Healing Abandonment Wounds Through Self-Loyalty

I watched a TikTok the other day about abandonment wounds being healed through self-loyalty, and I felt that familiar tightening in my chest. Not the dramatic kind. The quiet kind. The kind that says, oh… this again. The kind that recognizes truth before the mind has time to argue with it.

The message wasn’t flashy. It wasn’t about “high value” anything or cutting people off at the first sign of discomfort. It was simple and almost uncomfortable in its simplicity: abandonment wounds don’t heal when someone finally stays. They heal when you stop leaving yourself.

That line followed me around for the rest of the day.

Because if I’m honest, most of my life I believed healing meant finding someone who wouldn’t go anywhere. Someone patient enough, evolved enough, secure enough to tolerate my questions, my sensitivity, my need to understand what’s happening beneath the surface. I thought consistency from someone else would rewire whatever went wrong early on.

But what I’m starting to see is that even when someone does stay, the wound doesn’t magically disappear. Because the wound isn’t actually about them leaving. It’s about what I learned to do to myself in order to keep people close.

I’ve shared before how conflict is especially hard for me. How, when I feel misunderstood or talked past or emotionally redirected, something in me scrambles. My voice gets louder-not because I want to dominate, but because I’m trying not to disappear. It’s the nervous system saying, please hear me before I lose myself again.

What’s hard to admit is that in those moments, I often abandon myself before anyone else does. I override my own signals. I over-explain. I soften what I mean so it lands better. I accept conversations that don’t actually resolve anything, just to keep the connection intact. And afterward, I sit with that familiar mix of exhaustion and resentment, wondering why I feel so far away from myself.

That’s the abandonment wound in action.

Self-loyalty interrupts that pattern, but not in the way Instagram makes it sound. It’s not empowering in the fireworks sense. It’s quiet. It’s awkward. Sometimes it feels like grief.

Self-loyalty is noticing that your body feels off and choosing not to talk yourself out of it. It’s realizing that being calm on the outside while unraveling on the inside isn’t emotional maturity, it’s self-betrayal dressed up as regulation. It’s admitting that just because someone isn’t intentionally hurting you doesn’t mean the dynamic is safe for you.

One of the hardest lessons for me has been understanding that I can love someone and still need to choose myself. That I don’t need a villain to justify a boundary. That discomfort alone is data.

For a long time, I stayed in conversations that left me feeling small because leaving felt like proof that I was “too much.” Too sensitive. Too intense. Too emotional. I thought endurance was strength. What I’m learning now is that endurance without self-loyalty just recreates the original wound.

The nervous system doesn’t heal because someone reassures it once or twice. It heals because it learns that you will respond when something feels wrong. That you won’t gaslight yourself into staying. That you won’t sacrifice your voice to preserve proximity.

And here’s the part that surprised me most: when I started practicing self-loyalty, the anxiety didn’t immediately go away, but the shame did. I stopped spiraling about whether I was asking for too much. I stopped rehearsing conversations in my head, trying to find the perfect wording that would make my needs acceptable. I trusted that if something required me to disappear to maintain it, it wasn’t aligned, no matter how much chemistry or history was present.

People talk a lot about “secure attachment” as if it’s a personality trait. But from where I’m standing, it’s a practice. A daily decision to stay with yourself, especially when connection feels uncertain.

The TikTok didn’t offer a checklist or a mantra. It didn’t promise that no one would ever leave again. What it offered was something more stabilizing than reassurance: the reminder that the deepest safety comes from knowing you won’t abandon yourself to avoid abandonment.

And maybe that’s the real healing. Not the absence of loss, but the absence of self-betrayal.

Because when you’re loyal to yourself, even endings don’t feel like erasure. They feel like alignment catching up to the truth.

And that changes everything.

Stay Sunny ☀️

Sherri Lee Sunshine

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