Your healing begins when you stop abandoning yourself.

I have lived inside this wound. I know what it feels like to be 16 years old and so desperate to disappear that you make plans for it. I know what it feels like to stand in front of a mirror and hate what you see so completely that you punish your own body for existing. I know what it feels like to give everything you have and still go to bed feeling like something essential is missing, wondering what is wrong with you.

Nothing was wrong with me, and nothing is wrong with you. But something happened, and that something has a name, and once you can name it, you can begin to heal it.

Before we go a single step further, I want you to see the foundation everything in this school is built on. It is not built on my story. It is built on principles, principles that existed before either of us was born and will continue long after we are gone. Cultures change, trends change, therapies come in and out of style. But the principles God established in the beginning are the only foundation that can carry the weight of a woman becoming who she was created to be. So we are going to build on rock, and the rock for this entire school is one verse, one promise.

Though my father and mother forsake me, the Lord will receive me.

Think about this. God is the only Father who has never abandoned anyone. He did not abandon Hagar in the desert, He did not abandon Joseph in the pit, He did not abandon David in the cave, He did not abandon Hannah when the priest mistook her anguish for drunkenness, He did not abandon the woman at the well after five husbands left her, and He has not abandoned you, no matter what your story has told you.

That is the principle. Everything else in this school is a way of applying it. Long before psychology gave this wound a language, God was already speaking to the abandoned woman. He was already reaching into the places where people had left her and saying what no human being had ever said to her. "I see you, I have not forgotten you and your name is engraved on my hands."

That is where we begin.

What abandonment actually is

We usually think abandonment means someone left. A parent walked out, a man disappeared, a friend went silent, a husband chose something else. All of that is abandonment, and Scripture takes it seriously. The God of the Bible does not minimize human suffering. He names it, He addresses it and He sits with the abandoned and the rejected through every book of His Word.

But the wound I want to talk about first goes deeper than the people who left you. I want to talk about the moment you left yourself. Because that is the abandonment that keeps the wound open. Not the one they did to you. The one you learned to do to yourself in response.

"The first person who abandoned you taught you how to abandon yourself. And you have been practicing ever since."

Notice what God does not say in Psalm 27:10. He does not say it will not hurt, and He does not say you will not feel the weight of that leaving. He says that even when the people who were supposed to stay do not, He will receive you. The abandonment of others does not have the final word over your life. But you have to come to Him, and so many of us never come, because we are too busy going back to the people who left, trying to get from them what only He can give.

I want to show you what self-abandonment looks like, because it is far easier to recognize in another woman than in your own mirror.

Self-abandonment is saying yes when your whole body is screaming no. It is shrinking yourself so someone else feels comfortable. It is apologizing for existing in a room. It is going hungry so others can eat, going silent so others can speak, going without so others can have. It is explaining yourself endlessly to people who were never listening. It is staying in places that are costing you your peace because you are more afraid of being alone than you are of being destroyed slowly. It is the eating disorder. It is the work you bury yourself in so you do not have to feel what is underneath, the wine every night you do not really want, the way you say you are fine when you are not fine at all. It is the relationships where you poured until there was nothing left and still kept pouring.

That is what self-abandonment looks like. And it starts, almost always, with someone who left.

The first abandonment

To heal this at the root and not just at the surface, we have to go back further than your story. Further back than any parent, any man, any friend. We have to go back to the garden.

Read Genesis 3 with fresh eyes. The serpent comes and Eve listens, Adam follows, and together they reach for the one thing God had not given them. And the very first thing they do after sin enters is hide from God. They abandoned Him before any human ever abandoned them. Yet God came walking into the garden calling for them, because He wanted to restore them.

This matters, because every human pattern of abandonment since that day is downstream of that first severing. Parents leave, husbands disappear, friends betray, communities fail, because humanity first walked away from the One who never would. Sin is, at its core, abandonment of God. Every horizontal abandonment you have ever suffered is a faint echo of that first vertical one.

