Hello and welcome to Being Well. I'm Forrest Hansen. If you're new to the show, thanks for joining us today. And if you've listened before, welcome back. I'm joined today, as usual, by Dr. Rick Hansen. Rick is a clinical psychologist, a best-selling author. And he's also my dad. So, Dad, how are you doing today? I'm pretty fired up. And also, I'm doing what's always tied for first place with me as my favorite thing in a day.
I always love talking to you, too. And like you, I was really excited about this one. Today, we're going to be talking about self-abandonment.
which occurs when we go against our authentic wants, emotions, and boundaries in order to serve others, meet external expectations, or protect ourselves emotionally. And it's often part of a common family of issues that can include low self-worth, difficulties with setting and maintaining boundaries, and maybe some overlap with more anxious models of attachment, which I'm sure we'll be talking about a little bit today.
But I wanted to start, Dad, by just asking you, how do you think about self-abandonment? I know that this was kind of a new term for you when I introduced it to you. It is a new term for me. And for me, it really touches something very deep about... When we abandon ourselves, in a very deep way, we betray ourselves, right? We let ourselves down. And there are all kinds of reasons we do it.
It's quite poignant. It's really quite deep. And it also gets to the whole kind of parts work territory from different traditions, different places, the abandonment of the inner child. And it kind of gets almost at loyalty. You know, I think about the first chapter of my book, Making Great Relationships, Be Loyal to Yourself, where you and I started in the resilient book, Get on Your Own Side. And that's what we're going to be getting more and more into here.
Yeah, totally. I think that's a great summary. And we're going to start with kind of a being well classic here, which is talking about what we're talking about. So let's maybe name some of the things that you've already kind of brought up here, Dad, a little bit more specifically. What are some of the common features?
self-abandonment and we can probably start with this is just neglecting the self in favor of other people so people who engage in self-abandonment They often disregard their own desires, what they actually feel inside of themselves, their authentic wants and needs in order to perform some kind of a function for other people.
And then we can kind of go down a layer and ask, okay, why might that behavior pop up for people? And often it's security seeking in nature. There was an experience that they had at some point where... they felt like they had to perform a function for others in order to receive totally normal levels of love, support, safety, security, relationship with other people.
And so a really common example of that is just like the habit of saying yes to people. Sure, I'll do that. Yeah, no problem. Don't worry about it. I'll take care of it. And that's one of the ways that this kind of constellation of behaviors can come up for people. What I'm doing inside myself, it's essentially where someone tells you about something, or you hear an idea or a term like self-abandonment, and then you go inside. I go inside.
to feel into what would that be like for me? So if I have a client, let's say, tell me that they just feel that it's an absolute rule to take care of others. and not to take care of themselves, I go into, wow, what would that be like for me? When you talk about that, I'm aware of the difference between feeling fine inside. and being very focused on loyalty to others, duty to others, service. That's okay. That feels fine. That really feels fine. Then there's the aspect that's like you're moving.
away from, you're losing touch with what's going on inside yourself. And maybe that starts to move more into the false self. You're putting on a persona. You're not against. your deep core. You're just losing touch with it. And then next level, there's the place where we're actively dismissing the needs, the tenderness, the vulnerability, the frailty.
of that inner core. And then going even further, and I can relate to this as well, we don't just lose touch with it or dismiss it, we attack it. That's the... full on, with shaming, with loathing, for various reasons, including that's how we make peace with the parents or caregivers or powerful figures around us. So I guess that's how I would feel into it, on that range, right? There's a very important difference between self-abandonment.
and somebody who just has kind of a positive pro-social orientation toward other people, right? You can really care about what's going on in somebody else while also really care about what's going on inside of you. These two things can coexist. So we get to kind of a classic Rick question. here, which is what's the function, right? The real question, I think, with self-abandonment is not so much what the pattern of behavior is and more what's the internal function that it's serving for a person.
And in this case, I think that the function is just total security seeking. You're performing these behaviors because you feel like you have to in order to stay safe, and that's why you're becoming divorced and disconnected.
from who you feel you are inside as you know one way this happens is that we internalize what others do to us so on that kind of range i laid out you could imagine that other people just expect children, let's say, in the family to be really oriented toward taking care of the needs of others. One of my very best friends said to me that he grew up in a family in which it was a taboo to say what you needed and wanted yourself. But there was such a focus, sincerely.
on the needs and wants of others in the family system that your needs and wants would get taken care of because other people were very oriented that way. So it was kind of shocking to him. to move into adulthood in different kinds of settings where there wasn't that commitment to his own needs and wants. And he had to learn to speak up increasingly and vulnerably for his own needs and wants over time.
So I can imagine growing up in that situation, let's say, where you're just sort of pro-social. But then you can also imagine growing up in situations in which it was normative in the family to not be in touch. with one's innermost being, one's more emotional levels. And so then we take that on.
We do it to ourselves. Or going further, a dismissive parenting style that tends to create avoidant attachment, as you know. They did it to us, so now we do it to ourselves. We're dismissive or even growing up in situations, maybe not just in our... family, maybe we were bullied or kind of really toxic, kind of horrible math teacher or baseball coach, and we attack ourselves.
So these are these different ways in which we could treat ourselves based on how other people treated us. So anyway, I'm just kind of sharing about these distinctions, which I find are maybe useful maps for people as for how they are themselves.
maybe related to how they grew up. And then based on those maps, you can think, okay, what needs to happen now, right? So if we zoom out a tiny little bit here, you can see maybe a common family of issues that might be related to what we call self-abandonment.
