How compassion rewrites our self-abandonment origin story

There's usually one particular moment that taught us to self-abandon.

It happens in our impressionable years—between ages 6 and 18 when our brains are forming foundational beliefs about ourselves and the world. During this window, our experiences shape how we see our truth, our worth, our right to exist as we are.

Then something happens. We share a thought or an opinion or a part of ourselves that feels real and important. And it gets rejected. Or worse, it gets punished.

That moment becomes a turning point.

The moment that changes the course of being

I was 17, sitting at the dinner table with my parents. I wanted to share something I'd been thinking about. Nothing dramatic. Just a thought I wanted to express.

"I don't believe in God and the Church," I said.

I watched my devout Latin Catholic mother's face change. The disappointment. The disbelief. "What do you mean? Where did we go wrong? What are we going to do with you?"

Her words kept coming but they felt distant, like the world was shutting off around me. All I knew in that moment was: what I said was not okay.

Later, alone in my room, I made a decision: "I can never tell my parents anything ever again."

That was the beginning of closing everything up.

When our truth becomes unsafe

When we express something true and it gets rejected by someone we love (especially during those impressionable years) something soul-crushing happens. It feels like our truth is unacceptable. Like we're not okay.

The disappointment in a parent's eyes becomes a lesson:

Hide who you are.
Suppress what you feel.
Keep your thoughts to yourself..

This isn't just about the specific moment. It's about what we decide about ourselves after that moment.

Impact of the self-abandonment wound

The rejection I experienced in that moment at the dinner table spilled into every other area of my life. I started keeping secrets. Holding myself back. Conforming to what others expected.

In my 20s, I got the degree, climbed the corporate ladder, got married, appeared perfect from the outside. But beneath the surface, I struggled. Binge drinking. Insomnia. Body dysmorphia. A lack of self-love.

These weren't just challenges. They were manifestations of the suppression I'd internalized at that dinner table.

The self-abandonment compounds over time. It shapes relationships and the life we build.

The reframe that changes it all

What I’ve learned in my healing journey is the following idea that shifted everything for me:

People are always doing the best they can with what they know.

My mother wasn't trying to hurt me. She was responding the only way she knew how—the way she'd been taught to respond. She grew up in a suppressive, religious environment in Cuba. She inherited a belief system about how truth should be handled, about what was acceptable, about what it meant to be a good daughter and a good mother.

She was doing the best she could with what she knew.

When I really understood this—not as an excuse for her, but as a truth about how people operate—everything shifted for me.

As my friend said:

Realizing someone was doing their best is like finding the missing footnote to an old story. It changes how the whole thing reads.

Suddenly, I could see my mother differently. I could see myself differently. The wound didn't disappear, but it transformed. Instead of: "My mother rejected me," the story became: "My mother was doing the best she could, and I learned to reject myself as a result."

That’s a different story entirely. In that difference is where healing lives.

Compassion as a healing tool

This reframe opened doors I didn't know were closed.

Understanding that my mother was doing her best didn't mean I agreed with how she responded. It didn't mean what happened was okay. It meant I could hold space for her humanity while also holding space for my wound.

I started to understand her background. I learned about the patterns in my family—generations of suppression, of people doing the best they could with the limiting beliefs they'd inherited.

This understanding created compassion. Not just for her, but for myself. Because I also did the best I could with what I knew. As a teenager, I made the best decision I could make in that moment: protect myself by closing down. As a young woman, I conformed because conformity felt safe. These were adaptive responses. They worked for me at the time. They also cost me.

When we can see ourselves and the people who hurt us as doing the best we could with what we knew, something opens up. The story changes. The relationship to the wound changes. All interactions improve with this knowing.

The generational shift

Something else that happens when we adopt this understanding: we break cycles.

When my mother responded to my truth with disappointment, she was living out a pattern from her own life. Suppression taught to her. Passed down, generation to generation.

By understanding her best, I could choose something different. I could look at my own patterns and say: this stops here. I don’t want this belief to get passed to the next generation.

The grace that heals

Self-abandonment begins with a moment of rejection. A truth that wasn't safe to tell. A part of ourselves that we learned to hide.

But healing doesn’t begin with anger or blame. It begins with grace. Grace for the people who we felt hurt by. Not because they deserve it, but because understanding their limitations actually sets us free.

Also, grace for ourselves. For doing the best we could with what we knew. For surviving the way we had to survive.

When we can look back at that pivotal moment—the dinner table, the classroom, the conversation—and see all the people involved as doing their best, the story transforms. We're no longer victims of rejection. We're people who made sense of our world the only way we knew how.

From there, we can choose differently. We can choose to tell our truth again. To trust ourselves. To believe that our presence, our thoughts, our feelings… they're allowed to exist. Not because everyone will accept them, but because we finally do.

That’s the missing footnote that rewrites the story and where the real healing begins.

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