#283: From Self-Abandonment to Self-Worth (Plus TWO Exciting Announcements!)
If you struggle with anxious attachment, there’s a good chance you’re familiar with self-abandonment—even if you’ve never called it that.
Maybe you regularly put other people’s needs ahead of your own. You bite your tongue because you’re afraid that speaking up will create conflict. You tolerate behaviour that doesn’t feel good because losing the relationship feels even worse. Or perhaps you spend so much time monitoring how someone else feels that you’ve lost touch with what you feel, need, want, and value.
For many people with anxious attachment patterns, self-abandonment sits at the heart of their relationship struggles.
And shifting those patterns isn’t simply about learning better communication skills, setting firmer boundaries, or finding the “right” partner.
It starts with rebuilding the relationship you have with yourself.
What Is Self-Abandonment?
Self-abandonment is not the occasional decision to compromise, keep something to yourself, or prioritise someone else.
Healthy relationships require discernment, flexibility, and compromise.
Self-abandonment is something more chronic.
It’s the repeated pattern of disconnecting from yourself—your feelings, needs, boundaries, values, intuition, or desires—in order to maintain connection, avoid conflict, or keep someone else happy.
For someone with anxious attachment, this can become second nature.
Our attention is often directed outward. We’re monitoring the relationship, reading the room, analysing someone’s tone, wondering whether they’re upset, trying to anticipate what they need, and looking for signs that the connection is secure.
And when so much of our energy is focused outward, our relationship with ourselves can become underdeveloped.
We may struggle to know what we need.
We might not trust our feelings.
We might question whether our boundaries are reasonable.
We may believe that maintaining the relationship is more important than maintaining our connection to ourselves.
Over time, we can find ourselves holding tightly to relationships that aren’t working because the relationship has started to feel like a life raft.
Why Self-Abandonment and Anxious Attachment Go Hand in Hand
When our sense of safety is located primarily in another person, relationships naturally start to feel very high stakes.
If you need someone else to behave a certain way in order to feel okay, their actions can have enormous power over your emotional state.
A delayed text can feel threatening.
A change in their energy can send you spiralling.
Conflict can feel catastrophic.
The possibility of the relationship ending can feel unbearable.
From that place, it makes sense that we might try to control the relationship however we can—by people-pleasing, over-functioning, suppressing our needs, seeking reassurance, or becoming hypervigilant about someone else’s emotions.
The goal isn’t to become completely independent or convince ourselves that we don’t need relationships.
We are relational beings. Healthy relationships matter.
The work is about developing enough security within yourself that you can participate in relationships from a place of genuine choice and agency rather than fear.
That means knowing what you value. Understanding what you need. Being able to communicate honestly. Trusting yourself to make difficult decisions. And knowing that whatever happens, you will have your own back.
So how do we start building that?
There are four key areas that can help us move away from self-abandonment and towards a more secure relationship with ourselves.
1. Practise Self-Compassion
For many people, the instinctive response to an anxious attachment trigger is self-criticism.
Why am I like this?
Why can't I just stop thinking about it?
Why am I so needy?
I should know better by now.
We believe that if we criticise ourselves enough, perhaps we can force ourselves to change.
But shame rarely creates lasting change.
Self-compassion offers another way.
Instead of immediately judging yourself for having an emotional reaction, you can become curious about it.
What is happening for me right now?
What am I afraid of?
What does this part of me need?
Can I acknowledge that this reaction makes sense based on what I’ve experienced, without allowing it to dictate what I do next?
Self-compassion doesn’t mean excusing unhealthy behaviour or refusing to take responsibility for yourself.
It means creating enough internal safety that you can look honestly at your patterns without attacking yourself for having them.
And that becomes the foundation from which meaningful change is possible.
2. Learn to Regulate Yourself
Self-regulation is another essential part of moving away from self-abandonment.
When you’re highly activated, everything can feel urgent.
You may feel compelled to send the text, demand reassurance, solve the problem immediately, or get certainty about where the relationship stands.
But learning to regulate your nervous system creates space between what you feel and what you do.
Instead of needing another person to immediately remove your discomfort, you begin developing the capacity to stay with yourself through difficult emotions.
That doesn’t mean never asking for reassurance or support.
Healthy relationships absolutely involve co-regulation and leaning on one another.
The difference is that your partner is no longer your only source of safety.
You begin to develop more options.
You can notice that you’re activated.
You can tend to yourself.
You can give yourself time before reacting.
And then, from a steadier place, you can decide what actually needs to happen next.
