Repairing Self-Abandonment: People Pleasing, Anxious Attachment, and Developing Self-Worth

hello and welcome to being well I'm Forest 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 and 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 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 um kind of partswork 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 of self- abandon and where 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 um 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 you 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 next level there's the place where we're actively dismissing the needs the tenderness the vulnerability the Frailty uh of that inner core and then going even further and I can relate to this as well we don't just um lose with it or dismiss it we attack it that's the fullon 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 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 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 like 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 when my very best friends uh 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 that 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 or E and so then we take that on we do it to ourselves or going further uh a dismissive parenting style that tends to create avoidant attachment as you know um they did it to us so now we do it to oursel we're dismissive or even growing up in situations maybe not just in our family maybe we were bullied or had a 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 and 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 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 uh 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 uh 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 and 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 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 uh well intuitively I would start with a lot of empathy the provision of empathy for someone who's out of touch with themselves uh is for them often a new experience because 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 if 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 uh okay so 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 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 to go back to the question then uh I think first intuitive would be to be very empathic and particular to to do the kind of empathy that Carl Rogers did where there was both reflection oh I can I hear you saying and then there'd be empathic inquiry beneath that surface uh 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 I guess I would be wondering or gosh if that happened to me I might be feeling this or that I wonder if any of that fits for you right so you're 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 could be really alarming so I I'm attentive to uh the fears you know the fears of dreaded experiences related to what the person Longs for it's very poignant we long to be known in our deepest inner but we're also perhaps really scared of what might might happen you know if we are yeah so you're you're highlighting this really common uh I don't even know what the right word for it is like schema that appears in therapy uh where yeah 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 um 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 someway 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 like 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 maybe you could slice through what I'm saying here well you're getting in a really uh Deep thing and uh I learned a very important lesson from a mentor of mine I want to call her out with gratitude Carla Clark Dr Carla Clark who uh ran a case conference small group I was in for several years in which I learned a lot and one of the things Carla um talked about was uh tendency in some people to be basically alienated from others and alienated from themselves so there's a distancing and you know it's kind of a fairly strong version of uh uh avoidant attachment all right Carla pointed out that for that kind of person in the general journey of reintegrating uh split off Parts including true self parts of ourselves that get split off they're kind of fragmented to to become more integrated rather than talking conceptually about uh 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 uh Vitality they're called Vitality effects or people are there's an aliveness in the person or uh 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 you know having your authentic you know 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 is itself is integrating in healing and when you realize that you realize wow we all have this fantastic power that that we can use to help ourselves routinely over the day to drop into one step more authentic revealed disclosed present you're 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 to develop some um 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 if I come forward with my 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 then another big uh family of issues that people often struggle with who have self-abandonment Tendencies is shame uh and again kind of a double bind they were ashamed 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 the fears related to self-expression on the one hand and then more self-criticism and shame on the other well it's huge topic Terror and it's not specific to self-abandonment around self-expression the model I think of it is the Triangular track um having to do with um fears of the dreaded experience so it's helpful to be mindful uh of uh 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 we're loud or big or irritated and then the Third Leg of the Triangular track uh is the defense against is the inhibition against that full self-expression so becoming aware of that process is 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 in 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 uh step by step start helping yourself risk the dreaded experience of let's say saying no and so then you there ways to do that one is I find really helpful it's to consider uh how other people communicate and how it goes fine for them right other people say no uh he goes okay maybe there's a little little flurry around it but then it settles down and you could see that when your friend does that or your cooworker doeses that or other people you know uh particularly admired people who say no in various ways uh 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 another another thing to do is to really build up that sense that was typically missing for someone who um is self- abandoning think of that as process uh what was missing probably well probably what was missing was a was the internalization of something that itself May well have been missing uh of a of beings who really recognized the inner you the needs the longings the sweetness the good intentions uh 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 it's not the best way to you know let people know what you need but being forthright and straightforward about it yeah that that would work that would work that's good self-guidance so what I would be trying to do and what people can do on their own with regard to this is to really uh 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 uh you're scared your of the dreaded experience but you start to tune into these parts inside maybe visualizing them who really support you and 