The first would just be literal fears of abandonment that people might have. A belief might be something like, if I express myself, if I come forward with who I truly am, if I speak up in the way that I want to speak up, then they'll leave me. Another common set of issues that people have are just general issues with self-worth or self-efficacy. There's a lack of a sense of a strong interior.
and a real external referencing that can creep in. Everything that you are is in relationship to things that are going on outside of the self. And if the things that are happening outside of the self are approving of you, you're basically safe and okay. And if they're not, wow, it's a total red alert. Another really common set of issues that people can have that you've already spoken to here a little bit, Dad, is just that disconnection with the interior.
Maybe there's not a strong sense of what the wants and needs are inside, so those get kind of filled up by thinking about other people's wants and needs. And you're like, hey, I can perform that function for others in very clear ways. I know what they want, so I don't have to worry about what I want so much. And then as a result of all of this, just the common pattern of people-pleasing.
in different kinds of ways. And we can maybe think about this as like the habit of having really porous boundaries with other people. Maybe you can say no once, but it's really hard for you to say no twice. Yeah. And so I'm wondering, Dad, for somebody who maybe walked into your office with this general schema of issues, how would you start to approach working with that? Great question. Well, intuitively, I would start with a lot of empathy.
The provision of empathy for someone who's out of touch with themselves is for them often a new experience. Empathy helps us get in touch with ourselves. So if someone is not in touch with themselves, they probably have experienced a relative lack of empathy in their life. So that's kind of a headline. The kind of issues that you and I are talking about have a ring of truth for someone, which is sometimes revealed by the desire to turn off the podcast.
Because there's something about it that's really disturbing. That sometimes is the ring of truth. And whoa, this topic has your name on it, maybe. But anyway, if this is relevant to you, it might be helpful to you to think, wow. receiving empathy from others is a high priority for me. And I'm frankly going to look for others to the extent I can who are generally empathic and deliver empathy. And I'm going to create the context or basis to ask for empathy.
from other people that's a really important thing to feel free enough to ask for so i would go back to the question then i think first intuitive would be to be very empathic in particular to do the kind of empathy that Carl Rogers did, where there was both reflection, oh, I hear you saying, and then there'd be empathic inquiry beneath that surface.
that would be along the lines of, quote, I'm not sure, but I wonder if you might be also feeling such and such. Or I guess I would be wondering, or gosh, if that happened to me, I'd... might be feeling this or that. I wonder if any of that fits for you. So you're going to a deeper level. I think a second thing is to really pay attention, just like you did at the start, to the fears.
of having the true self recognized, sometimes called true self, the deep self, the true self, the core self, the innermost being. Because often people... grow up in environments in which the recognition of the true self is very scary sometimes they grow up this sometimes happens when you grow up with a narcissistic parent or a more borderline personality type
parent who's very hungry themselves and egocentric, relatively self-centered. And so if you were to reveal your own true self, then you would be punished. So now suddenly if you're a therapist, is pulling strongly from your true self, your deep self, or really mirroring it back to you. Even though it's well-intended, it can be really alarming. So I'm attentive to...
the fears, the fears of dreaded experiences related to what the person longs for. It's very poignant. We long to be known in our deepest innards, but we're also perhaps really scared of what might happen if we are. Yeah, so you're highlighting this really common, I don't even know what the right word is, for it is like schema that appears in therapy where there's a thing that we really want or we really need. In this case, maybe it's reconnection with our authentic self.
Maybe it's the ability to say no to other people when we really want to say no to them. Maybe it's just feeling safe by ourselves as an individual. Whatever it is that the person needs to build up that's built up. in some way through trying out doing that.
But trying out doing that, whether it's your therapist kind of giving you those things or you trying them on yourself is really freaking scary because it went poorly in the past. And that's why this behavior was developed. So you can get stuck in what sort of feels like a double bind where.
you're damned if you do, and you're damned if you don't. You're damned if you try it out, and if you don't, you're just stuck the way you are. So how do you kind of pendulate people through that process, Dad, to help them touch the hot stove without being totally burnt by it?
I understand that I kind of just asked you, like, how does therapy work? But, you know, maybe you can slice through what I'm saying here. Well, you're getting at a really deep thing. And I learned a very important lesson from a mentor of mine. call her out with gratitude. Carla Clark, Dr. Carla Clark, who ran a case conference small group I was in for several years in which I learned a lot. And one of the things Carla talked about
was tendency in some people to be basically alienated from others and alienated from themselves. So there's a distancing, and it's kind of a fairly strong version of... avoidant attachment. All right. Carla pointed out that for that kind of person in the general journey of reintegrating, split off parts, including true self.
parts of ourselves that get split off, they're kind of fragmented, to become more integrated rather than talking conceptually about, I know you're a beautiful being deep inside. You know, I know there's a magnificent inner child in there. Let's talk about your inner child. Rather than doing it that way, simply getting into authenticity in the present with someone.
particularly related to vitality. They're called vitality affects where people are, there's an aliveness in the person or getting into sort of feelings. The process of having an authentic flow between you and another person is itself integrating. And it tends to bypass the fears related to having your authentic deep self, true self.
be seen and known. In other words, you kind of solve the problem of working around the person's defenses by giving them repeated experiences of open, authentic communication. with another person. That itself is integrating and healing. And when you realize that, you realize, wow, we all have this fantastic power that we can use to help ourselves routinely over the day to drop into one step more authentic, revealed, disclosed, present, you are present.
in the interaction or to help other people do that with us. There are a lot of different things that a person needs to develop some strengths related to in order to be able to tackle these issues. So one might be what we've talked about so far, which is those fears related to authenticity and self-expression.
true aspects, then I will be destroyed. So you need to resource people to convince them that actually it's relatively safe to do this. You really can say no to people in these ways, whatever it is that you have to do. And another big family of issues that people often struggle with who have self-abandonment tendencies is shame. And it's, again, kind of a double bind. They were shamed for expressing their needs when they were younger most of the time in these cases.