3. Find Your Voice Through Self-Advocacy
Many people first encounter concepts like boundaries and needs because something isn’t working in their relationship.
So they learn the language of boundaries and suddenly swing from saying nothing to saying everything.
After years of suppressing themselves, the pendulum can swing in the opposite direction.
Boundaries become rigid. Needs become demands. Conversations carry an enormous amount of pressure.
While understandable, this can still be driven by fear.
Healthy self-advocacy looks different.
It means being able to communicate honestly and clearly without needing to control the other person’s response.
You might say:
This is important to me.
This is what I need in a relationship.
This is what supports my wellbeing.
This is something I’m not willing to tolerate.
And then you allow the conversation to unfold.
You don’t need to threaten, manipulate, over-explain, or issue an ultimatum in order to make yourself heard.
You communicate your truth and stay grounded in it.
That’s a very different experience from expressing a boundary while desperately hoping the other person will respond in exactly the way you need them to.
Self-advocacy asks: Can I tell the truth and still hold my centre, whatever happens next?
4. Build Self-Trust
Self-trust is one of the biggest challenges for people with insecure attachment patterns.
We second-guess ourselves constantly.
Am I being unreasonable?
What if I regret this?
What if I'm making the wrong decision?
What if I'm expecting too much?
When we don’t have a clear internal anchor, we naturally look outward for answers.
But self-trust isn’t about knowing with absolute certainty that every decision you make will work out perfectly.
It’s about trusting yourself enough to move forward without certainty.
There are three important pieces to this.
First, knowing what is right for you.
That requires understanding your values, your priorities, the kind of life you want to create, and the kind of person you want to be.
Second, doing what is right for you.
Sometimes we know a relationship, situation, or choice isn’t right for us, but we struggle to act because we’re afraid of loss, judgement, regret, or the unknown.
Self-trust means developing the courage to take the next right step even when you don’t know exactly where it will lead.
And finally, letting go of what you cannot control.
Instead of trying to guarantee that nothing painful will ever happen, you learn to trust that if something difficult does happen, you will figure it out.
You don’t need every contingency mapped out.
You don’t need to know exactly what comes after Plan A.
Sometimes you simply need to know your next right step and trust yourself to work out the step after that when you get there.
You Don't Have to Force Yourself to Stop Self-Abandoning
When we recognise an unhealthy pattern, our first instinct is often to ask:
How do I stop doing this?
How do I stop people-pleasing?
How do I stop overthinking?
How do I stop abandoning myself?
But trying to overpower your patterns can become another form of fighting with yourself.
A more useful question might be:
What can I start building instead?
What would it look like to cultivate self-compassion?
What would help me become more emotionally regulated?
How can I practise advocating for myself?
What small decisions would strengthen my self-trust?
Because when you begin building a healthier relationship with yourself, something interesting happens.
The old patterns gradually become less necessary.
When you trust yourself, you don't need to monitor everyone else quite so closely.
When you know your worth, you become less willing to accept relationships that repeatedly ask you to compromise it.
When you can regulate yourself, every moment of uncertainty doesn't feel like an emergency.
When you know your needs and values, you don't have to shape-shift endlessly to keep someone else happy.
The self-abandonment starts to fall away because it no longer fits the person you are becoming.
Building Your Secure Self
Healing anxious attachment isn't ultimately about becoming better at keeping someone else close.
It's about becoming someone you no longer have to abandon in order to experience love.
It’s learning to treat yourself with compassion, regulate your emotions, advocate for your needs, and trust yourself to navigate whatever comes next.
And from that foundation, relationships start to feel different.
There is more space.
More choice.
More honesty.
Less grasping and less fear.
You can want connection deeply without believing that losing it would mean losing yourself.
And perhaps that is one of the most powerful shifts of all:
Knowing that whatever happens in your relationships, you can trust yourself to stay on your own side.
You might also like…
[00:01:23]:
Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of On Attachment. In today's episode, we are talking all about self-abandonment and what it takes to shift away from the patterns of self-abandonment that can be so deeply entrenched in how we do relationships and how we navigate that realm. Because self-abandonment really is at the heart of our attachment patterns for those of us who tend towards anxious attachment. And if you're familiar with my work, you would know that I'm constantly talking about the importance of rebuilding the inner relationship and really holding the mirror up to look at the ways in which we are often unknowingly perpetuating unhealthy patterns or ways of doing relationship that are no longer serving us, that are not leading us to where we want to go, that actually originate with us, or at least are reflected in our own in a relationship and the patterns of self-abandonment that are second nature to many of us. So in today's episode, I'm going to be talking about what it really takes to put down those old patterns so that you can start taking steps towards something healthier and really setting the standard in terms of what you expect and tolerate in your romantic relationships and other relationships. But sort of leading the way in terms of how you relate to yourself and what that inner relationship looks and feels like.
