When Change Feels Like Abandonment

She looked at me and said, “I feel completely abandoned.”

It caught me off guard.

Abandoned felt like a surprisingly big word for what was happening.

Not disappointed.
Not inconvenienced.

Abandoned.

The business where I do healing work recently announced that it will be closing. It’s one of those places that has helped a lot of people. The woman I work with is extraordinary at what she does and over the years she has walked alongside many people through some of the hardest chapters of their lives. Over the past year and a half, I’ve stepped into that work alongside her—sitting with people in their unraveling, witnessing what it takes to heal. Real healing has happened in those rooms.

So when the news came out that we were closing, people had reactions.

Some were sad.
Some were surprised.
Some were already asking where they could go next—not ready to let go of the work, or the people who held them in it.

But that word stayed with me.

Abandoned.

Because it made me realize how easily something that helped us through a crisis can quietly become something we believe we can’t live without.

Many of us find a person, a place, a practice or a routine during a difficult time in our lives and it becomes a lifeline. It steadies us when everything feels like it’s coming apart.

And that’s a beautiful thing.

But sometimes what begins as support slowly becomes something else.

We keep returning to the same place, the same person, the same routine not because we still need it in the same way, but because it once helped us survive something hard.

Humans are very good at holding onto what once worked.

Even when life is quietly asking us to move forward.

Change has a way of exposing that.

When something we’ve relied on disappears, it can feel less like change and more like loss. Sometimes even abandonment. Not because anyone actually left us, but because the structure we leaned on is no longer there.

And suddenly we’re standing on our own again.

That’s an uncomfortable place for most people.

But it’s also an interesting one.

As I thought about it later, I realized we do this in other places too.

We hold onto patterns we learned as children because at one point they helped us make sense of the world.

Maybe being quiet kept the peace.
Maybe being strong meant no one had to worry about you.
Maybe we learned that we had to be perfect to receive love.

Those patterns weren’t mistakes. They were strategies.

But sometimes the very things that helped us survive earlier chapters of our lives quietly follow us into places where they no longer fit.

And when life changes — when a person leaves, a relationship shifts or a door closes — those old patterns can wake up and whisper the same story they learned long ago.

You’re being left.
You’re on your own.

Even when that’s not actually what’s happening.

Because the purpose of good healing work isn’t to make people dependent on it forever. It’s to remind them that the capacity to heal was inside them the entire time.

I know that because my own healing didn’t begin in a therapy office or a healing studio. It began in the quiet aftermath of losing my son, when the world had split open and none of the structures that had once held my life together made sense anymore.

At first I looked everywhere outside of myself for answers. Books. Teachers. Practices. Anything that might help me understand how a person survives something like that.

And many of those things helped.

They steadied me while I learned how to breathe again.

But over time I realized something else.

Every tool, every practice, every person who helped me along the way was really pointing me back to the same place.

Inside.

People can absolutely help us along the way. In fact, we often need them to. We borrow strength, perspective and safety from each other while we learn how to find those things within ourselves.

But eventually the training wheels come off.

Life has a funny way of doing that.

Sometimes through choice.
Sometimes through circumstance.
And sometimes through a door quietly closing.

And while that can feel unsettling in the moment, it also opens the possibility for something else.

New experiences.
New perspectives.
New teachers we haven’t met yet.

Or the quiet realization that maybe we’re stronger and more capable than we thought.

Support is a beautiful thing.

But it was never meant to be the thing that holds you up forever.

The real work of healing is remembering that the strength you thought you were borrowing…

was yours all along.

And sometimes change is the moment life gently hands it back.

I’m continuing to share this journey on Threads of My Heart if you want to follow along.

Another thread from my heart to yours.