And then on the other hand, they often feel a lot of shame about being somebody with this set of tendencies. And so you've got this double bind of shame. And this is just so core to your work in general, Dad, like resourcing people in different ways. And I'm wondering how you can help resource people to deal with these two common sets of issues.
fears related to self-expression on the one hand, and then more self-criticism and shame on the other. Well, it's a huge topic, Tori, and it's not specific to self-abandonment. Around self-expression, The model, I think of it as the triangular track having to do with fears of the dreaded experience. So it's helpful to be mindful of the authentic self-expression that's arising. That's the first of the three legs of the triangular track.
And then the second leg is the fear, the dreaded experience that you imagine would happen if you actually said no or were loud or big or irritated.
And then the third leg of the triangular tract is the defense against, is the inhibition against that full self-expression. So becoming aware of that process is really helpful. And so what... you're trying to do is gradually resource people so that they're increasingly aware of that triangular track and that process often initially in retrospect but more and more kind of in real time you become aware of it in yourself
And then based on the awareness, you, in a very graduated way, step by step, start helping yourself risk the dreaded experience of, let's say, saying no. ways to do that. One is, I find really helpful, it's to consider how other people communicate and how it goes fine for them, right? Other people say no.
He goes, okay. Maybe there's a little flurry around it, but then it settles down. And you can see that when your friend does that or your coworker does that or other people you know, particularly admired people who say no in various ways. You know, you can appreciate that. So you can realize, oh, if they can get away with that, why can't I, right? How can I increasingly apply that for myself? That's one way into it. That's more rational and reasonable.
thing to do is to really build up that sense that was typically missing for someone who is self-abandoning. Think of that as process. What was missing probably? Well, probably... What was missing was the internalization of something that itself may well have been missing, of beings who really recognized the inner you. the needs, the longings, the sweetness, the good intentions, the frailty, really recognized it and cherished it and supported it and to some little extent maybe guided it.
You know, like coming out with a lot of whininess, yeah, it's not the best way to, you know, let people know what you need, but being forthright and straightforward about it, yeah, that would work. That would work. That's good self-guidance. I would be trying to do and what people can do on their own with regard to this is to really build up the sense, I loosely call it the caring committee inside, of different energies or voices, parts.
beings who support you. So there you are. You want to say no to your boss or your boyfriend or your parent. You're scared. You're afraid of the dreaded experience. But you start to tune in to... these parts inside, maybe visualizing them, who really support you in saying, you can do it, it's okay, even if they get mad, you're going to still be okay, we really recognize you, and so forth and so forth.
Maybe I'll just leave it there for the moment. One is first a kind of rational recognition that it's really okay to communicate, you know, in the ways that you're considering. And second, a sense of inner supporters. who bring to you now what was missing way back when. This can show up for people as direct problems with saying no, like somebody's making a request, they have a hard time saying no to it. Okay, that's kind of one family of issues.
But the way that I often see it show up for people is less granular and more kind of global and as a general lean of being into just not really prioritizing their own thoughts, feelings, emotions, needs, whatever, and instead really prioritizing the thoughts, feelings, emotions, and needs of other people.
So it's less about the ability to say no in that way and more about catching the habit of being externally referenced rather than internally referenced. Does that kind of make sense? And I'm wondering… what you've seen about that and how you feel like people can start to lean into that sense that they do truly matter just as much as everybody else in the room. Beautiful question.
I'm going to do a visual demonstration here. Great, yeah. So bear with me one second. I'll try to translate for podcast listeners over here. Okay. So this gets at this whole body of work that comes out of your favorite. psychodynamic theory. Oh, yeah, baby. Rooted in psychoanalysis called object relations. And this is really worth looking up in Wikipedia. I'm sure there's a reference for object relations. Okay.
Rick is furiously scribbling on one of his famous yellow legal pads. That's right. And so here we go. So now the way that most people tend to relate to the world is in... A combination, these are called paradigms or object relations or models, working models of relatedness. The one thing I'm going to ask you to do here, Dad, is to not put the pad in front of the microphone. So in other words, like put it more to the side of your face rather than...
in front of the mic. So you're, yes. Great. So we could, yeah, all right, good. Because go ahead and go. Oh, this is going to become a meme. I can feel it. Oh, yeah. We have to green screen this. Somebody has to green screen this with like a bunch of, just so people who are like.
listening now. Rick is holding the yellow legal pad now up to the side of his head, and this is a meme template waiting to happen. But okay, go ahead, Dad. It is, it is. And I need one on the other side, too, for symmetry. Okay, so we have the big circle and the little circle. That's how it is for most people. The big circle is other people, the world, you know, the other. And then the little circle is me, me, me, the self.
And very often then, what people do is they, in effect, experience as a self. They're always dealing with this massive internalized other and the inner audience. highly sensitized to the reactions of other people. That's kind of how they spend their days. And I know what that has felt like, right? And what goes along with this very often is what's called orbiting, where...