[00:03:01]:
Because it's very rare that I encounter someone who really, really struggles with anxious attachment in their relationships, but has a really solid foundation within themselves and has really healthy self-worth and who doesn't self-abandon and who trusts themselves and all of those things. It's almost universally true that they go hand in hand. And that Lacking those foundations in our relationship to self really makes us much more susceptible to engaging in those not-so-healthy patterns in our relationship and finding ourselves in dynamics that we know aren't serving us, but not really knowing what to do with that or whether we're the problem or the other person's the problem, all of those things. So that is what we're going to be talking about today. It is a really big topic. It's at the heart of everything that I teach. And part of why I have chosen to speak about this today is because I have a really exciting announcement.
[00:03:55]:
Yay!
[00:03:55]:
I actually have 2 really exciting announcements, but the first one is that my book, The Secure Self, is finally available for preorder. I have spent the last year and a bit writing and working on this book, which really brings together everything that I teach about when it comes to shifting anxious attachment patterns by focusing first on that inner relationship and how you can really effectively transform Your relationships, whether you're in one at the moment or not, but your relationship patterns from the inside out. And that for folks with anxious attachment patterns, it really has to start within because the self is the piece that we have neglected for so long. So much of our pattern drives us to be externally oriented, to be monitoring, to be checking, to be constantly taking the pulse and reading the room and all of that outwardly focused attention of taking care of everyone's needs and making sure everyone's happy tends to create this collateral damage of a really underdeveloped relationship to ourselves. So we don't really know what our needs are, and we don't know how to communicate them, and we don't really believe that we're worthy of having them. We accept very little and yet still hold on to someone else because we've come to believe that we need them in order to be okay. And so much of our identity gets wrapped up in the relationship and in being someone's partner. And even when the relationship maybe isn't working or doesn't feel healthy, we still hold on to the relationship and try relentlessly to make it work, even when that's kind of trying to fit a square peg into a round hole, because we experience it as being almost a life raft.
[00:05:40]:
And what I believe and what I know to be true from not only my own experience, which I write about quite a lot in the book, but having guided thousands of other people through this work, Is that when we try and locate our sense of security in someone else, we will always feel very intensely vulnerable and helpless and desperate, and we will naturally have a vested interest in trying to control them because them doing what we want them to do is the only way we know to feel okay. So really the work has to start in rebuilding that foundation within ourselves, not so that we can leave a relationship necessarily, or not so that we don't need relationships at all. That's not what I teach and that's not what I believe, but so that we can step towards relationships from a place of genuine choice and agency, knowing what we want and need and value and desire and being able to maturely advocate for that and to experience a relationship that feels spacious and that we can really trust in. Because when we're going to relationship from that place of fear and insecurity and holding on and grip, it's hard to ever really feel like you can rest there. And I think that robs us of so much of the joy of relationships and so much of the true security that relationships are meant to provide. And instead, the security we get comes from this place of survival. So all of that to say, the book is now available for preorder. It's going to be released on the 2nd of February next year.
[00:07:16]:
But if you preorder, which I really hope you will, because preorders, I know it is a bit annoying from a consumer point of view, but for an author, it's very, very important and makes a huge difference to the overall success of the book. It signals to retailers that if there are pre-orders coming in, that this is a book that people are interested in. And so it tends to then be more widely distributed and stocked by bookstores and all of the things. It's also really instrumental in all of the bestseller lists and things like that. So I would be hugely grateful if you would consider pre-ordering the book. If you've been a podcast listener for a long time, if you've found value in my work, that would be a really, really wonderful way of supporting me. And as a way to say thank you for those who decide to preorder, I've put together a really great bonus package, which includes a 3-part workshop series all about the core wounds of anxious attachment. So there will be 3 different workshops.