The wound of being left by people is real, and we will honor it in this school. But the deepest wound is this. You were created for unbroken communion with God, and you have been living in a world where that communion is fractured. Every other ache traces back to that one.

But God. His answer to abandonment is not consolation. It is adoption.

While we were still sinners. While we were still hiding in the garden, He came for us anyway. He does not require you to clean yourself up before He receives you. He receives you, and the cleaning up is the result of the receiving, not the requirement for it.

Adoption is not a metaphor. It is the legal and spiritual reality of every woman who has come to God through Christ. You were not handed a consolation prize for your earthly losses. You were given a position in the family of God that supersedes every earthly relationship you have ever had. Whatever you lost horizontally, God restores vertically. He is not a substitute for what you lost. He is the original, the Father of whom every earthly relationship was only ever a shadow.

And here is where the work begins. You can be adopted by God and still live like an orphan. The adoption is settled in heaven. The living of it is what we walk out in time, and it breaks down at one specific point, the moment you start abandoning yourself.

Naming it

When someone who was supposed to stay leaves, your nervous system does not process it as their failure. It processes it as evidence. Evidence about you, about your worth, about whether you are the kind of person who gets to be loved and chosen and stayed for.

The brain of a child does not have the capacity to say, "That person had wounds that had nothing to do with me." It says something much simpler and much more dangerous. It says, "If I was enough, they would have stayed."

This is the lie the enemy plants in the wound, and it is a very specific lie. Look at what it does. It takes their failure and turns it into your identity. It takes what they did and converts it into who you are.

The lie that you are not enough, that you are unworthy of being stayed for, that something in you causes people to leave, that is not a truth you discovered. That is a lie you were handed in a moment of pain, and you have been carrying it as if it were yours ever since.

So what do we do with it? We name it.

You must name the abandonment for what it is. Even Jesus, standing in front of the tormented man in the region of the Gerasenes, asked the spirit its name before He cast it out.

Naming came before authority. And this pattern runs all the way back to the beginning. When God brought the animals to Adam in Genesis 2, the first task inside Adam's rule over them was to name them. Naming was part of the dominion. When you name a thing, you have authority over it. Until you name it, it names you.

This is why we do not tiptoe politely around the wound. As long as the abandonment stays vague, a fog lying over your whole life, it operates on you from the dark. The moment you drag it into the light and call it what it is- my father walked out, my mother chose something else, the man I loved discarded me, I have been abandoning myself for twenty years- it stops being your identity and becomes your assignment. You have stopped being the victim of it. You have become the one standing over it with authority.

One more thing here, because I want you to have compassion for yourself. Abandonment and rejection activate the same neural pathways in the brain as physical pain. Science has confirmed what God already knew. When someone left and your heart shattered, your teeth chattered and it felt like it was going to kill you, it was not just some dramatic weakness or drama. That was your body doing exactly what it was designed to do. Your body was not lying. It was trying to protect you, and understanding this is where compassion for yourself begins.

The woman at the well

Let's go to one of the most powerful encounters in the entire Bible. John chapter 4. The woman at the well.

She comes to draw water in the middle of the day. Not in the morning with the other women, but in the heat of noon, when no one else is there. Scholars tell us this was deliberate, because. she was avoiding people. She had been married five times and was now living with a man who was not her husband. In her culture, in her time, she would have been looked at as a woman who could not keep a man. She was a woman who had been left, over and over, until the leaving became her identity.

She comes to the well alone, ashamed, trying to get what she needs without being seen. And Jesus is already there, waiting for her.

She is shocked that He speaks to her at all. A Samaritan and a woman, two categories of person that Jesus, a Jewish rabbi, would have had no cultural reason to address. She had already learned to make herself invisible. She had learned that she did not deserve to be spoken to, let alone seen.

But Jesus does not look past her. He looks directly at her. And He knows everything about her, every man who left, every wound she is carrying, every way she has tried to fill the emptiness with something that could not hold it. And He does not condemn her for any of it. Instead, He offers her living water.

