A few days ago, I had a coaching session with a potential client, I’ll call her Jennifer.  Jennifer, has been separated from her husband for several months.  As she described her situation and how it was impacting her life, the subject of abandonment came up.  Several months ago, her husband had decided he no longer wanted to be married to her.  His distancing behavior, was bringing up feelings of abandonment for her.  It reminded her of a time, when she was a young girl, and her father had walked out of his marriage to her mother.

As a coach, my job, is to ask the challenging questions, that help my clients to cut through the fog of powerless thoughts, that keep them stuck, so they can make real changes in their lives. The question I asked Jennifer, was this…  “In what ways, have you abandoned yourself?”  She thought about it for a few seconds, but it didn’t take her long, to rattle off a list of ways that she had deserted herself.  She had stopped taking care of herself physically, emotionally and spiritually.  Jennifer admitted that she no longer spent time with her friends.  What she was doing though, was blaming herself for the demise of the marriage, and ignoring her husband’s role in the relationship problems.  When she wasn’t berating herself, she focused all her energy on her estranged husband.  During our conversation, Jennifer realized, that she had abandoned herself.  This realization, puts her in a position to begin to make a significant change in her life. 

When we are feeling ignored, abandoned or mistreated, often, if we dig deeper, we find that the way others treat us, mirrors the way we treat ourselves.  We attract the people into our lives, who confirm the ideas we have about ourselves.  

If you think of yourself as someone that people abandon, then you have assigned yourself to the role of a victim.  You are giving control of your life to someone else.  You are what I call, “other focused”.  

Other focused, is when you make decisions about who you are, and what you do, based on the opinions and behaviors of others.  If your husband walks out of your marriage, an “other focused” mindset will cause you to believe that there is something wrong with you that caused him to leave.  You will describe the situation as abandonment.   A person who experiences the same situation, but who has healthy self-esteem, will still feel the pain and disappointment of the breakup, but she is not likely to interpret the event as implying something about her, nor will she label it as abandonment.  

If you are tired of feeling abandoned and want to insure that you never feel that way again, you have to stop abandoning yourself.  You have to get serious about changing your beliefs around who you are and what you deserve.  Until you do that, nothing will change and you will continue to feel abandoned by others.   

Be courageous!