The Part That Leaves You Behind

There are moments in client work when something shifts in the room and you feel it before you can name it, and this was one of them. Sarah had been coming to me for about three months. She was clever and self-aware, the kind of person who had already done a great deal of work on herself before we met, she’d been in therapy and she knew her patterns. She could articulate them with real precision and yet something was still happening that she couldn’t quite figure out. She came in one week and told me about a dinner party she’d been to, where a friend had said something dismissive about her work, not cruelly, just carelessly, the way people do when they aren’t really thinking, and Sarah had laughed along. She had even agreed in the moment. She had spent the rest of the evening being charming and easy and completely fine. But she had driven home and cried the whole way.

In the session she said, ‘I just left myself there, I was sitting right there next to my friend and just LEFT’.

I knew exactly what she meant and it’s one of the things that moves me deeply in this work, that absence. Not a dramatic exit but a quiet stepping away from yourself, so practiced and so fast that you almost don’t notice it happening. One moment you are there, you have a feeling, an opinion, a need, something that is genuinely and unmistakeably yours and the next you have tucked it somewhere out of sight and become whoever the room seems to need you to be.

Sarah had been doing this her whole life and she was extraordinarily good at it. She told me, quite matter of factly, that she didn’t know when she had stopped having preferences, desires, opinions of her own. That she must have had them at some point but she couldn’t quite locate them anymore. It’s not uncommon and this is what sustained self-abandonment does over years. It doesn’t announce itself. It just quietly erodes the thread back to yourself until one day you reach for it and find it isn’t quite where you left it, or in some cases, it isn’t there at all.

In the Internal Family Systems therapy model we don’t put a label on this or try to fix it. We get curious about it instead. And when Sarah and I did that, when she turned toward this part of herself rather than away from it, what emerged was a part of her that was very young. A girl who had learned early, probably earlier than she could consciously remember, that the emotional weather of a room could shift without warning, and that her job was to read it and respond before anything went wrong. Keeping herself small and agreeable and easy to be around was how love stayed in the room. It was how she stayed safe. This part wasn’t sabotaging Sarah. It was working extraordinarily hard to protect her, doing the only job it had ever known, and it had been doing it without a break for decades. It didn’t know that Sarah was forty-one now, that the room she was in had changed, that she didn’t need protecting in the same way anymore.

This is the part I want to talk about today. The one that abandons you, not maliciously, not even consciously but reliably, and often at the moments when you most need yourself to stay. The dinner party, the difficult conversation, the moment you almost said what you actually thought and then didn’t. It can look like going quiet when something needed to be said, or saying yes when everything in you was saying no, or laughing along with something that actually hurt. And sometimes it goes further than that. Sometimes the part doesn’t just quiet you down but disappears you so completely that there is genuinely nothing left to retrieve in that moment, no opinion, no feeling, no sense of what you want. Just a very capable, very pleasant version of you, holding the room together while the rest of you waits somewhere else entirely.

The cost of this is strange, because it doesn’t always feel like a cost in the moment. In the moment it often feels like a relief. The tension drops, the room stays okay, you made it through. It’s later that it comes, in the car on the way home, in the flatness that follows or perhaps in the slow accumulation of resentment you can’t quite explain because nothing terrible happened. Because that is what sustained self-abandonment does over years. It doesn’t announce itself. It just quietly erodes the thread back to yourself until one day you reach for it and find it isn’t quite where you left it.

When we sit with the part that abandons us, really sit with it with genuine curiosity rather than frustration, what we usually find is something exhausted. Something that has been working extremely hard for a very long time and has never once been thanked for it. Something that genuinely believes, still, that if you show up fully and take up space and say the real thing, something bad will happen. Love will leave. The room will turn. So the work using the Internal Family Systems therapy model isn’t to put a label on this part or try to fix it. The work is to ask it what it thinks will happen if it lets you stay. And then to listen, really listen, the way you would to any part of you that has been doing its best in the dark for longer than it should have had to.

By the time Sarah and I finished working together, she hadn’t become someone who never self-abandoned. But she had started to notice the moment it happened, that small internal lurch, that split-second of leaving, and she had begun slowly to get curious about it rather than simply going along with it. That noticing is everything, because you cannot return to yourself if you don’t first realise you’ve gone.

If any of this is landing for you, if you recognise that quiet leaving, I’d love to know. You can reply directly to this email. I read everything. Sending love to everyone today ❤️