This is what Jesus is saying to her, and to you. You have been going back to the same wells. The same people, the same relationships, the same patterns, the same attempts to fill the void. And every time you drink from those wells you are thirsty again. You are still thirsty not because you are broken, but because those wells were never designed to hold what you are thirsty for.

The abandonment wound keeps reopening because you keep returning to human sources to heal what only God can heal.

The woman at the well left her water jar behind. She did not need it anymore, because she had found something that would never run dry. And then she went back into the town she had been hiding from, and she told everyone she met about the Man who knew everything she had ever done and loved her anyway.

That is what this healing looks like. You stop carrying the jar, and you become the testimony.

There is no nobility in abandoning yourself

Somewhere along the way, so many of us were taught that disappearing for others is holiness. That the good woman is the one who gives until she is gone. I want to dismantle that today, because God did not create you to be the sacrifice. He created us to sacrifice for others, to serve others, and that is a holy calling. He did not create us to be the ones stepped on. There is a difference between laying your life down in love and lying down so people can walk over you, and the enemy has been blurring that difference in women for generations.

When Jesus was asked to name the greatest commandments, He gave two, and the second one carries something we rarely stop to see.

As yourself. The command assumes a self that is loved. You cannot physically give someone something you do not have. If you cannot love yourself, you cannot truly love others, because the love you extend to them is drawn from the same well. A woman who respects herself is able to respect others to that same capability. The measure of care you hold for the vessel God made sets the measure of care you are able to pour out of it.

Above all else. Not above your relationships, not above your reputation, not above making other people comfortable. Above all else, guard your heart. That is not selfishness. That is stewardship.

Because this is the pattern I see everywhere. Someone leaves, and you decide the solution is to give more. You give more, and they still leave, or they stay and take everything you give without returning it. You pour more. Your body starts breaking down and your energy disappears. You call it burnout or depression or exhaustion, but underneath it all is the same girl who decided at some point that her worth was measured by how much she could give before she finally collapsed.

The Bible has an answer for this too. In 1 Kings 19, the prophet Elijah has just done something miraculous for God, and then he sits down under a tree and asks to die. He is utterly depleted. He says, "I have had enough, Lord." And what does God do? He does not rebuke him, and He does not tell him to get up and keep working. He sends an angel to feed him, twice.

God knew that Elijah could not continue from empty, and He knows that you cannot either. Choosing yourself is not a betrayal of others. It is obedience to the God who created the vessel and knows exactly what it needs to keep carrying His purpose.

And I want to be honest with you about what this healing actually looks like, because so much of what we hear about healing is a lie dressed up in aesthetics. Candles and journaling and morning routines are not healing. They can support healing, but they are not it. Real healing is sitting with the pain you have been numbing for years and feeling it for the first time without reaching for the thing that makes it stop. It is saying no for the first time, watching someone be disappointed with you and choosing to survive it. It is choosing yourself in a small way on a Tuesday when no one is watching.

The word translated transformed is metamorphoo in Greek, the same word we get metamorphosis from. A caterpillar does not transform without first going into a dark, enclosed, uncomfortable place. It does not emerge looking the same, and it cannot return to what it was.

Healing is when the little girl inside you, the one who decided she was not enough the day someone walked away, starts to believe something different. Not because someone finally told her she was worthy. Because you, the adult woman, started showing her with your choices. Every time you keep a promise to yourself, your self-worth expands. Every time you choose your peace over someone else's approval, you are sending a message to every wounded part of you that says I am here, I am not leaving and you are safe now.

And if you are reading this at 60 after a lifetime of abandoning yourself, or at 17 still in the middle of it, or at 35 just beginning to understand why your relationships keep breaking apart, hear this. It is not too late. Healing does not have an expiry date.

Not some of the years. The years. Every season that was stolen from you, every year you spent in the wrong place with the wrong people being the wrong version of yourself, God says He can restore it. That is not wishful thinking. That is a covenant promise.

You survived the abandonment. Now it is time to stop re-enacting it on yourself.

You are not the girl who was left behind. You are the woman God receives, and that reception was settled before the foundation of the world.