The self is like a moon going around this giant planet, never breaking free into full autonomy, nor really landing into complete intimacy, orbiting. And that's a dynamic in relationships that often has to do with the seeking and the maintenance of optimal distance. So that paradoxically, sometimes it happens, is if you're with someone like that, so you are in the...
the world to them, you draw them into closeness out of affirming them or being empathic toward them. And then for them, that is very scary. And so then they distance. further, so it becomes paradoxical. Okay, this is how we often go through life, okay? Giant world, giant others, mini me. Mini me over here, okay? We're going to drop in a little mini me image, right?
I'm now going to show you a different way to be that has to be kind of put in perspective. You ready? I'm going to put the pad down. Yep, pad down. You're going to pad down. I'm going to narrate. Here we go. This is great podcasting right here. It's starting to happen. Just wait for it. Wait for it. This is the better way to do it. The self is big.
And the world is there. You're not egocentric. You're not narcissistic, sociopathic. But a lot of what you're doing in life is not object referenced anymore. You're taking others into account in appropriate ways. But you are, for example, doing something I find really interesting, which is to imagine walking across a room, including a room in which other people are, without being referenced to them in any way.
Can you imagine walking through a mall or a store or down a street in which you're entirely aware of the world, but you're not doing anything to get a response from others or to avoid a response from others? moment to moment to moment, you're completely free. You're liberated. And the feeling of that is you're getting at for us deeper than all these various techniques, that fundamental feeling.
where you're over there. I'm doing it right now. I see you. I love you dearly. I'm completely loyal to you, seriously committed to you. And... I'm very aware of my own livingness, my own life, and my inherent differentiation from you. That's another term, differentiation. You're over there. I'm over here. Your karmas are your karmas. in this life. My karmas are my karmas in this life. There's a sense of differentiation and a living in our own being in a self-sufficient kind of way.
I like the language that you're using here, Dad, because I think that one of the common defenses that comes up when we get into this kind of work— is that some version of essentially, you can say that because you're a comfortable, secure white guy. And I, who am not in that positionality, simply do not have the safety, the security, the privilege, to be able to move through the world in that fashion. But what you're highlighting here, I think, is not that you're being dismissive of other people.
not that you're ignoring them, not that you're not paying attention to your surroundings in an unsafe way. If I'm walking down the street in San Francisco at 1.30 in the morning, I am paying attention to my surroundings. That's what I'm doing because it is reasonably intelligent to do that in life, right? That doesn't mean that I'm self-abandoning and being excessively other referenced.
there's a tone to it that you're describing here that I think is really important, where you can love the other, you can relate to the other, you can consider them in all of these important ways, while also having... this totally big and totally strong and totally secure sense of yourself as an individual who matters too. And it's the balance of those two things that's really important here. There's a technique I would often use with people.
I said, I don't know if other therapists use it. They probably do, some of them. In which I would have people say certain things and then pause to see how that felt, including what resistance arose. to inhabiting or establishing that statement. And so I'll just offer a few here and people could consider, oh, wow, what comes up for me if I really say it? Wow, what does that feel like?
Okay, so here's one. I am whole and complete as I am, or I am whole and complete already. My life has meaning in and of itself. You could shift the languaging a little to something like this one, or you could use your name. I might say Rick is whole and complete already. Another one would be... This life matters in itself. My life matters in itself. And how do those feel?
Well, I think that's a great question. And those are really good phrases for people both diagnostically to see if there might be an issue here. And then also for people who even have a pretty secure base of relating, I would describe myself as not really somebody—I'm pro-socially oriented, but I wouldn't say I have problems with self-abandonment in this way.
But even so, phrases like that can feel a little squirrely for people. They can certainly feel a little squirrely for me. And there's something about just kind of saying them or resting them that can feel egocentric. or kind of self-important in a way, even though they are all just objectively true statements and very safe things to believe. So it's funny how there's that tension there. Revealing some of my own oddities here, perhaps.
This is, of course, going to be full geeky. I read a book about Goodall, Kurt Goodall, and Albert Einstein. And it was about time. Gödel had famously the incompleteness theorem, and he and Einstein were both at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton. They became friends. Gödel himself was very eccentric. All that said, somehow...
When I was reading that book and I was getting dropped into reality somehow or part of it, the phrase arose for me, essentially, I'm not implicated in their mind stream. I am not implicated in your mind stream. In other words, your mind stream is rolling along. Your mind stream may have thoughts about me and attitudes toward me, most of which have nothing to do with me. I'm just not implicated.
And there are things we can say to ourselves that help us decouple from being object bound. In other words, stimulus bound, stuck to the giant planet of... the internalized mother or father or authority figure. We're freer from that. And it's okay to be yourself, you know, differentiated.
from what's going on with them. You're aware of it over there. You're living by your code. You're not evil. You're well-intended toward other people, while also realizing at the same time that you're not implicated in their mindstream. They are making that movie themselves. So you might find your own phrases and less dorky phrases like, I'm not implicated in your mind stream. But you get the basic idea.
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when they come from a background where safety is a more critical issue than authenticity. That's the choice that's being made, is that you're being inauthentic in order to be safe. And so we abandon authenticity and bond to an external other that we perceive as something that gives us safety. That's the model of it, if you think about it. The premise of that behavior is the belief that you cannot derive safety from yourself. That when you are alone, you cannot be safe.
You cannot provide it to yourself. You cannot create a secure environment on your own. You have to do it through that external reference that we've been talking about throughout this episode. And I'm wondering how you would work with somebody to change that belief. and to increasingly let them believe in themselves as a source of safety and security. There are very good, effective ways into this.
