“Why do I keep accepting this?”

It’s a question I hear often in therapy. Sometimes it’s asked with frustration, sometimes with shame, and sometimes with genuine bewilderment. The person isn’t weak. They’re often intelligent, compassionate, and deeply committed to relationships. They’ve tried to communicate. They’ve read the books, gone to therapy, and given second chances, sometimes far more than that. Yet, despite all of their effort, they find themselves living farther and farther away from themselves.

This is what I think of as self-abandonment.

The term has become increasingly popular, but I think it’s often described too narrowly. It isn’t simply poor boundaries or a lack of self-care, although those can certainly be part of it. Self-abandonment is the gradual process of overriding your own internal experience in order to preserve a relationship, a hope, or an identity that no longer aligns with reality. It rarely happens in one dramatic decision. Instead, it occurs through hundreds of small moments: explaining away behavior that hurt you, minimizing your own emotional reactions, convincing yourself that next time will be different, or believing that if you communicate more clearly, become more patient, or love more generously, the relationship will finally become what you’ve hoped it could be.

None of those responses are irrational. In fact, they’re profoundly human. From a attachment perspective, relationships are among the primary regulators of our nervous systems. Beginning with John Bowlby’s work and expanded by Mary Ainsworth and decades of attachment research, we understand that when an important relationship feels threatened, our attachment system typically moves toward the relationship rather than away from it. We seek closeness, repair, reassurance, and understanding. In other words, when we feel insecure, our first instinct is often to work harder to restore the bond.

That is why people frequently stay longer than they imagined they would. It isn’t necessarily because they lack insight or strength. More often, they are trying to reconcile two competing realities. One is the relationship they are actually experiencing. The other is the relationship they sincerely believe is still possible. Hope is an extraordinarily powerful force. It keeps couples engaged through difficult seasons, motivates genuine repair, and allows people to forgive painful mistakes. But hope can also become untethered from evidence. When accountability never arrives, when apologies are repeated without meaningful change, or when trust continues to erode despite repeated conversations, hope slowly begins to function less as resilience and more as denial.

One of the most difficult moments in therapy occurs when someone begins separating the person they love from the person they have hoped their partner would eventually become. Those are not always the same person. Healthy relationships absolutely survive disappointment, conflict, and even profound injury when both people take responsibility for the work of repair. Accountability changes everything because it creates the possibility of rebuilding trust. Without accountability, however, hope often becomes waiting. Waiting becomes explaining. Explaining becomes minimizing. And eventually, minimizing becomes abandoning your own experience.