Why do I keep abandoning myself?
Self-abandonment is a learned safety strategy. Somewhere early, staying connected to another person cost you your own position — so your nervous system learned that abandoning yourself was the cheaper price to pay.
How each tradition describes this pattern
Western psychology
Self-abandonment and the fawn response
Clinically this sits close to the fawn response: appeasing to stay safe. A child who could not afford a caregiver's withdrawal learns to read the room faster than they read themselves. Repeated for decades, that becomes a personality — accommodating, attuned to everyone, unable to locate its own preference.
Contemplative traditions
Loss of svadharma
Contemplative traditions describe svadharma as one's own particular nature and obligation — the life that is actually yours to live. Losing it is not a moral failure but a kind of disorientation: acting from another's dharma while your own goes unlived, which is described as productive of far more suffering than difficulty within your own.
Where the two meet
What each account misses alone.
Both describe the same event from different ends. The fawn response explains the mechanism — how self-abandonment was installed. Svadharma explains the cost — what is lost when it runs. Treating only the mechanism produces someone who can set boundaries and still does not know what they want. That is why a Soul Mirror maps the belief and the direction together.
Related questions
The Atlas explains the pattern. A Soul Mirror finds yours.
Reading about a pattern and seeing your own are different events. A Soul Mirror maps your specific architecture from your birth details and your own answers, and arrives within 24 hours.