They often start with more cognitive, rational, reality-based approaches in which if you're working with someone who has intact function in those ways. You help them to realize that they've transferred into the present a whole bunch of predictions and expectations from their past. It's understandable. But these days, those predictions are not accurate anymore. Those expectations.
are untrue. And so you start to help people realize and experience, we did a previous episode, I think on this recently, prediction error. We talked about this, I think with Judd Brewer maybe. And actually also the ways in which psychedelic experiences, that's a whole other thing, can disrupt what are called weighted priors so that people increasingly are less prone after they go through the healing.
process of, let's say, psychedelic-assisted therapy, but we could apply this to other things as well. So they're less likely to have that expectation, right? And also, the way I do it systematically myself is I say, well, when you were young... The odds of a bad event, if you, let's say, spoke up, okay? And we're authentic. You were authentic. So the odds of a bad event were very high. The impact on you was huge.
and your capacity to cope with it was very minimal. So now we bring that into the present. But in the present, factually, the odds of a bad event of you speaking up in normal range ways are very low. particularly if you choose people that don't reenact your scripts from your childhood. Hello. Second, even if they do get kind of feisty and grumpy after you speak up.
You're just not going to be blown out of the water like you were when you were two years old or 12 years old because you've got now a much more mature nervous system and you have self-regulatory capacities that you've resourced up over time. You have more shock absorbers. inside yourself now and third you're able to cope with it much more when you again you were
trapped when that teacher was yelling at you as a 12-year-old, you couldn't cope. You couldn't get away. Or those bullies were shaming you. You couldn't get away. But these days, you can get away. You can cope in different ways. So recognizing those three things rationally. can be really helpful. That would be one thing. A second thing would be certainly to access the sense of inner support, inner allies. I've talked about that. But I want to name a third one, which is...
Allying with the part of you that has accumulated, probably, a considerable amount of fed-upness, even anger. Anger is very energizing. This is healthy anger. And getting in touch with a part of you that's just is sick and tired of taking it and ain't going to take it anymore. And that part is often aided. by sort of like a 5% regulating, softening, tuning around the edges so that you don't cancel your own vote by just going way overboard.
All right, a little bit of regulation there. But otherwise, really getting on the side of that understandably fed up, tired of injustice, had it, and... definitely is going to start speaking truth to power. Definitely is going to start naming what's true. Even if we don't have the power to change what's happening, we're going to name it. And they're going to know that we know what's really going on here. That would be a third thing.
I would think, I do think actually, is to join with a sense of healthy entitlement that you have the right to tune into your own gravity, your own dignity, your own seriousness about this thing that has really bothered you. What do you think about all that? Especially the last one. Well, I think it's great for starters.
I'm not totally sure why I keep thinking about this right now, but I'm just thinking more about populations of people who tend to struggle with these issues and why they tend to struggle with these issues. Self-abandonment is... closely tied to the classic female archetype, right? Like the dutiful mother, the person who provides for others. If you think about safety issues, which we've talked about throughout this.
conversation, the simple fact of the matter is that all women and minorities have a lot more practical safety issues than white guys like you and I do. These are issues that are present that are real. And so one of the common rebuttals that might come up in this process is there are real safety issues for me. And I do have to toe the line in a bunch of different ways with people in order to preserve my security. And that's where this habitual pattern of behavior comes from.
That has now become an issue in its own right for me in adulthood where maybe some of those safety issues aren't as present, but they are still present in some ways. And the reality of them... makes that voice that tells you toe the line, toe the line, toe the line harder to push back against because there is a truth to the security problem. It's really, really interesting. So, of course, anything that...
we say or others say about assertiveness needs to take into account objective safety issues. And there are many subtle forms of that. Getting... you know, a little heated at work. No one will ever forget that. And that could have career consequences. Around gender, I think it's absolutely true that in patriarchy, those contexts. In that frame, yes, the prerogatives of men as a class to be able to just let it rip and assert themselves and just say what they want. Yeah, that's true.
On the other hand, in terms of being alienated from oneself and dismissive toward one's vulnerabilities and feelings and tender needs and longings and hurts, You know, I could argue that certainly men as a group have certainly a lot of significant issues that are in the self-abandonment heading.
I mean, anything that starts to feel like tenderness is often acculturated out of men, for sure. Yeah. Yeah. Including a tenderness towards yourself, towards your own interior, which is the point you're making. Yeah. I think also for us to keep... being drawn into something deep about this. I think that people who grow up more embedded in the land, the earth, in nature, in their culture.
they tend to be more integrated. Self-abandonment starts with fragmentation and then relationships between parts. If you grow up in a culture in which you're already more integrated, then you're less fragmented. And so there's less possibility of self-abandonment. And so when we think about those of us who did not grow up in that kind of culture, myself, for example, outer becomes inner, right? We do to ourselves what was done to us or we do to ourselves.
Or we grow within ourselves the structures in which we grow up. And I grew up in structures that were very alienated from nature. So then we become alienated from ourselves, our own nature. So the healing of this is a kind of reclaiming of the whole of ourselves. So we're less fragmented. Then we're not abandoning ourselves. And one path into that.