[00:08:15]:
The first, which you'll get instant access to once you preorder and submit the form on my website, is all about the fear of abandonment and its role in anxious attachment. The second workshop, which will be released in November, is about the fear of rejection and its role in anxious attachment and all of the ways that it manifests. And then the third workshop is all about the unworthiness wound. So that feeling of not being worthy of love, of being too much, of being not enough, that again, I think most, if not all people with anxious attachment patterns will relate to. So you will get access to all 3 of those workshops, the first being available right away. And in addition to that, I'm also going to be holding 3 live Q&A calls for folks who preorder. So for the price of a book, in addition to actually getting the book when it comes out, you'll get access to 3 brand new exclusive workshops on the core wounds of anxious attachment, plus the opportunity to join me and others for 3 live Q&A calls. So you can ask me a question, get my advice on your situation, or just come along and connect.
[00:09:20]:
So I really hope you'll consider preordering the book. As I said, wonderful way to support my work. And I'm eternally grateful for all of your support always, but in particular, this would be a really, really helpful way to get behind the book. And the link to that is in the show notes, or you can go to stephanierigg.com/book. The second big announcement after all of that, I need to take a breath. And part of why I need to take a breath is because I'm pregnant. I am having another baby. I've got a 2-year-old, but I'm having another baby boy in March next year.
[00:09:53]:
So I'm about 17 weeks pregnant now, which is really lovely and exciting. And part of why, if you follow me on social media, I've been a bit MIA of late, juggling a lot with limited capacity. But yes, I'm due in mid-March, which means that I'm going to be 8 months pregnant when this book comes out, which goes back to I'm really going to need you guys to get behind the book and help me out as much as you can because God knows I'm not going to be doing some fancy speaking tour or jet-setting around to do lots of interviews and things like that. But yes, there's been lots going on. So a book and a baby coming. In Q1 2027. And yeah, I'm excited to be able to finally share all of that with this beautiful community of listeners who've been so kind and generous in supporting my work over the years. Okay, so with all of that out of the way, I think that's the world's longest announcement segment at the start of an episode.
[00:10:51]:
So thanks for bearing with me. Let's talk about self-abandonment and how we can start to build a healthier relationship to ourselves as the foundation for healthier relationships with others. So let's just talk about what self-abandonment is to begin with. And I don't think there's any kind of singular concrete definition, but the way I think about it is anything that we do and kind of chronically, I don't think biting your tongue in one moment means you've got this longstanding pattern of self-abandonment. That just might be a wise thing to do in that moment. That might be a function of discernment rather than self-abandonment. But for most of us, it is a pattern and it's anything that we do where We are compromising our values or our integrity or our sense of what's right for us, where we're really chronically dropping our needs in order to gain someone's approval, in order to fit in, in order to keep the peace. So it's sort of prioritising belonging and connection over authenticity or what's right for us.
[00:11:51]:
And I sort of pause on authenticity because I don't love that word. I think it's a bit overused and I think it can devolve into these conversations about like, what is my authentic truth and all of those things, which I don't think is particularly helpful. But the self-abandonment piece is really like, am I chronically neglecting my own needs? Am I overriding my own boundaries? Am I avoiding raising an issue that is really big and important to me because I'm afraid of the consequences? Am I giving someone second, third, fourth, fifth chances because I'm afraid of letting go, even though I know that To do so is likely going to be causing myself ongoing pain and suffering. All of these things where we're not treating ourselves well and we're kind of abandoning our own needs and wellbeing, generally in this context, in order to hold onto someone or to make someone happy or to take care of them or whatever it might be. So a lot of us will have learned to do this in various expressions along the way. And oftentimes that can originate from an early environment where there was a lot going on, where we felt like someone else was volatile or erratic, or there was some drama or chaos that we had to learn how to move around and anticipate and maybe try and manage. Or even in the absence of volatility or really chaotic circumstances, there might have just been enough inconsistency or unpredictability that we became Super attuned to what is going on outside of us and the conditions and the environment, and became almost hypervigilant around what's going on and is it going to change and are there any storm clouds brewing and what can I do to try and keep that at bay so that everything's okay. And so we come to conflate our happiness or our stability, our safety with what other people are doing, thinking, feeling.
[00:13:54]:
And we make it our role, or we experience it as being our responsibility to try and keep all of that under control and try and make people happy and gain their approval and stave off any problems or any ruptures, smooth things over. And because it feels like all of that is so deeply interwoven with our fundamental sense of safety, am I going to be okay? Any other needs or worries or concerns or discomfort that we might have kind of pales by comparison to this bigger thing of, is everything going to be okay? And so bit by bit, we sort of learn to prioritise taking care of whatever's going on out there with the people around us, and we'll deal with the other stuff in the background that's low priority. And of course, that might be a really wise choice, particularly if you are young and you are factually reliant on caregivers to provide that safety and security. And often the patterns that we pick up early in life are really wise and protective in the environments that we're developing in. But unfortunately, what happens is we carry those things with us. Of course, we don't kind of arrive at adult romantic relationships with a clean slate and start from scratch. We're shaped by the relational environments that we've been part of. and that we've witnessed and had modelled to us.
