When you are self-aware yet sometimes, still self-abandon in your relationships, it can be confusing and frustrating.
While this pattern may be frustrating, it’s also completely understandable.
Self-awareness is a necessary step towards healing self-abandonment. Yet to truly stay connected to yourself there comes a point where you must move beyond self-awareness.
Self-Aware Yet Still Self-Abandoning
There was probably a time in your past where you were unsure as to what your relational patterns were. Over time, you likely cultivated important insight to clarify your specific patterns of self-abandonment.
Becoming self-aware is an important stage in healing from self-abandonment. You may have felt relief when you learned you weren’t alone in your patterns and there was a framework to understand them. As Dr. Dan Siegel says, we must “Name it to tame it.” This means to understand the roadmap towards embodied change and felt security we must first identify our personal patterns and root concerns.
Cultivating Insight isn’t Enough to Truly Change
When we are becoming self-aware, it sometimes feels like insight may be enough to change. If we know better than we can do better after all.
Yet, while we must name the patterns we see and build insight, self-awareness alone usually isn’t enough to change. Once we have connected some dots, we have to move forward in “taming” the issues we notice which is a different step of healing.
The roadmap towards healing relational patterns usually looks like this:
- Feeling confused about why I behave or feel in certain ways.
- Building insight and self-awareness through various tools like articles online, books, podcasts and therapy.
- Transforming insight into felt embodied change.
Yet many approaches stay in the second stage of healing. But self-awareness alone doesn’t lead to felt security and true self-connection.
Sometimes Self-Awareness May Keep Us Stuck
There comes a point where valuable insight may inadvertently reinforce self-abandonment. In my work as a therapist, I’ve met many clients who have cultivated important self-awareness yet now use this insight as another tool for self-disconnection.
At this point, they now use their insight against themselves. Rather than helping them feel more self-connected, their self-awareness sometimes acts as fuel for their inner critic. For example, at this stage, they may tell themselves when they feel insecure “What is wrong with you? You already know that your dad wasn’t capable of loving you. Stop feeling so insecure in all your relationships!”
Moving Beyond the Mind to Feel Self-Connection
It’s incredibly common that self-awareness becomes a tool for self-disconnection before moving towards the next stage of healing.
Many of us usually reach a point where we no longer need more information or education. Rather we need to move beyond the mind to truly feel connected to ourselves no matter what arises in our lives or relationships.
To feel secure and self-connected, you must drop down out of your logical mind and connect with your body. Self-connection involves being able to truly feel your feelings rather than intellectualizing what you “should” do or feel.
Feeling Self-Connected and Secure
One of the most common ways people self-abandon is by refusing to feel their feelings. Often people will get stuck judging or analyzing their feelings rather than simply feeling them.
When you develop secure self-connection, you become a soft place to land for yourself. Here, there are no bad or wrong emotions just comfortable or uncomfortable ones. Self-connection happens when you simply let yourself feel the sensations of whatever emotion is arising within you without judging or analyzing.
Feeling your feelings doesn’t always feel comfortable yet, your willingness to sit with your emotions with an open-mind and heart always cultivates self-connection.
Moving Beyond Logical Awareness to True Wisdom
When you connect with your body’s sensations, you have the ability to truly process your feelings compassionately and effectively no matter what happens in your relationships.
Your body’s sensations also give you tremendous clues as to what’s right for you. Often when people self-abandon they try to approach their life from a logical lens only. Yet sometimes, what’s right on paper isn’t right for you.
Many people choose a career or a partner because it’s logically makes sense but deep down, they are profoundly unhappy. This is because only you can sense what you need and want to make this life happy and meaningful for you. Learning how to connect with your authentic truth is an important part of moving beyond self-abandonment.
Listening to Yourself to Stay Self-Connected
You can let go of self-abandonment completely when you learn to listen to yourself as a regular practice.
Listening to yourself includes letting yourself feel your feelings without judgment or analysis. Listening to yourself also involves letting yourself sense what you need or want in any give moment. Truly if you learn to listen to yourself you always know the right next step for you. Maybe it’s setting a boundary or taking a breath or going on a walk.
The most profound moment in a person’s healing journey from self-abandonment to self-connection is when they finally hear, and honor, themselves moment to moment. It is at this stage clients graduate from therapy because they now know that they are capable of guiding and supporting themselves no matter what happens.
Their sense of self-connection is so deeply rooted not because they’ve suddenly got this process “perfect,” but because they are simply willing to honor what they need or feel as the awareness arises.
This is the moment you take cultivated self-awareness into embodied self-connection.
Implementing the Strategy: Your Next Steps
You have already invested the time, energy and resources into cultivating self-awareness yet still lose yourself in your relationships. Now you may focus on taking this important self-awareness and transforming it into integrated, felt positive change.
To begin cultivating embodied self-connection, here are the recommended next steps:
- **Take the Relationship Safety Assessment:** If you haven’t identified your specific score, start here. This data will allow you to better understand your personalized next steps.
- The DIY Path: If you are ready to begin incrementally make progress on your own to resolve your attachment style, The Toxic Relationship Recovery Workbook: Understand and Heal Attachment Wounds, Reclaim Your Confidence, and Build the Healthy Relationships You Deserve, provides clinical exercises to become securely attached. This is the foundation of healthy self-connection.
- The Comprehensive Library: Access the Confidently Authentic Resource Library for practical and clinical skills to implement healthy boundaries, reduce negative inner dialogue, and communicate more effectively. This all supports embodied change.
- The Strategic Private Partnership: If you are ready for a permanent systemic solution to feel connected to yourself no matter what others choose to do (or not do), you may work directly with author and relationship expert, Krystal Mazzola Wood.
Whatever path you choose is best for you, we are rooting for your security here at Confidently Authentic!
At Confidently Authentic, we believe relationship transformation is a human lived experience requiring a human expert approach. All these articles are written from a human being with 15 years of clinical experience.