I think does also involve an appreciating of our own embeddedness in nature as nature. It's not that we go visit nature at the park or in the mountains or at the beach. It's that we are. already nature. And to really experience that, it's like there's something sacred and deep about being the all of you as a whole in the present. Yeah. Right?
and claiming that for yourself. Yeah, that seems like a great resource for people if they're able to get into a sense of it. And I do think that it's something that most people can cultivate more of a sense of over time.
ourselves as parts of an ongoing process around us that can help us feel embedded and secure and one with others while we are still being ourself, which I think is kind of part of what you're what you're suggesting here also going back to what we were talking about a second ago about situations where there are different kinds of real safety concerns real security concerns a really powerful tactic
both in therapy and in life, is called joining with the defense. Self-abandonment in general is an attempt to solve a practical problem, which is those security issues we've been talking about throughout the episode. And it can be really helpful to start by convincing your internal parts, the aspects of your personality that are like, hey, we can't speak up because it's dangerous to.
it can be really helpful to convince them that you're taking that problem seriously. And then you can kind of get on the same side as them internally and just be like, yeah, no, I see these issues out there. I do take them really seriously. I believe in the story that you're telling me.
But is there a different way that we can approach this problem? Can we both stay safe, however it is that you need to stay safe in the world, while also appreciating your own needs in different kinds of ways? And maybe one way into that... is asking yourself, is there a situation, is there a circumstance, where it is objectively safe for you to care for yourself? Whatever that circumstance is for you.
So you're not vilifying your trauma response here, which is self-abandonment. You're not making it wrong or making it bad. It was probably a rational response at one moment in time. As you were talking about earlier, Dad, when you were talking about the patterns that we have in childhood now being ported into adulthood. So it's not really about not pleasing or being fiery or whatever it is.
It's just about being at choice about your behavior. That's really where we're trying to go with all of this. Oh, beautifully said. So as we get toward the end of the episode, I want to spend the rest of our time here talking about how self-abandonment issues can show up for people in relationship. One of the things that you mentioned earlier, Dad, was how people who have these issues can sometimes recreate the circumstances for them that were problematic.
maybe with their parents or just in other relationships that they've had previously. So they keep on going back to this familiar set of behaviors. Would you mind describing what that looks like? I'm sure you've had people who have walked into your counseling room, a couple dealing with that kind of an issue, and I'm wondering what the process of working with it looks like for you. For example... Someone who grows up with parents who, for various reasons, are dismissive.
In their attachment style, they kind of push away the child's needs. They tell the child to, you know, big boys don't cry. Just take care of it on your own. Daddy's busy. Mommy's busy. Okay. And then that person as an adult ends up in a relationship with someone who's pretty dismissive themselves. Friendly, polite, decent, and also dismissive, especially of the...
the soft underbelly that we all have. So that would be an example of that. I think a different kind of example is more cultural in which people who grow up in a culture in which There's not much in-touchness with feelings. People don't speak the language of feelings. They don't tell each other. They love each other, for example. They then might seek out.
that familiar culture because it's what they're used to, but as a result in that familiar culture continue to feel unseen, unheard deep down inside. So let's say now you're a person and you're in a relationship and you're in the frame of trying to make the relationship work better, okay? And let's say you're the person who is feeling...
kind of abandoned yourself. They are abandoning you or you feel deep down inside, I know I should stand up more for myself. I know that I should say more of what I need, but I'm really scared. Maybe my... My friends are cheering me on to do it, but I just, I'm freaking out here. Okay, classic. Very understandable. One thing that we haven't really talked about, it's very useful, is to deal with the grief.
about letting yourself down. Because much as we can face regret and remorse about letting others down, we can face regret and remorse and grief about letting ourselves down and coming to terms with that. And there's a really important distinction. between shame and grief. Rather than feeling ashamed that you have let yourself down or reenacted the abuse that was done to you by doing it to yourself, okay, feel a little shame.
But move through the shame, which tends to be toxic in quantity, and move into the grief, the sadness, the sorrow, the lost opportunities. Feel that and let it flow. much less toxic than shame, and it's appropriate. There's a mourning, there's a grieving, there've been losses, some of them irrevocable. Okay.
We tell the truth about that, which then helps us to move to the other side. Truth-telling is the bridge that gets us across the river of suffering. Now we're on the other side. So that's one piece of it. is to just drop that in i want to highlight that around grieving related to self-abandoning another is to really appreciate the justice, the worthiness, the allowingness, the entitlement, the healthy entitlement of what it is that you want to say.
That really helps people not to get all philosophical, but to rather to stand against the beliefs that say, oh, you're not allowed. Well, what's the why? Underneath, oh, you're not allowed. And to really dispute that why. with an understanding of why you should be allowed. Other people are allowed. If they're allowed, I can be allowed. I am allowed. It's fair. It's just. It's appropriate. That's really useful. It can really help to script it out for yourself.
I've gotten out my yellow pad and even recently just laid out the words I want to use, the sequence I want to say it in. So I'm really prepared in a situation that's scary for me. to be able to speak from my heart and say what needs to be said in a skillful way. So prepare. And then the last thing I'll say, it's a wonderful technique you can apply to many things. Imagine how you want to be.
and visualize it. So you're saying it and you're feeling it. It's like a movie. You're creating a little mini movie of the interaction you want to have. You are imagining yourself saying things and in the way you want to say them and feeling in the way you want to feel while you're saying them. You're then imagining how the other person might respond and imagining skillful, effective responses to their responses.
that lead it to go well and then you're imagining it moving into a good resolution you're rehearsing it in your mind in advance doing that is a really effective technique. You can imagine different things. You're kind of training yourself to be prepared when the oatmeal starts to fly. And you're likely to feel more confident. If after a couple of cycles... especially a few cycles of skillful loyalty to yourself, the other person is still resisting. Well, then that's an indicator of, you know.
a significant issue in the relationship that then you have to think about. Part of what you're pointing to here, Dad, is the notion of the scripts that can appear inside of our relationships and the more familiar scripts that we fall into with somebody else. as opposed to being more deliberate and at choice about the words that we're saying and the ways that we're interacting with another person. And I know for me, I have a lot of patterns of relating to other people.
that have their own problems. They might not be self-abandonment problems, but they might be other kinds of issues that I have. And there is a real gravitational pull toward being that kind of a way with and around other people. And one of the things that you can be really attentive to is when you try to shift into a new way of being, when you try to say a different word, when you try to express yourself a little bit differently.