[00:15:19]:
And so we have certain blueprints that we take with us, and we've learned what our role is, and we've learned how we are meant to relate to others and relate to ourselves and what connection usually looks and feels like. And so if self-abandonment, meaning dropping all of our own needs or sidelining that in order to please or take care of or accommodate someone else, if that's just part of what we know, then that's really natural that we just carry on with doing things the way we've always done them. And that can lead us into relationship dynamics where we do play that role, and there's almost an expectation that we will because it suits the other person as well. And so we find ourselves in these relationships that might be really imbalanced, and yet they're internally balanced in that there's one person who's over-functioning and another person who's under-functioning, one person who's over-giving and another who's under-giving. And so we can become really entrenched in that without really realising we're doing it. And then, of course, we feel resentful and we feel this sense of injustice and unfairness. We feel neglected and hurt because all of our needs are going unmet and we feel unimportant to this person. We feel like we're not a priority.
[00:16:39]:
But But for most of us, what we've learned to do when we're feeling that way is just to give more, to try harder because we've internalised this thing that it's my job to make things okay. So to the extent that they're not okay, I must not be doing a good enough job, so I'll just try and do a better job. And so we then just keep going down the same track and that can intensify or amplify the asymmetry, and then we end up feeling more resentful and more frustrated. And I think Partly that frustration is with a partner, but partly it's with ourselves as well, because we're only walking further down that path of self-abandonment that ultimately leaves us really empty-handed. Because in all of our efforts to pour into this other person, to do everything for them, to give them everything, to try and be the perfect partner, to make them happy and to make them love us and appreciate us and show up in a certain way, we've neglected ourselves in the process. And so we've really sacrificed greatly and often gotten very little in return because it's rare that all of that overgiving and kind of codependent territory that we can find ourselves in yields reciprocity. It's usually the opposite. It just creates these really skewed dynamics.
[00:17:56]:
And to add insult to injury, if a relationship then ends, as it often will because it's rare that these relationships are healthy, if the relationship does end or even if it kind of holds together but feels deeply unfulfilling and unsatisfactory, we can realise that we've kind of lost everything. Because we don't really have anything authentic or satisfying or fulfilling with this person that we've given everything to. And we don't have a healthy relationship to ourselves. We don't know who we are. We don't know what we think or believe or care about. We don't trust ourselves. We'll often kind of neglect other areas of life because we're so laser-focused on the relationship and trying to make someone be a certain way and pour everything into them and be constantly available. We may have abandoned friendships or not really put much into developing ourselves as a whole person outside of, of our romantic relationship.
[00:18:51]:
And so we can really face this double whammy of not having the relationship that we so long for despite our very best efforts, and also not having much else going on because we've been focusing so hard on the relationship. So it really is a very damaging pattern, even though it has roots that make perfect sense when we can look at it in context. And it does drive so many of our relationship behaviours and it does show up in so many places. So it's something that we really wanna be wise to and aware of because I think a lot of us can have a bit of a blind spot there and think that we're just being loving and we're just being generous or whatever, when really this is a protective part of us that's saying, I have to do this in order to be loved. I have to do this in order to be valuable, to be useful. To make myself needed so that this person wants me, chooses me, doesn't leave me. All of those things are lurking beneath the surface sometimes of these behaviours that we can frame as just being loving. So in terms of where do you even begin on putting some of that down and unlearning that very deeply entrenched pattern and taking steps towards doing things differently and in a healthier way, this is where— My book, and I also have a programme, The Secure Self, this is where that really comes in.
[00:20:16]:
And what I argue in the book is that for folks with anxious attachment patterns, the impulse when things are feeling hard in the relationship is to try and fix the relationship. And that makes sense. That's kind of an obvious place to start. If we have really dysfunctional conflict cycles, let's go to couples therapy, or maybe I'll read all these books about how to communicate more effectively, conflict resolution and stuff like that. And There's absolutely nothing wrong with doing all of those things, and if that works, please carry on. But what I've found for myself, certainly, and in guiding a lot of other people through this, is that oftentimes the relentless impulse to fix the relationship and to work on the relationship can be part of our pattern rather than part of our healing. And we can really earnestly want to clean up our side of the street and communicate more effectively. But if our partner doesn't leap at the opportunity to do that work with us, then we can really quickly revert back to our insecure patterns of demand and protest and sulking and criticism and whatever else.
