I’ve recently found myself drawn back into SATC reruns. It’s comforting, I tell myself. The New York City propaganda is homey. The late 90s outfits are nostalgic. But there’s something more to it that I only realized this time around.

When I go back to something old and familiar like a TV show, it usually means there’s a part of me experiencing the same patterns as the characters in the story. This time, it’s Carrie’s blatant self-abandonment and self-betrayal.

Examples for those who haven’t seen the show:

1. Carrie abandons herself to go back to Big (her ex). Many, many times. She knows how much emotional pain he has put her through, how much agony lies behind the curtain, and yet, she runs back to him as often as she can. She blames “fate” for her going back to him. But the pain is so familiar, it’s all she knows. She doesn’t know how to really take care of herself emotionally by choosing a good man. Case in point: she loses Aidan, a loving, loyal, devoted, caring man who is ready to give her the commitment she claims to want, by cheating with Big. When everything falls apart, Big’s wife catches Carrie and leaves Big, and Aidan leaves Carrie, heartbroken, she agonizes about her guilt. The real guilt and the real pain is that she abandoned herself by not protecting herself from pain, and letting someone hurt and use her again and again as Big did.
2. Carrie betrays or endangers herself financially. She is horrible with money and it’s honestly miraculous she doesn’t lose her apartment in the series (she almost did, but she guilted her friend Charlotte into giving her the money to buy it). Carrie has no self-control, which is a sign that she does not know how to protect herself from danger. She spent $40,000 on shoes often using credit cards, but had no savings and no emergency fund. She had one income source (her column) and any other opportunities to advance career-wise, she sabotaged (making her column into a movie) or half-assed (her book deal, modeling, etc). This is self-sabotage.

I’ve written about this topic and my relationship with it twice;

how and why we abandon ourselves

giving your power away: a personal exercise

And, I’ve expressed the realization that most of my anger, guilt, and shame all stem from this self-abandonment thing. Even though I had some breakthroughs with the “inner child” dialoguing practice, I didn’t fully understand it. Not everything was about my younger self, right? It couldn’t be. Except, what the inner child represents is the beginning of self-abandonment. In other words, she is stuck at the age at which I first abandoned myself in order to please or appease someone else. Every time I do it again, she is there, begging for me. She is holding all of the guilt and anger that I consciously project onto others. “I hate him for hurting me!” but the truth underneath is that I (the child) am angry at myself (the adult) for trying to please other people and ending up getting hurt myself. When I feel abandoned by others, my reality is just a mirror of the inner abandonment I mourn against myself.

And yes, it’s technically “not my fault,” because the reason I first abandoned myself was because someone I needed expected me to, and the only way I could win their love that I so desperately needed was to appease them, and the only way to appease them was to abandon myself. As long as we are stuck in the “you did this to me!!” phase of healing, we will never evolve into the “taking personal responsibility” phase and then, the “getting over it” phase. You will never overcome your self-abandonment cycle until you realize that it was you all along who was abandoning yourself. You did what you had to do to survive, but that pattern no longer serves you today. Plus, you probably have a lot of inner anger and grief against yourself for all those years of seeking external validation and people-pleasing. Because that is what people-pleasing is: it’s the external manifestation of self-abandonment.

If you stayed true to yourself, and were focused on self-protection, you would never people please, you would never seek external validation, and you would never ever self-abandon. People who accept and protect themselves as they are don’t do these things. Carrie did, because it was all she knew.