“Self-abandonment was my way of dealing with their abandonment.”
This is the realization one of my readers came to and shared with me in a recent email. They continued, “What’s interesting is that I self-abandoned even while protesting their mistreatment of me.”
That’s how ingrained the ‘drive to disappear’ becomes when you have suffered years of Narcissistic System Abuse and Family Scapegoating.
We stay small to survive. We flee, fight, freeze, fawn and fix so we don’t risk feeling.
We weren’t allowed to thrive. We weren’t allowed to feel. If we existed independently of the Narc Machine we would be threatened, punished, neglected, and withheld until we “got back in line”. So we abandon ourselves. We have to.
Self-abandonment is a completely understandable coping strategy to deal with an oppressive and suffocating regime like NAS.
The problem is that the coping strategy follows us into every other part of our lives and starts to take up residence in all our relationships. Are you staying small and self-abandoning as a means of self-preservation? Do you find yourself perpetually in relationships where you have to stay small and emotionally hidden?
It may be useful to hear that your need to self-abandon is a logical (though challenging and harmful in the long term) way to exist in relationships and maintain a sense of safety.
The Birth Of Self-Abandonment
“Self-abandonment is a survival mechanism borne out of being denied access to a safe, supportive, nurturing, validating, loving, and affirming system that enables you to develop an identity, resilience, and independence.”
This quote comes from a previous article I wrote about how Narcissistic System Abuse trains us to turn away from ourselves. It’s clear this idea of ‘turning away from self as a coping strategy’ resonated with readers and I’ve had requests to explore this more thoroughly. Why do we do this? How does it happen?
When we are young, the idea that the person who is supposed to love us and keep us safe is, in fact, unsafe is a real threat to our actual survival. As children, we literally cannot care for ourselves without our parents. If our parent (or guardian) is unsafe (for example abusive, neglectful, emotionally immature or unstable, emotionally/physically absent) we end up having to choose between attachment to them OR attachment to ourselves. We don’t get to have both (which is the blueprint for healthy attachment).
When we are safe and nurtured, we can take the needed risks to grow, explore, express and develop our inner selves and independence. These small risks help us form an attachment to self (aka a relationship with ourselves independent of other people’s needs/feelings/expectations) so that in adulthood we can thrive. Our attachment to self encompasses the critical experiences of liking yourself, trusting yourself, knowing who you are, and protecting yourself without diminishing yourself. This is the birthplace of things like identity and emotional resilience.
Think of it like learning to swim: you take a small risk to let go of the edge. You kick your legs and paddle your arms. You are amazed at yourself, and you see your parent delighting in you. You see you are separate from your parent but, still connected. Because you know that when you need a rest, or need someone to grab hold or pull you up from under the water sputtering and coughing, your parent is right there alongside you. You know that when you push off from the wall and swim out a bit further they will let you go because you need to learn how to be out further on your own, but that you have a safe person on the sidelines to swim back to. Depart and return. Depart and return. That is how you learn to swim. And that’s how you learn to balance healthy attachment to self and healthy attachment to others.
In Narcissistic systems, however, that healthy oscillation between parent and self isn’t possible. Attachment to self threatens the parent or caregiver. And therefore to not be literally abandoned, the young child needs to choose the parent over themselves. One core belief about Narcissistic Systems is that there isn’t enough room for everyone. The child learns quickly that if they want to stay in the system (i.e. be raised, fed, loved, cared for, paid attention to, and receive affection) they have to depart from themselves to make more room for the Narcissist.
This isn’t a choice. It is actually life or death.
When we are that young, we need to be attached to the parent.
So the young developing brain does some mental gymnastics to make sense of how to navigate being an independent entity with our own thoughts, feelings, and perceptions, while still shackled to the oppressive demands of the Narc Machine. To reconcile this dissonance, we have to come up with a story of why we need to self-abandon so that we don’t live with the knowledge that we are not safe.
In other words, we (as young children) need to avoid knowing that the parent is unsafe/unstable. Kids do this by turning the blame on themselves (as they were taught to do by the abusive parent) and abusive parents reinforce the lie that they are a “good parent” by blaming the child.
