Blaming yourself for your relationship’s failure to thrive is the most painful type of regret. Beating yourself for losing someone’s love is true agony. But more often than not, we do this when we’re dealing with a breakup.
People often blame themselves for breakups, believing that their insecurity is what drove their partner away.
Another thing on which people blame their breakup is their own personal defects. They believe that their lacking, inadequacies, faults, or negative behaviors drove away the person they love. They feel as if they’ve been condemned to involuntary aloneness as a form of personal punishment for their shortcomings.
People also blame the breakup on their supposed unworthiness. They feel they are lacking enough personal power to hold a person’s love. In short, their pain during the breakup is coming from feeling unlovable, that they’re somehow inherently lacking some essential ingredient of personal value. Otherwise, why would someone have thrown them away?
The truth is, we are all needy — especially when we are attempting a new relationship, and especially when the person we are attached to isn’t fulfilling our basic need for trust and security.
Unless we feel mutual love and attachment coming from the other person, we can all become insecure and exhibit behaviors that are extreme and can drive the person further away.
The first step is to accept our humanness — neediness and insecurity are part of the human condition (even if most people don’t admit to them in public).
Your task is to give yourself security; it’s nobody else’s job — especially not your lover’s.
Susan Anderson
The task is to accept yourself, warts and all.
Don’t expect other people to validate your worth. You must do that yourself, even at this painful moment when you are believing yourself unworthy of a relationship.
Stop looking to your ex to accept you. You must take 100 percent responsibility to give yourself the esteem that you need (that’s why it’s called self-esteem).
Your task is to give yourself security; it’s nobody else’s job — especially not your lover’s. Only you can do this. And as you do, you will become emotionally self-reliant.
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I wish I could participate in an abandonment recovery workshop.
Even though I have been divorced from my ex-wife for over 9 years now,
we have only lived 10 minutes apart.
But recently she completely cut ties to the area where we have been since we arrived here in 1994 and our son was born in 1998 and is now a senior in College at 22 years old. We have always been together on Holidays for our son’s sake and because I have always lived close I was involved in his life on a daily basis..
However, since she has physically left the area and relocated to Jupiter,FLA I have been feeling devastated. I don’t think I went through the stages of grief over my divorce except in the beginning when I got served divorce papers in the mail. But after that I started satisfying my sexual desires through “transactional” interactions. I am in a recovery group now for that addiction but it is not addressing my abandonment issues–Please help me.
Dear Tim, divorce indeed creates turmoil. We are planning to have an online workshop soon. We’ll keep you posted.