. When we can’t fulfil our own emotional needs, we either abandon them entirely in an attempt to please someone else or place too much responsibility on our partners to take care of us (mimicking our caregiver relationship).
Both of these options will create instability in our relationships. No one can be our saviour, and we can only put aside our needs so many times before we begin to feel that neglect in our bodies. Resentment is a crucial emotion that tells us when we’re feeling hard-done by. It can show up when others mistreat us or when we mistreat ourselves.
At its worst, self-abandonment can suffocate a relationship until it breaks. As I said before, this can leave us not only heartbroken but lost. Having let go of our independent lives for someone else to make us feel good, we’re left without our source of goodness and unable to tend to our own needs.
Death by 100 Cuts: Self-Abandonment
I say self-abandonment is death by 1000 cuts because self-abandonment doesn’t occur in one single instant, but over time as the result of behaviours that instil habits of relating in our relationships.
This process can start as early as a first date. When we meet someone new and are asked about our personal interests, we may shy away from expressing them because we don’t know what makes us unique or we fear rejection. This sets the stage for a relationship where our authentic selves can’t be present and, at worst, can lead to us matching with partners who devalue us — because we are secretly devaluing ourselves.
Over time, I’ve grown to enjoy my time alone. Part of my healing journey has come with creating practices that nourish me and “fill my emotional cup”, so to speak — outside of my relationship to others. Even so, self-abandonment is a habit of relating I learned early, so I can quickly revert to my old ways.
In my last relationship, I shied away from speaking up about some of the difficulties I was having with intimacy. It was only when things ended that I managed to verbalise them, but by then, it was too late.
To be in a romantic relationship is to have someone else see and hear us. When we choose to withhold information because we’re afraid, we limit the experience of intimacy. We build walls rather than bridges.
It’s worth saying before I finish that it’s perfectly fine to seek support and care from your loved ones. That’s why they’re there, after all, to help and add to our lives.
But there’s a difference between support and enmeshment.
Self-abandonment blurs the lines between us and them.
It merges our physical and emotional worlds until we don’t know where we start or where someone else begins.
When this happens, we risk losing ourselves, and it’s only when things go terribly wrong that we realise we’ve been metaphorically cutting ourselves for months or even years through the act of self-abandonment.
Only then do we notice we’ve lost ourselves in the eyes of someone else, but it doesn’t need to be this way:
We can notice when we need time alone, or when our fear of being alone is an issue we need to fix.
We can notice when we begin cancelling plans with friends and ensure to prioritise time with them aside from our relationship.
We can notice when we’re spending too much time with our partners and say, “Actually, we’ve seen each other 4 times this week. I think a weekend apart would be good for us”.
We can start building healthy self-care practices and independent lives that fulfil us so that we don’t automatically turn to others to take care of us.
Thank you for reading this article! I hope you have enjoyed. I am currently withdrawing from nicotine, so I also hope this made sense!!
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