This is what it ends up looking like: The child genuinely starts to believe they are the problem instead of their parent. They look inward and wonder, “What can I do to be better so that I can entice my parent to love me, care for me, protect me and raise me?” Then they set about “becoming better”. They learn exactly how to change, contort, shrink and sink themselves to keep the parent afloat.
Servitude Over Self
That’s the beginning of self-abandonment. Servitude over self. The efforts to be a “better person” stand in place of where an identity never got to be planted, take root and flourish.
When love, care, validation, support, and affection are absent we change who we are to try to create it or earn it. These are human needs. We cannot go without. And so our next option is to alter ourselves to grasp whatever we can get hold of to sustain us.
Children cannot face that their parent is incapable of giving them these human needs. No child should have to consciously realize they are on their own! It is a concept too existentially dark to entertain without causing severe trauma in such a fragile developing brain. And so the brain copes by creating a story that is (not less horrendous), but more within the child’s control: “There’s nothing wrong with my parent, I am safe with them, it’s just that I need to fix myself because there is something wrong with me that makes it hard for them to love me and care for me. It’s my fault. And therefore I can do something about this and since I can do something about this, I will be ok”.
And guess what, because you were able to pivot and learn to self-abandon instead, it means your brain didn’t break and you did end up OK.
Huh??
I know that sounds weird because you are in immense pain and anguish and are working through layers of recovery. That probably doesn’t feel like “being OK”. But…YOU’RE ALIVE! From a survival perspective, it’s just a smashing job. Honestly, really well done. You clever kid! You smart, wise child full of ingenuity and courage! You figured out how to survive (and raise yourself into the amazing person you are) out of literal hope, grit, and thin air.
To survive. you learned how to parent them, change yourself, and ignore your needs so that they didn’t feel pressure to step up or face themselves. You learned how to deny your emotions so they didn’t become triggered, which could have put you in more danger. You figured out how to work the system so you could survive the system. You survived by shifting the responsibility (that they couldn’t carry even though it was theirs to carry) onto yourself. You changed the narrative from “my parent is unsafe and I am in danger” to “if the problem is me, then that gives me power. I can punish me, I can change me. I am not helpless.” It sounds REALLY messed up to write it all out like this — because no kid should ever have to learn and apply such twisted lessons and strategies. But you did it because it enabled you to curate safety and sanity out of danger. Again, while being tragic, it is an impressive feat.
What amazing self-awareness skills you developed.
This self-awareness (which no doubt has only grown thanks to your ability to learn as much as possible about NAS) is the first key that you can and will recover from self-abandonment. The road bump that you’re facing right now is that the original coping narrative (“it is me”) may have held on. The lifeboat became the prison ship. We just need to chart some new waters.
The first step is to examine how self-abandonment may still be taking shape in your life. Do you ever notice that you turn away from yourself? What does it look like for you? Where in your life (work, relationships, parenting, intimacy, body image, success etc.) does self-abandonment show up for you? How does it impact you? What stories/lies does it tell you about your worth, value and rights to an identity that isn’t constructed around pleasing and placating others?
What do you wish would be different? What life do you envision? What life or identity feels inaccessible to you? What is getting in the way?
These are great questions to help kick-start the process of settling back into yourself. Recovery happens in these incremental moments where you can slowly make space for something new, something beyond the toxic regime that took over your mind and existence due to NSA.
But you don’t have to go it alone. Remember, 1:1 support is available to guide you through shedding this limiting belief so you can step fully into your life and stop abandoning yourself.
And if you’re more into community support, it isn’t too late to get on the waitlist for my Survivor’s Sanctuary. A drama-free, genuinely welcoming and empowering space for survivors who want to move beyond the injustices, pain, betrayals, and lingering anger and grief caused by NSA. I’ve created this space specifically to feel more like family than family ever did. It’s unlike any recovery group you’ve been a part of — and includes a tonne of resources and support from me!
If you’re not yet on the waitlist, you can click HERE.