How do I stop abandoning myself?
You stop abandoning yourself by catching the exact moment it happens, which is almost never a big dramatic betrayal but a small quiet exit, the second someone else's face changes and you start editing yourself in real time to fix it. Self-abandonment is not one decision. It is a habit of leaving, over and over, usually so fast you don't clock it as a choice at all.
What's actually happening
Somewhere along the way you learned that your honest reaction to something cost you more than it was worth, so you started pre-editing. You feel the real thing, a flash of anger, a no, a preference, and before it can even reach your mouth you've already softened it, rerouted it, or swallowed it whole. That's not weakness, it's a trained reflex, and reflexes are fast precisely because they bypass the part of you that would object. The tell is usually physical before it's mental: a tightness in the chest or throat right as you say 'it's fine' when it isn't.
Why it made sense
If you grew up with someone whose mood ran the household, or dated someone who punished disagreement with withdrawal, abandoning your own position was the correct read of the room. A kid who insists on being right in a house where that gets you screamed at learns to drop the insisting. An employee who watched a colleague get quietly frozen out for pushing back learns to nod along in meetings. You didn't invent this pattern out of low self-worth, you built it as a working solution to a real problem, and it worked, that's exactly why it's still running.
Where people get the fix wrong
Most advice here is 'just set boundaries' or 'love yourself more,' which assumes the problem is a lack of information. It isn't. You already know your boundary. You know it in the half second before you cave. The actual work is shortening the gap between feeling the true reaction and acting on it, even by one full breath, even just once a day, in something small: ordering the thing you actually want instead of what's easier for the table, naming that you're annoyed instead of saying you're tired. Practicing on low-stakes moments builds the muscle for when it costs something.
What genuinely helps
Pick one relationship where the stakes are low enough to survive a mistake, and let yourself be slightly more of an inconvenience there on purpose. Say the unpopular preference. Let a silence sit instead of rushing to fill it with an apology. What you're training is not confidence, it's tolerance, your own tolerance for someone else being briefly annoyed at you without you collapsing to fix it. The self you're trying to stop abandoning isn't an idea, it's that reaction you keep overriding, so the fix is not therapy language, it's reps.
When this runs your life, it usually traces to one underlying pattern. For this, it is most often the Ghost rhythm, the thing under the behavior.