[00:21:23]:
Because if we ultimately don't feel like we would be okay without them, or we need the relationship and we need them to change, then we're always going to resort back to fear and insecurity when we're under pressure. So the way I see it, the way that I approach teaching it is no matter whether you're in a relationship, whether you're dating, whether you're going through a breakup, you'll always benefit from shifting focus away from whatever's going on there in the relational field and actually focusing back on you for a bit and rebuilding that relationship so that you can go to relationships from a healthier place. One that isn't so infused with fear and insecurity and needing someone else in order to feel okay because it's just so hard to build something solid on top of that foundation. Now in the book, I teach 4 pillars of a secure self, which if you've done my Secure Self Challenge, you would be familiar with this. But the first is self-compassion. And I've spoken about this before on the podcast that unless and until we can relate to the things that we struggle with through the lens of curiosity and compassion, meaning rather than judging ourselves for why am I like this and why do I keep ruining everything and how do I stop being so anxious and how do I fix My anxious attachment style, like all of that kind of rhetoric and that energy is basically wanting to chastise a part of us that's really afraid and a part of us that's having a really hard time and that's feeling really unsafe. And so we actually have to turn towards that part of us with a desire to help and a desire to support and a desire to understand. And that's really in my mind what self-compassion is all about.
[00:23:06]:
And it's something that ironically, I think a lot of folks with anxious patterns are really good at doing that for other people and really not so good at doing it for themselves. That's something that I always describe as like the soil. We need to be growing in the right soil. And if you don't have an inner environment of self-compassion, if you tend towards shame and blame and being very punitive and harsh with yourself when you're struggling or when you make a mistake, it's very hard to grow from that place because you're essentially trying to bully yourself into being better. And that's just not how it works. You can't meet shame with more shame and expect to get something else out of it. It just makes it worse. And it's just sending yourself the message of there's something wrong with you when that self-devaluation and that lack of self-worth is the thing at the heart of all of the patterns.
[00:23:58]:
That's the thing that's driving all of these outward manifestations. So changing the way that we actually relate to ourselves and to our patterns and to the things that we find hard and to the insecurities that we have is a really important first step. And it's not the same thing as just letting ourselves off the hook. It's not the same thing as condoning or excusing the behaviour that we might've engaged in that we're not proud of. If you're familiar with me, you'd know that I'm very staunchly in favour of taking responsibility and recognising where we've fallen short and owning that and committing to doing things differently. But we have to do that from kind of the energy of like a loving coach rather than, you know, a bully who's just wanting to remind us of how much of a failure we are. Loving accountability, I believe, is only possible when we have self-compassion in place. And so that's where we have to start.
[00:24:53]:
And only when we have the space there to be able to go, okay, I don't like what I did, but can I get curious about what I was experiencing when I did it? Can I understand why, even though I don't like the what? It's only then that we can start to go, okay, what can I reach for next time that's going to be healthier rather than just continuing to act out from fear and insecurity and then shame myself for it afterwards? So that's the first piece, self-compassion. And the next piece is self-regulation. So really learning to create an embodied sense of safety from within, rather than feeling like our nervous system is completely at the mercy of whatever's going on in our relationship. And it's important to note that like, of course our nervous system is going to be affected by whatever's going on in our relationship. It would not be normal or natural or even healthy to be unaffected by things that are feeling hard in your relationship. Of course we are interdependent. We, we are impacted by each other. That doesn't mean that you're in secure or there's something wrong with you or you need to fix that about yourself.
[00:25:53]:
But for folks with anxious attachment patterns, that is something we experience to pretty extreme degrees. And that sense of threat detection that I spoke to earlier of always scanning and monitoring for something that could go wrong and is there a storm cloud brewing, because we're so hypersensitive to that, we tend to perceive threats more often and we also tend to magnify those threats. So every small thing feels like a really big thing. And then the double whammy is when we get triggered, we often lack the ability to calm ourselves down, to find our centre. And it can feel like our anxiety really spirals out of control. And then we can lash out and do all sorts of things that we almost feel like we're possessed by a demon that's driving us into all of these really reactive behaviours that are coming from a place of fear and overwhelm. And that can unfortunately create this self-fulfilling prophecy where we're so afraid that something bad's going to happen or that we're losing someone. And so we do all of these frantic things in an attempt to stop that from happening.