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 um 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 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 like 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 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 uh and uh 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 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 you got it 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 Rel 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 you're yes great so we could yeah all right good go so go ahead go oh this is going to become a meme I can feel it I know we we got we have to Green Screen this somebody has to Green Screen this with like a bunch of just so people who are listening now uh Rick is holding the yellow legal pad now up to the side of his head it and this is a meme template like 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 okay 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 um internalized other and the inner audience and uh highly uh sensitized to um the reactions of other people that's kind of how they spend their days and I know what that has felt like right U 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 uh never breaking free into full autonomy nor 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 the 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's 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 gonna 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 great I'm going put the pad down yep pad Down You're Gonna pad down I'm going to narrate here we go this great podcasting right here it's starting to happen just wait for it wait for it da da 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 um you are for example doing something I 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 uh 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 complet completely free you're liberated and the feeling of that is um it's you're getting at Forest 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 the common defenses that comes up when 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 uh 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 total 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 I'll just offer a few here and people could consider oh wow what 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 now you could shift the languaging a little to something like this one or you could use your name uh I might say Rick is whole and complete already another one would be this life matters in itself my life matters in itself then 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 um 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 squirely for people um they can certainly feel a little squirely for me and there's something about just kind of saying them or resting in them that um Can Feel egocentric or kind of self-important in a way even though they are all just like objectively true statements and like very safe things to believe so it's funny how there's that tension there revealing some of my some of my own Oddities here perhaps uh this is of course going to be full geeky um I read a book about GLE Kurt goodle and Albert Einstein and it was about time GLE had the famously the incompleteness theorem and um he and Einstein were both at The Institute for advanced studies at Princeton they became friends GLE 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 am not implicated in their mindstream I am not implicated in your mindstream in other words your mindstream is rolling along your mindstream may have thoughts about me 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 um being object Bound in other words stimulus bound stuck to the giant planet of the internalized mother or father or authority figure uh we're Freer from that and it 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 unless dorky phrases like I'm not implicated in your mindstream but you get the basic idea yeah totally and and kind of very practically here self-abandonment comes up as a problem for people when they come from a background where where safety is a more critical issue than authenticity like that's the choice that's being made is that you're being in authentic 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 like 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 Bel belief and to increasingly let them believe in themselves as a source of Safety and Security there are very good effective ways into this um they often start with more cognitive rational reality-based approaches in which if you're working with someone who has in 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 uh but these days those predictions are not accurate anymore those expectations are untrue uh 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 Jed 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 in increasingly or less prone after you know 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 and also um the way I do it systematically myself as I say well when you were young the odds of a bad 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 um 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 uh 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 2 years old or 12 years old because you've got now a much more mature nervous system and you have self-regulatory you know 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 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 where 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 um in 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 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 uh 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 um fed up uh 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 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 the sense of healthy entitlement that you have the right uh to 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 I'm not totally sure why I keep thinking about this right now but I I 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 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 rebuttal that might come up in this process is there are real safety issues for me and I do have to tow 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 realityy of them makes that um 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 uh objective safety issues and there are many subtle form ter of that MH getting you know a little heated at work no one will ever forget that and that could have career consequences around gender um I think it's absolutely true that in patriarchy and those context in that frame yes uh the prerogatives of men as a class to be able to just let it rip and assert themselves and just say what they want that yeah that that's true on the other hand in terms of being alienated from oneself uh 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 um have certainly a lot of significant issues sure yeah that are in the self-abandonment yeah heading I mean anything that starts to feel like tenderness is uh often acculturated out of men for sure yeah yeah including a tenderness towards yourself towards your own interior which was the point you're making yeah I think also for us there I 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 uh 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 inner outer becomes inner right we do to ourselves what was done to us or we do to ourselves or we we grow within ourselves the structure the structures in which