HOW TO STOP ABANDONING YOURSELF AND REACH YOUR GOALS
By Susan Anderson © Dec 7 2011
Do you sabotage your relationships? Your long range goals? Your diet? There are myriad ways we all abandon ourselves, forsaking our true needs and goals on a daily basis. Many of our (Outer Child’s) self-defeating patterns are aimed at our love-lives; others at our careers or life styles.
Self sabotage has everything to do with self abandonment.
Self abandonment is what happens when you love yourself ONLY ENOUGH to give yourself immediate gratifications, but NOT ENOUGH to postpone those gratifications and give yourself what you really want. So you fall into old habits and let your Outer Child run your life:
- You grab for the second piece of cake rather than delay that gratification to achieve your true goal of becoming trim and fit.
- You overreact with insecurity or rage toward your lover rather than postpone that impulse and remain open to a healthy, adult exchange of feelings.
- You run up your credit card, numb out in front of the TV, or avoid career goals.
When you hold yourself in high enough regard, your Adult Self is empowered to take charge and lovingly shepherd you outside of your comfort zone where you take forward reaching actions that are good for you in the long run, rather than indulge in avoidance, procrastination, and other short term fixes. As a self-loving adult you
- remain self possessed in your love-relationships even when things heat up inside
- stick to your diet even when tempted
- make that awkward phone call to open up a career opportunity even though the easy road would have been to procrastinate and justify it with excuses like fatigue, unfairness, or too much competition.
Look how many millions of people love themselves ONLY ENOUGH to take the easy road: Eat now, diet tomorrow; spend now, pay tomorrow; cling now, cry tomorrow.
When you practice unconditional self love, you forgo your complacency at work, your sweet tooth at mealtime, and your temper in relationships. Instead, you build steadily toward all of your long range goals.
Hot to reverse self abandonment? Well, it doesn’t happen by osmosis or by reading about it, although your Outer Child will try to con you into holding out for the magic bullet. No, you must get on the program to resolve your ambivalence toward yourself and take actions that inculcate unconditional self love (self esteem, self regard). The program involves behavioral steps that function like physical therapy for the brain. You change incrementally, steadily reversing self abandonment and reaching your goals.
16. 12. 11 Woke up 4:30 am, shattered, insecurity knocking at my door to self. My habitual
reaction is to push it away, though I remember later that I should have embraced it, re-experienced it, that it’s only a feeling or a memory/recall as feeling and to allow myself to feel
it again as intensely as possible, is the key which opens the door and releases the inner child from his prison.
It may be that as things have progressed for me positively as a result of this knowledge of the abandoned self, that I get lulled into thinking things will continue to progress; but I now
realize that along the road to recovery, I need maintenance. I need to read again the message as I just did here, and try to stay close to that message as I go about my day. It can
just be the littlest disturbance — a neighbor with prattle breaking the concentration I need in
getting things done in my adult obligation world — that sets off inner insecurities and followed
by outer child reactions: I’ll finish this tomorrow, ‘go find a burger and fries to make you feel
better,’ o.c. says and so I do.
The episodic traumas that hurt to the point of the adult self throwing in the towel, have caused deep, perhaps permanent weakenings that can’t be completely jettisoned. So in this
case, my case, I will need to re-center my recovering self as frequently as needed, to avoid
accidents that can be mortal. Would that I were as stable and solid as others not bothered by debilitating weaknesses, but this is my self, my life, and so I have to walk this path of the
pilgrim recovered from traumas, those traumas that cannot be totally left behind or forgotten,
as they contain the experiential knowledge necessary to steer clear of those hazards again.
It’s all so trepidous [is that a word?], ie trepidation as reality or feeling or both. Personally, I
am not a biblical believer, so I don’t find solace there. I do recall one verse, however, that I
think expresses the best of human empathy toward sufferers, and I let it speak to me in my
falling down: “… do thyself no harm, for we are all here.” We are all here; we are not alone
to hug ourselves at the end, not there yet. I think you are there on my side, and that helps.
[a 'little' verbose (ie alot), editor says]
you should read my post to susan at http://fuzzypictures.wordpress.com about abandonment
Thank you. I am seeking response mechanisms during each day to renew my mind to not sabotage the healthy goals set for positive consequences.