For years, I told myself a story common to so many women: that someone else—a partner, a job, an achievement, a bank balance—was supposed to provide what I couldn’t give myself. I call this the provider myth. This book is the personal story coupled with clinical insight about of how I discovered my own pernicious dependency and came to live my way out of it. Self-Abandon No More follows my own precarious path through single motherhood, financial insecurity, attending grad school at fifty and the slow work of building a psychotherapy practice. It is a memoire but also a guiding map for any woman who has wondered why she keeps looikning ousdie herself for what only she can give herself.

The singular revelation and boon from my quest —it’s truly my magic sword, “You are the only one you can always count on to never abandon you in any way ever again.”