we grow up and I grew up in structures that we're 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 than we're not abandoning ourselves and when path into that I think does also involve a grow uh 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 uh and and to really experience that it's like there's something sacred in deep about being the all of you as a whole in the present yeah right and feeling and claiming that for yourself yeah that seems like a great resource for people if they're be able 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 um over time as 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 a 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 uh your internal Parts the aspects of your personality that are like hey we 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 that you can kind of get on the same side as them internally and just be like yeah no I 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 like 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 uh 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 and I'm sure you've had people who have walked into uh 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 uh 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 tell the child to you know Big Boys Don't Cry uh just take care of it on your own Daddy's busy mommy's busy okay and then that person as an adult you know ends up in a relationship with someone who's pretty dismissive themselves friendly polite decent and also dismissive especially of the the soft underbelly you know that we all have so that would be an example of of that uh 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 uh deep down inside so let's say now you're a person and you're in a relationship and you're you're in the frame of trying to make the relationship work better okay and let's say you're the person who uh 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 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 uh 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's there have been losses some 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 uh around grieving related to self- abandoning another is to really appreciate the Justice the worthiness the the allowing 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 uh 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 um 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 you know 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 in a skillful way uh so prepare uh and then the last thing I'll say it's a 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 and 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 like the more familiar familiar scripts that we fall into as somebody else as opposed to being more deliberate and at choice about the words that were 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 you know other kinds of issues that I have um 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's 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 uh in the people who are a part of them and when that's the case man like things get very difficult for people and it's a it's a key thing to be attentive to particularly um 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 a last thing I wanted to to say it might just sound way too I don't know personal growthy it's a personal growth podcast it's kind of what we're doing here so it's a really powerful technique uh 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 we like parts of C 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 it's really interesting how the brain is because these parts of ourselves are little layers they're they're they're part they are subpersonalities 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 uh what is soothing or healing or incl reassuring and including related to that part so for example I could be aware let's say or person could be aware of um feeling worthy and good and oh people some people do like me and my son likes me and oh you know you're just 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 um that felt the opposite of that you're other words you're bringing the current beneficial experience that's well matched to into contact with uh 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 so and it's a way to kind of retroactively heal you're not tricking yourself you know it actually happened but uh there's a 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 U maybe queuing 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 like how this feels for people and I'm not a therapist so you know take it with a Grandin of salt but there's a process from cognitive behavioral therapy that's called cognitive restructuring it's kind of the basis of what they're trying to do where there are these various beliefs that people have um 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 uh my needs are less important than those of other people 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 the 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 yeah 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 when you write them down or maybe 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 beh 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 um deepen conviction yeah 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 more emotional or deeper than rationality uh even preverbal you know during the first couple years let's say of Life uh so you want to uh 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 that's a wonderful note to end today's conversation on so thank you so much for doing this with me today d I really enjoyed this one I thought this was great thank you Forest 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 the roots of self-abandonment behaviors for most people 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 a early romantic relationship that had a certain kind of structure for other people unfortunately it might be uh 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 uh 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 uh 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 re 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 need 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 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 reck 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 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 s 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 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 a inner Paradigm or a uh 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 relationship sh 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 SL beingwell podcast and for just a couple of dollars a month you can support the show and you'll receive a bunch of bonuses and return until next time thanks for listening and I'll talk to you [Music] soon

Channel: Forrest Hanson

Views: 213,610

Keywords: Mental Health, Personal Growth, Self-Help, Psychology, Forrest, Forrest Hanson, Being Well, Being Well Podcast, Rick Hanson, Resilient, Self-Care, Anxiety, Self-Development, Boundaries, anxious attachment, emotional boundaries, creating healthy relationships, healthy relationships, authentic self, self-criticism, self love, self worth, what others think, self abandonment, self-abandonment, authenticity, what do i want, abandonment, abandonment issues, fears of abandonment

Id: LdUnFzgobPM

Length: 67min 15sec (4035 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 11 2024