[00:26:52]:
And lo and Behold, that can be the thing that pushes someone away because if you're on the receiving end of that, it can feel like someone's just flooding you with their anxiety. And that can be a lot to receive. So actually learning the language of our nervous system and understanding what's going on in our body and learning to work with that rather than just feeling like it's this thing that overwhelms us periodically that we are sort of powerless in the face of is really important and frankly life-changing. When you can start to feel like, oh, okay, I understand what's going on and I can actually have some input or agency over this process rather than feeling like it takes over me and there's nothing that I can do to stop it. And I think, of course, when we feel that way, we naturally then become very afraid of our own anxiety or afraid of our anger or afraid of our jealousy because we don't trust that we can feel those things and still make decisions, can still exercise choice in how we respond. So building up our capacity to be able to do that, to expand our window of tolerance so that we can be triggered or activated and actually still have the capacity to make somewhat clear-headed decisions, that is really profoundly life-changing, not only in relationships, but in all aspects of life. Because it allows us to just feel so much more in control in a healthy way, rather than feeling like we are totally at the mercy of our emotions and other people's behaviour, and we could kind of spiral out of control at any moment. Okay, so the third pillar is self-advocacy, and this is really learning how to find your voice and communicate your needs and boundaries and worries and whatever else you may need to share with someone from a healthy, grounded place.
[00:28:35]:
And I think a lot of people start here, as I said, when we're having issues in our relationship, we'll often identify it as a communication problem. And so we'll try and communicate more effectively and people discuss discover the language of boundaries and the language of needs and become quite firm and often experience this pendulum shift from having no boundaries and not expressing any needs to suddenly being extremely assertive about all of those things to the point of being almost demanding. And again, that can kind of overwhelm the other person because it can seem very serious. I've had so many students over the years who, again, with the best of intentions, Uh, going into like a second or third date and taking someone through what their needs and expectations and boundaries are in this very stern way. And that's them trying to make sure they don't self-abandon. But I think when we do that, we're overcorrecting and we're still doing that from fear. So I think that's why self-advocacy coming after we've done some of that, when we've started to work on these other pieces to build a more stable Steady foundation within ourselves, I think layering in self-advocacy after all of that is really beneficial. So to me, I think when we can have these conversations in our relationship without the overlay of extreme anxiety and attachment to an outcome, sharing something and needing the other person to respond in a particular way, and if they don't, then all bets are off and you spiral back into whatever pattern you might have been in.
[00:30:05]:
That really the difference is, can I hold my centre? Can I share in a way that's honest and open and clear? And can I stay sturdy in that? So if I'm saying that this is what's really important to me in a relationship, this is what I need, this is what really supports my wellbeing, or this is something that I absolutely won't tolerate, being able to stay in that and not puffing up and threatening and issuing these ultimatums, which again, I think is just an expression of our our fear and trying to overcompensate for the underlying insecurity, actually just being able to share all of that and bring it to someone and see where that goes, see where that conversation leads, and be really open to whatever the outcome might be, and trusting that the right outcome will reveal itself when we can approach those conversations with an open heart and honesty and a sense of integrity. And I think in doing that, we start to implement some changes in the relationship naturally, that give us a new blueprint around how that can look. And that builds our self-trust, and it also builds our trust in being able to have healthier interactions, particularly if our track record has been really unhealthy as far as those sorts of conflicts in our relationship. Okay, and the last pillar in terms of building your secure self that I talk about in my book is self-trust. And self-trust is a really big one, and it's one that most people with anxious attachment patterns, I would actually argue most people with with insecure attachment patterns more broadly really struggle with self-trust and doubt themselves, second-guess their perception and their feelings and their desires, and constantly wonder, am I being unreasonable? Am I gonna regret this? Am I doing the wrong thing? And that can just lead to so much noise and so much confusion and so much self-doubt. And of course, that is a really tricky place to do anything from, frankly. It's a tricky place to pursue a career from. It's a tricky place to make any kind of relationship decisions.
[00:32:12]:
Because it's essentially, again, a function of always looking outward is I don't have a clear north star within myself. I don't have a clear anchor. I don't really know who I am and I don't know what's right for me. And in my book, if you read it, which I hope you will, I talk about 3 elements of self-trust being knowing what's right for me. And I think a lot of people actually struggle just to know what's right for them because there is all of that noise and confusion and doubt and not really knowing what your values are and what's important to you and who you want to be in this world, doing what's right for you, which is sometimes we know what's right or we know what's not right. And yet we just struggle to actually make the change or do the thing or leave the relationship or whatever it might be because we're afraid. We're afraid of the unknown. We're afraid of regret.
