Finding the Way Home When you’ve Lost Yourself

Sometimes self-abandonment doesn’t feel loud.

It feels like a quiet drifting.

You look at your life and nothing is wrong exactly. You’re functioning. You’re capable. You’re holding it all together.

But somewhere along the way, you stopped feeling fully here.

There’s a flatness.
A dullness.
A sense that the woman you once were — fierce, creative, instinctive — has faded into the background.

And you don’t know quite when or why she left.

What Self-Abandonment Really Looks Like

Self-abandonment isn’t always dramatic self-sacrifice.

More often, it’s subtle.

It’s laughing something off that actually hurt.
It’s saying “it doesn’t matter” when it does.
It’s talking yourself out of your intuitive knowing because it might cause friction.
It’s managing someone else’s moods instead of honouring your own.
It’s editing your personality so you’re easier to be with.

It’s becoming so attuned to everyone else that you lose attunement to yourself.

And over time, this creates a strange internal split.

On the outside: competent, kind, reliable.
On the inside: restless, resentful, vaguely disconnected.

You start to feel like you’ve lost yourself.

And in shamanic terms, that isn’t just poetic language.

The loss is very real.

Soul Loss: The Shamanic View

In many shamanic traditions, there’s a concept called soul loss.

It doesn’t mean your soul has disappeared.

It means parts of you — your vitality, your instinct, your voice, your wildness — have gone into hiding because it wasn’t safe for them to stay visible.

As children and young women, we are exquisitely sensitive to belonging.

If being expressive led to criticism, we learned to tone it down.
If anger led to rejection, we swallowed it.
If asking for too much created tension, we needed less.

So a part of us stepped back.

Not because we were weak.
Because we were clever.

Shutting down a part of yourself is an act of protection.

But protection, when it runs for decades, becomes disconnection.

And that disconnection can feel like:

• “I don’t know who I am anymore.”
• “I used to be so confident.”
• “I feel flat.”
• “I don’t feel fully alive.”
• “I’m doing everything right but something is missing.”

What’s missing is often not something new.

It’s something old that got left behind.

Why We Abandon Ourselves

We abandon ourselves to stay loved.
To stay safe.
To avoid being too much.
To avoid being abandoned by another.

Many women I work with are highly perceptive and deeply capable. They can read a room in seconds. They can regulate others with ease. They anticipate needs before they’re spoken.

This is not weakness.

It’s a survival skill.

But when that skill becomes your identity, you become the regulator, the stabiliser, the understanding one.

And somewhere quietly, you stop asking:

What do I feel?
What do I need?
What do I want?

The longer you ignore those questions, the more distant you feel from yourself.

The Cost of Shutting Yourself Down

When parts of you go underground, life becomes smaller.

You might still succeed.
Still function.
Still achieve.

But there’s less colour.

Less spontaneity.
Less instinct.
Less delight.

You can’t create a life that feels wild and alive if half of you is still in hiding.

And this is where the work becomes beautiful.

Because coming home to yourself isn’t about becoming someone else.

It’s about retrieval.

Coming Home: Reclaiming the Parts You Left Behind

In my work, we don’t force change.

We create space.

Using the framework of the Andean Medicine Wheel, practical coaching, and guided shamanic journey work, we gently explore the patterns that shaped you.

We meet the survival parts with respect — because they kept you safe.

And then we begin the process of calling your vitality back.

Sometimes that looks like reconnecting to anger in a healthy way.
Sometimes it’s reclaiming your voice.
Sometimes it’s retrieving the part of you that was imaginative, instinctive, sensual, sovereign.

In shamanic language, this can include soul retrieval — a process of reconnecting with aspects of yourself that withdrew during times of stress or trauma.

In everyday language, it’s remembering who you are.

And crucially — integrating that remembrance into real life.

Boundaries.
Decisions.
Conversations.
Choices that reflect the woman you actually are now.

You Haven’t Lost Yourself. You’ve Been Protecting Yourself.

If you feel like you’ve disappeared somewhere along the way, I want you to hear this clearly:

There is nothing wrong with you.

The parts that went quiet did so for a reason.

And they can return.

If this speaks to you, my Weaving A New Way weekend workshop is a powerful place to begin. Over two days, we’ll work with the four directions of the Medicine Wheel to explore the deeper stories shaping your life and consciously shift what’s been keeping you in place.

Join the workshop HERE.

And if you feel ready for deeper, more personal work, my 1:1 shamanic coaching sessions offer space for journey work, belief-shifting, story rewriting and integration — so the changes land in your actual, everyday world.

Find out more about shamanic coaching HERE.

Coming home to yourself is not indulgent.

It is essential.

The woman you’ve been missing hasn’t vanished.

She’s waiting to be invited back.