Fear & Self-Abandonment: A Surefire Way To Poor Boundaries and Not Getting What You Want
It can be tempting to overlook red flags and mixed signals when dating someone new. Equally, it can be easy to overlook bad or harmful behaviour with someone you love.
Rather than face-up to what reality is presenting us and confront someone for the way they are behaving, or not behaving, we’d rather turn a blind eye.
But in my experience, this always leads to more harm than good — if not immediately, then certainly in the long-run.
Only in the smoke and ashes of the broken relationship can we look back and think, “the signs were there”.
It’s important we’re able to take notice of potential red flags and call them out when we see them.
But in order for us to do this we have to have healthy boundaries, something many of us lack.
Why is it we struggle with setting boundaries?
That’s what we’re talking about in todays article.
Boundaries: Self-Abandonment & Fear
In order for us to stand up for our wants/needs we have to speak up.
It means knowing our boundaries and communicating, as Brene Brown says , “What is ok for us and what is not”.
As someone who has previously struggled with setting boundaries and has felt the brunt of not having any, there were two reasons for my inability to set clear-boundaries:
I was in a habit of self-abandoning and not listening to myself.
I was living in fear.
The two formed a complex and close relationship, one feeding into the other in a way that reinforced my inability to speak my truth and ask for what I wanted.
Awareness is the first stept to any change so it’s important to outline the roles of both self-abandonment and fear in order to understand how we can move forward.
The work is difficult, but it’s a challenge worth the pain.
Let’s look closer at each:
1. Self-Abandonment: A Loss of Self
In realtionships, psychologist Nancy Colier LCSW, Rev refers to self-abandonment as a “…disappearance into the other’s experience”. It’s what happens when we cast aside our wants and needs for approval. We do this in work, in platonic relationships and romantic ones.
Self-abandonment can be a conscious choice or instincual. For example, some of us grew up in environments where we felt we couldn’t voice our needs, instead learning to appease others. This is a hallmark of the anxious attachment style, where we rely on others to reinforce our sense of self. In learning this mode of relating early, we not only grow up to be adults who self-abandon on autopilot but we have no practice in reinforcing our own sense of self.
To have healthy boundaries is to understand who you are and stand up for yourself. In having weak boundaries, we reinforce the idea that our sense of self isn’t worth sitcking up for — which negatively impacts our self-esteem.
Why would we like something we actively reject? Mark Manson refers to boundaries as “by-product of self-esteem”
When we lack clear-boundaries we can’t decipher where we start and someone else begins. Unable to satisfy our own needs, we look to others to do this for us, making us reliant on their continued approval/affection.
A lack of clear boundaries is what leads to self-abanonment; we feel we need to self-abandon in order to stay safe.
Which is why setting boundaries is so hard. There is a risk in boundary-setting that we might upset or be dissaproved of.
This results in fear.
2. The Reinforcing Power of Fear
None of us are chronic self-abandoners without some form of fear to keep the habit going.
For those of us who are chronic self-abandoners, it’s easier for us to not have boundaries than have them. At least in the short term, anyway.
The anxiety tied to setting a boundary can be mild at best and diabilitating at worst. I’ve recently debated dying my hair but as the day of my consultation approached so did anxiety. I thought about how others might judge me and how it might impact my professionalism at work.
These thoughts were draining and I soon found myself iritated by my inner critic. A part of me wondered if I should just cancel and forget about it. Maybe it’s better to conserve the energy than argue with myself, I thought. Fortunately — or unfortunately — the stylist cancelled, so I ended up having to rearrange. This is just an example of how anxiety can creep in and stop us from doing something we genuinely want to do. In that moment I was on the verge of self-abandonment, stopping myself from doing something I wanted to do.
This is just a micro example, now imagine what we can be like in relationships!
In callenging our fears and setting a boundary we have to challenge age-old beliefs likely rooted in pain and rejection. It’s unfortunate that childhood trauma has such an impact on us and sometimes I wish I could do things freely, without the inner judgement.
As many of our core woundings are a result of our early relationships, this can make setting boundaries with others particularly difficult. Our automatic response to a challenge in a relationship may be to fawn and give in to the other person’s wants/needs or disrespectful behaviour to maintain peace.
This need to always be “good”, “acceptable” and “loved” is just our way of using others to maintain a sense of self that we are abandoning. It’s toxic, perfectionistic and reinforced by fear.
A New Way of Relating: Where To Begin?
Relating back to my own experience, learning to set healthier boundaries in my relationships has looked like the following:
1. Building an awareness of what is OK for you and what is not:
We don’t know where we need boundaries unless we’re aware of where we’re not setting them. Resentment is a powerful emotion that shows us where boundaries may potentially need to be set. The emotion tells us where we’ve felt hard done by and can be felt as that simmering frustration within us.
2. Investing time and energy in self-care.
We won’t want to self-abandon if we have an independent life that we enjoy. In this, we need to have friendships and hobbies that are ours and “fill our cup”, so to speak. When I started doing this work it was easy for me to self-abandon because I didn’t have much of a self to begin with. In learning what it felt like to fulfil my own needs, I was then able to ask others to treat me better.
3. Practice, Practice, Practice
We don’t get better at something unless we start doing it — which means facing discomfort. Identify the areas in your life where boundaries might be needed and start communicating them. This is obviously easier said than done and you may find yourself second-guessing and doubting your decisions. You may even feel bad for setting a boundary but watch as you feel better with time — it feels good to honour your own needs.
4. Accept Some People Will Fall Away
When we begin setting healthier boundaries we will begin reinforcing a sense of self that we’ve always known but have rarely displayed. What this means is that some people, mainly those who have been able to take advantage of our lack of boundaries, will fall away.
5. Practice Emotional Regulation Techniques
Being able to regulate our emotions allows us to face fear without being overcome by it. Practices like meditation & breathwork can increase our awareness of internal emotions like fear and teach us how to calm down when we are triggered.
Thank you for reading this article.