[00:33:02]:
We're afraid of other people's opinions or judgement. We're afraid of loss. So that can be a big one as well, is actually following through, ripping the bandaid off, doing the thing and trusting ourselves to figure it out. And then the third one is letting go of all of the things that we can't control. And rather than focusing on making sure nothing bad ever happens, it's actually building the self-trust to know that we will have our own back and we will figure it out. So not needing to have all of the answers before making a choice or taking some bold action. It's actually just going, I need to figure out the next right step for me and trust that from there I'll figure out the next right step. And that might include seeking the support of people who can help you along the way.
[00:33:47]:
But ultimately shifting from making sure that everything goes perfectly to plan and I've got every contingency lined up, so if it's not plan A, it's plan B, and all of those things, and kind of constantly being braced against life from this place of not trusting that we would be okay, and actually just letting go and allowing ourselves to be open to whatever life might bring, the good, the bad, and the ugly, because it will bring all of those things and no amount of planning will be able to prevent that from happening. happening, and actually just trusting ourselves to figure it out and to handle it and to have our own back and to learn from the experience along the way and to continue to make choices in alignment with our values and with our sense of integrity, which I think is absolutely liberating as a paradigm shift if you are someone who has really struggled with all of that and who finds yourself really paralysed by not really Yeah. Knowing what you want from life, or feeling very afraid of regret, or ending up in a certain relationship or situation or some future path that you don't want. Getting really clear on your values and then taking incremental steps towards what feels right for you, rather than dwelling on all of the things that could go wrong and trying to buffer against that or prevent that. That's really, really important. And all of those things together— so self-compassion, self-regulation, self-advocacy, advocacy and self-trust. If you have those pieces in place, or you even just start taking steps towards that, you don't even really have to try to stop self-abandoning. And I think this is such a hallmark of when we're deep in our insecure patterns is the questions we ask are like, how do I stop doing this? And again, it's coming from that place of just wanting to overpower our patterns and forcibly make them go away or subdue them.
[00:35:39]:
And really, I think a much more productive use of your energy is what can I actively cultivate? What I foster? What can I build? And trusting that in building this new way, the old way ceases to be needed. It ceases to be relevant because when we build a healthy inner relationship, it naturally radiates out and it just will transform how you experience not only relationships with other people, but fundamentally how you see yourself. And you start to really see your own value and worth and trust in that. And that just creates this sense of relative ease in terms of all of the other stuff that really lowers the stakes and lowers the temperature, and you don't feel so highly strung and overwhelmed all the time. And so the self-abandonment, I think, is really a byproduct of the low self-worth. And so when we start to build these things up, oftentimes it kind of naturally falls away, and we realise that we've stopped doing that because it's no longer a fit for the way that we relate to ourselves and the way that we relate to others and what we really expect from our relationships because we've kind of outgrown that pattern. So that's today's episode. It's been a long one.
[00:36:52]:
If you're still with me, thank you so much. I hope that you found it helpful. And if you have found it helpful, I can assure you that you will find my book helpful. And I really do hope you'll think about pre-ordering. And also a reminder that if you do pre-order, you'll get instant access to that first workshop in the series on the abandonment wound, which talks more about all of this and specifically focusing on where the abandonment wound comes from, the types of behaviours that it can drive in our relationship, and the link between that fear of abandonment and self-abandonment. All of that and more you'll get instant access to. And then in the coming months, you'll also get free access to those other 2 workshops and the live Q&As with me. So please do consider heading to stephanierigg.com/book to preorder your copy.
[00:37:41]:
You can preorder the audiobook, the ebook, or the hardcover. Any of those will qualify for this preorder bonus. You will just have to submit the form on my website with your proof of purchase, because obviously we need to see that so that we can grant you access. I'm so delighted to be able to finally share those 2 pieces of exciting news with you. Thank you so much for joining me, and I look forward to seeing you.
Keywords from Podcast Episode
self-abandonment, anxious attachment, inner relationship, attachment patterns, self-worth, romantic relationships, relationship dynamics, The Secure Self book, pre-order bonus, core wounds, fear of abandonment, fear of rejection, unworthiness wound, workshop series, self-compassion, self-regulation, self-advocacy, self-trust, codependency, emotional safety, nervous system, relationship boundaries, overgiving, people pleasing, inner child, communication skills, relationship conflict, breaking unhealthy patterns, personal growth, self-development