How does the world around you, the group that you're part of, respond to you? Because all systems are resistant to change, but they're not all equally resistant to change. There are some systems and circumstances, friend groups, whatever else, that are going to be pretty receptive to this. You know, they're going to kind of like look at you weird for a minute.
or maybe for several weeks, but okay, sure, they're going to look at you weird for a minute, and then they're going to basically shrug and move on and let you be this new, different kind of way. But there are some systems, particularly romantic systems a lot of the time, that are very resistant. to any change in the people who are a part of them. And when that's the case, man, things get very difficult for people. And it's a key thing to be attentive to.
Particularly if you're considering somebody as a romantic partner or if you're looking for a good romantic partner, something to really keep an eye on is how open they are to this kind of change. Last thing I wanted to say, it might just sound way too... I don't know. Personal growthy. It's a personal growth podcast, Ed. That's kind of what we're doing here. It's a really powerful technique in which, so you imagine...
The genesis of the self-abandonment very often is others who let us down or we didn't feel like parts of ourselves could be included or they mattered or they were seen, so on. Well, today... you can do the technique of I call linking in general. It's a general technique where you're bringing positive and negative together. And it's really interesting how the brain is because these...
Parts of ourselves or little layers, they are sub-personalities. They are parts. They don't have the full package of self-awareness that the total psyche has. So that gives an opportunity. For example, you can bring into awareness, let's say, a part of you that I'm doing it right now. as a 15-year-old, felt very awkward and unlikable and doomed to failure with other people. And you can then be...
prominently aware of what is soothing or healing or reassuring and including related to that part. So for example, I could be aware, let's say, or a person could be aware of feeling worthy and good. And, oh, some people do like me, and my son likes me. Oh, you know, you're in the feeling of that, and then you bring it into contact. That's the linking. You bring it into contact with that part of you or layer way down in the sediments of the psyche that felt the opposite of that.
In other words, you're bringing the current beneficial experience that's well-matched to into contact with some wounded, hurting, alienated, warded off, disowned, exiled. part of yourself. And then there's the sense of that exiled part receiving that positive experience that would have been so good to have received in my case.
60 plus years ago. Anyway, that's a really powerful technique. And it's a way to kind of retroactively heal. You're not tricking yourself. You know what actually happened, but... There's a soothing, there's a softening, a healing deep down inside when you use this linking method. I think that's great, and it's a great place to mostly end our conversation today. I want to throw in one last thing at the end here.
maybe cueing a little bit off of some of the questions that you were asking earlier or some of the statements that you were saying people could say and try on and see how this feels for people. And I'm not a therapist, so take it with a grain of salt. But there's a process from cognitive behavioral therapy that's called cognitive restructuring. That's kind of the basis of what they're trying to do. Where there are these various beliefs that people have.
about themselves or about the world. And one of the big processes that you go through is trying to change those beliefs in different kinds of ways. So what I think could be kind of helpful and interesting at the end here is just thinking about some of the common beliefs that people with a self-abandonment set of issues might have. Maybe they look like things like this. My needs are less important than those of other people. That might be a belief.
My worth comes from what I can do for others. In order to be safe, I have to be liked. If they knew who I really was, they wouldn't like me. And those two kind of travel together a lot of the time. And a final one that's a little bit of a wild card, I really don't know what I want. Or maybe I really don't know who I am inside. Or maybe I don't know who I am when I'm not with other people.
And these are all beliefs a person might be carrying around that might be driving some of those self-abandonment behaviors. So a process you can go through, if you want to, very deliberately, is you can write down those various beliefs.
you'll kind of feel the ones that make you go, or you write them down, or maybe you feel like there's kind of the ring of truth for you. You can just cross out the ones that aren't true for you. Just get them out of here. And maybe you're left with one or two where you go like, oh yeah, there's some life there. And then you can think very deliberately of what's an alternate belief. What's something else that's kind of in the same shape as that belief, but is fundamentally different from it?
and lets you step into a new way of being. Maybe something like, my needs are as important as those of other people. Or something like, in order to be safe, I have to care for myself. Whatever it is for you. just a phrase that you can buy into, that you can get on the same side as, that fulfills the same purpose of finding that safety, finding that connection, that you're trying to fulfill through that self-abandonment pattern of behavior.
but has less costs for you today than those old behaviors had for you in the past? And how can you step into that new way of being? And that's really fundamentally what we're asking here today. That's great. It really helps to... deepen conviction about the new beliefs and intend for them to prevail these methods one reason why they're really good is that they tend to surface obstructions deep down inside
that could be more emotional or deeper than rationality even pre-verbal you know during the first couple years let's say of life so you want to as you do these processes they're like affirmations in effect and you want to really help yourself believe them and have them even sink into that's linking and dislodge those old problematic beliefs right
And that's a wonderful note to end today's conversation on. So thank you so much for doing this with me today, Dad. I really enjoyed this one. I thought this was great. Thank you, Forrest. Today, Rick and I talked about self-abandonment, which is the common family of issues that comes up for people, where they neglect their own wants, needs, boundaries, or the authentic self that they have inside of themselves.
in order to be of service to other people, to perform a function for them, to be referenced to and deriving security from them. and to essentially make themselves like a small moon orbiting the great planet that is everyone else. One of the questions we ask most frequently on the podcast is, what's the function of this behavior? It's an incredibly useful question to come back to over and over again.
