"Empathy with no boundaries is self abandonment"

 Wow those words in a random Threads post really hit me hard. I did that. I abandoned myself. After 4 divorces and failed "relationships" too numerous to mention, most of which cost a lot of money to maintain or leave, at the age of 73, I am finally realizing what I have been doing to sabotage myself. 

Empathy with no boundaries. I abandoned myself just as I was abandoned at 26 months by the premature birth of my brother by parents who left me in the care of a kind stranger to focus on my baby brother who in the NICU. They certainly loved me and had no ill intent at all; they didn't know what they were doing would have such a profound and negative impact on me. 

I now believe that after Kerry was released from the hospital that my mom was afflicted with post-partum depression and overwhelmed by the need to care for my fragile brother's health. I remember being very small and looking up at the edge of the kitchen counter while my mom stood at the sink crying and asking me "why won't you help me?"  

I know from reading my "Baby book", kept meticulously by my smart and compulsive mother, that I was a precocious child: walked and talked early, and as an adventurous and curious child, had tried to drive my walker down the stairs to the basement with frightening but not injurious results. So when my brother arrived early with complications, I developed a reputation for being very independent, very low maintenance; I was, as they told me, a "me do myself" kid who picked out his own clothes and matched colors to coordinate them by age 3. This pseudo-independence was a screen for unmet needs for affection, affirmation, and communication. And in the developmental sense, it was a sign of an interrupted developmental phase-rapproachment Piaget called it--that would have allowed me to emotionally reconnect with my mom who had unintentionally abandoned me to have a premature baby and care for him post

But that abandonment wound led me to abandon myself.  And I learned that I did not deserve to be taken care of but rather to use my empathy to perceive and recognize the needs of depressed women like my mom. And the relationship dynamics with my mom would be repeated over and over in relationships with women who were smart and creative, like my mom, but also wounded and needy and who expected me to care for them and fix them. 

So I asked Gemini to discuss potential effects and out came a spot on description of me. 

Growing up with a depressed mother can result in profound childhood emotional neglect (CEN), which is deeply shapes how a person manages relationships and self-worth in adulthood. When a parent is emotionally unavailable, a child often adapts by developing hyper-empathy without boundaries as a survival mechanism. In adulthood, this psychological blueprint directly manifests as a cycle of self-abandonment, lack of self-care, and chronically failed romantic relationships. 



Reddit

·r/CPTSD

 +4

The Root: Emotional Abandonment by a Depressed Mother 

A mother struggling with depression is often consumed by her own psychological pain, rendering her unable to consistently provide emotional attunement, mirroring, or validation. 



National Institutes of Health (.gov)

 +

• The "Invisible" Child: The child's emotional needs are ignored or met with apathy. The child learns that their feelings are a burden or are "too much". 

• 

• YouTube
·Kati Morton
 +1


• Internalized Unworthiness: Children naturally internalize parental unavailability as a personal defect, concluding: "If my mother cannot love or see me, I must be fundamentally unlovable." 

• 

• Psychology Today
 +2


• The "Parentified" Role: To stabilize the home or win a shred of maternal connection, the child often becomes the mother's emotional caretaker, hyper-focusing on her moods. 

• 

• YouTube
·Forrest Hanson
 +3


The Mechanism: Unbounded Empathy as a Survival Strategy

To survive an unpredictable or emotionally flat home, the child develops a highly sensitized radar for external emotions. This turns into unbounded empathy, or codependency. 



YouTube

·Forrest Hanson

• Hypervigilance as Empathy: What looks like profound empathy is actually trauma-induced hypervigilance. The child must predict the depressed mother's emotional state to feel safe. 

• 

• YouTube
·Forrest Hanson
 +1


• The Absence of "Self": Because their environment never mirrored their internal state, the child fails to develop clear boundaries between where they end and where othersbegin. 

• 

• Quora
 +1


• Worth Tied to Usefulness: The child learns that their value exists only in their ability to soothe, fix, or accommodate others, completely erasing their own identity. 

• 

• Charlie Health
 +1


The Consequences in Adulthood

[Maternal Emotional Abandonment] 

       │

       ▼

[Hyper-Empathy & No Boundaries]

       │

       ├───────────────────────────────┐

       ▼                               ▼

[Severe Self-Abandonment]    [Chronic Lack of Self-Care]

       │                               │

       └───────────────┬───────────────┘

                       │

                       ▼

         [Failed Adult Romantic Relationships]

1. Severe Self-Abandonment

Self-abandonment occurs when an individual actively rejects their own thoughts, feelings, and values to appease others. 



Reddit

·r/CPTSD

 +1

• Censoring the Authentic Self: The adult suppresses their real desires or opinions out of an intense fear that authenticity will lead to rejection. 

• 

• Reddit
·r/CPTSD
 +1


• Compulsive People-Pleasing: They reflexively say "yes" when they mean "no," absorbing other people's emotional chaos while muting their own inner voice. 

• 

• Charlie Health
 +3


• Internal Hostility: By treating their own emotions as unimportant, they replicate the original neglect of the depressed mother, trapping themselves in a cycle of deep self-loathing. 

• 

• YouTube
·Kati Morton
 +1


2. Chronic Lack of Self-Care

When an individual has been conditioned to believe that their existence is only justified by caretaking others, personal upkeep falls away. 



Charlie Health

• Perceived Selfishness: Practicing basic self-care feels deeply unnatural, selfish, or unsafe, triggering intense subconscious guilt.

• Emotional and Physical Burnout: Because they act as an emotional sponge for everyone around them, they experience profound energy depletion.

• Passive Self-Neglect: They may ignore physical health cues, skip doctor appointments, sleep poorly, and fail to feed or nurture themselves, mirroring the exact lack of protection they experienced as a child. 

• 

• YouTube
·Mel Robbins
 +3


3. Failed Adult Romantic Relationships

The toxic combination of CEN, poor boundaries, and self-abandonment heavily sabotages adult romantic dynamics through predictable attachment wounds. 



PositivePsychology.com

• Anxious and Insecure Attachment: The unresolved fear of being left behind triggers extreme hyper-sensitivity to any perceived distance from a partner. This leads to suffocating clutched behaviors or sudden, preemptive emotional withdrawal.

• Attracting Extractive Partners: Individuals with unbounded empathy naturally drift toward partners who take without giving—such as narcissists, emotionally unavailable individuals, or those in perpetual crisis. They unconsciously attempt to "fix" these partners to rewrite their childhood script with their mother.

• The Cycle of Resentment and Collapse: Because the individual cannot state their boundaries, they expect partners to intuitively read their mind. When the partner fails to do so, a massive wave of silent resentment builds, ultimately causing the relationship to implode from imbalance, exhaustion, or emotional volatility. 

• 

• National Institutes of Health (.gov)
 +6


Path to Healing

Breaking this intergenerational loop requires shifting focus from external tracking to internal healing. This typically involves utilizing trauma-informed therapy—such as Inner Child Work, Somatic Experiencing, or Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)—to safely reconnect with suppressed emotions. Healing is centered on practicing re-parenting, which means learning to validate one's own needs first, establishing rigid boundaries as an act of self-preservation, and systematically refusing to abandon oneself for the comfort of others

Started setting better boundaries with my brother. Trying Hinge and League dating apps to practice making better choices in partners . My current low cash flow condition may be a barrier or perhaps the exact filter I need to move on to an equal not needy partner.