Because there's a difference between self-abandonment and just being kind of pro-social and interested in what's going on in other people and having a sort of conciliatory personality type. The question is, what's the cost for you here? And what are you trying to do by performing this behavior? For people who self-abandon, there are two really big costs. The first one is you lose authenticity. The second one is you're neglecting yourself in favor of other people.
That means that you do not get what you want most of the time. What do you gain from this? What's the function? You gain safety and security. are our early relationships. This could be our relationship with a primary caregiver. That's the way it is for most people. But for other people, it might be later formative relationships, an early romantic relationship that had a certain kind of structure.
For other people, unfortunately, it might be abusive relationships, ones where they were told over and over again that their needs simply did not matter by another person. and that the only way that they could stay safe was by serving a function for that individual. Whatever the roots of this pattern of behavior, there are some common aspects of it that tend to show up in people again and again. The first, as I said before, neglecting the self in favor of others.
People who self-abandon tend to disregard their own physical, emotional, and psychological needs in order to meet those that other people have. This can include neglecting even basic self-care like getting enough to eat or to sleep. as well as ignoring their emotional needs. For instance, totally normal range needs for nurturance and self-expression.
They tend to seek validation, approval, or love from others as a means of either compensating for their perceived inadequacies and insecurities, or because they feel unsafe without external support. And this tends to lead to people-pleasing behaviors and an excessive reliance on others as the source of safety. And then finally, they tend to have issues with low self-worth or authentic self-expression.
They might adopt different kinds of personas or masks in order to fit in, to be liked and to receive what they want from other people. A really key point here is that self-abandonment behaviors often arise as rational responses to a dysfunctional environment. That's a fancy way of saying that people do these things for a practical reason. They actually did.
to find that safety and security by giving up a part of themselves in order to please and respond to the needs of other people. That was a practical, rational, often very intelligent choice. The problem is that now in adulthood, they often aren't under those same conditions that they were back then when they were a kid. They have more resources. They have more capabilities. They have a stronger sense of self. There is more objective safety, maybe. But even so, the behaviors persist.
So the question then becomes, how can we find other behaviors, other ways of being in the world that still satisfy those same underlying needs, that same underlying desire, for example, for safety and connection? but without all the costs that come from self-abandonment. And we entered this part of the conversation with me asking Rick how he would approach this broad family of issues as a clinician. And one of the things he started with that I thought was really interesting was empathy.
empathy, and relationship with the other person's experience. And by creating that empathic and secure container as a therapist, often quite quickly, you can get into a pattern of authenticity. with the person that you're working with the person that you're talking to in little ways you start to open up with them and they start to open up with you
And what this means is that you are practicing authenticity in a secure environment. And the more and more comfortable you become with authenticity, the easier and easier it becomes to leave the therapeutic space. and actually do those behaviors out in the world with other people. But the problem is that those authenticity behaviors, speaking up for yourself, saying what you really need, taking yourself seriously, caring about your own needs, not being such a people pleaser, whatever it is.
The problem is that those behaviors had consequences back in the day. So when you do them now, it's really, really scary. So one of the things you have to do is start to resource yourself so you're able to tolerate that discomfort. Rick talked about a number of different ways that we can do this. One of the things that he mentioned was developing a stronger internal caring committee. Those are the voices that are truly on your side that are supportive that believe that you really do matter.
I also mentioned joining with the defense as a useful intervention here. That's convincing the voice that's inside of you that is more critical or is more concerned about security. that you really are taking its concerns seriously, and you're just looking for a different way to solve this problem.
Rick also had a funny moment during the conversation where he was talking about the object relations framework and how many people have an inner paradigm or an inner schema of themselves as this small, vulnerable thing. and everything else as this large and imposing thing. And so what we need to do is develop an internal view of ourselves as something that is worthy and meaningful and matters on its own.
not just because it is in relationship to something outside of the self, but because we exist too. We then close the conversation by talking about how these patterns can show up for people in their relationships. and how it is not uncommon for people to get sucked into relationships that have the same problematic tendencies.
of older relationships in their life. Maybe the ones that they went through when they were just a kid with their parents, maybe those early formative romantic relationships that went really sideways for them. For whatever reason, we have as
Freud called it a repetition compulsion. We just keep on going back to the same problematic kind of person. And one of the ways that we can start to work with this is by changing the scripts that we have in our relationships. What are the patterns that you fall into?
And how do you want to go through a process of deliberately constructing a new script that has a different ending? I hope you enjoyed today's episode. I had a great time recording it with Rick. And if you've been listening to the podcast for a while and you haven't subscribed yet,
Please subscribe when you can. That would really help us out. And also, if you'd like to support us in other ways, you can find us on Patreon. It's patreon.com slash beingwellpodcast. And for just a couple of dollars a month, you can support the show. and you'll receive a bunch of bonuses in return. Until next time, thanks for listening, and I'll talk to you soon.