Healing Your Relationships: The Cost Of Self-Abandonment

In our last episode,

We talked about the difference between true caring and codependency.

And I've been inviting you into a place of compassionate awareness and to really looking and seeing where in your life you might be abandoning yourself.

And that conversation naturally leads us to something deeper,

Which is why this matters.

And what costs are you paying in your life when you are living from this survival,

Trauma response behavior?

Because so often,

Your patterns of codependency just feel normal.

That you become so used to shapeshifting,

Caretaking,

Silencing yourself,

Walling off.

That you forget that there's a cost and a weight you're carrying from that.

That it's manifesting in your body,

In your mind,

And in your spirit.

And my teacher,

Don Jose Ruiz,

Always says,

Once you wake up,

You can never go back to sleep.

And when you don't see the costs,

When you refuse to look at it,

When you want to make excuses like,

I'm just strong,

I'm just nice,

I'm easygoing.

But underneath,

You're carrying resentment,

Anger,

Exhaustion,

Loneliness,

And a quiet ache for something more that's going to manifest.

And so today I invite you into a place of compassionate observation and awareness.

At what cost is the question that you're asking yourself?

And we're going to name those costs,

Not to judge and not to victimize,

But because seeing this truth is the first step,

This is awareness.

Awareness leads to perception shifts,

And we must have a perception shift.

And when you realize that so many of the symptoms that you're feeling are tied to something sacred inside of you that you're sacrificing,

You can't unsee that.

And it can feel scary and like,

What am I going to do with this?

But don't worry,

Because I'm here for you.

We take this work a step at a time.

So let's talk about emotional tolls,

And these might feel like the most obvious,

But you might not even realize that some of these emotions are actually coming from codependent patterns in your life.

Chronic resentment.

Chronic resentment can often show up more in denial and control pattern codependence.

People who wall off and judge other people.

A lot of times that behavior is because they're judging themselves so harshly that they're actually angry and resentful at themselves.

And so they project that onto others to keep them safe because the pain of being with vulnerability or pain is too painful.

So chronic resentment,

People might be silent screamers,

Might put this perfect happy face onto the world,

Shape shift,

Do what they need to do,

And then come home and be so angry,

So resentful,

Talking under their breath,

Or maybe complaining or sharing their experience with someone else,

But they're not going to let the other person see it.

So they're suppressing and repressing their chronic emotion of anger,

Even if they know that they're getting it out a little bit.

Then there's the screamer who's not so silent.

That's always angry and always resentful.

So what are you sacrificing when you're living in chronic resentment?

Well,

A lot of times you're sacrificing your truth,

Your boundaries for those anxious attachment people that keep saying yes when they want to say no.

Every single time you're dishonest with yourself,

You're chipping away your own inner clarity at your own inner truth.

It's no wonder you can't trust yourself if you're constantly living for other people.

And if you're constantly saying yes when you want to say no,

Then you might be tangled in these relationships where you feel unseen and unvalued.

How can you feel seen and valued by someone else if you can't see and value yourself?

What you're sacrificing when you wall off and you use your anger and resentment to keep you safe,

You're sacrificing intimacy,

You're sacrificing true connection,

You're sacrificing love,

You're sacrificing allowing yourself to be loved by other people.

And it's very lonely.

Anxiety and hypervigilance.

Everyone is struggling with anxiety.

Everyone is on medication and everyone uses something to soothe themselves.

Anxiety is rampant,

Especially with women.

And please remember,

I'm not a doctor or a therapist or psychologist.

I'm not giving you medical advice.

I'm asking you to explore if your anxiety could be coming from codependent patterns and could changing these patterns help relieve you of the anxiety that's coming in your day to day.

It's just a curious question that you're asking yourself.

Hyper awareness and anxiety keeps us in a place of exhaustion.

When we're constantly in a place of shape-shifting and trying to gauge what other people want from us,

Performing,

Then analyzing whether or not it was received well,

How can you possibly be comfortable in your mind and body and spirit when you're so hyper aware and obsessed with everyone else and what their experience is?

So much anxiety comes from caring about what other people think of us,

Which is so wild because I remember someone told me once,

Marie said,

Nobody is thinking of you as much as they think of themselves.

In the same way that you're obsessed or afraid of what someone else is thinking of you,

They're probably just thinking of their own self.

And if they are judging you,

There's a good chance they judge themselves for the same thing.

We sacrifice so much inner peace when we lose the ability to just rest and be present in our own skin.

And to simply trust ourselves.

And that is the scariest thing.

I think I might have said this in the other episode,

But I'm going to say it again.

That Don Miguel Ruiz says,

There's nothing scarier than being yourself.

That being yourself is one of the scariest things that you can do.

And it takes a lot of courage to say,

Screw it,

I'm going to practice being myself today and deal with that discomfort.

Because hello,

Surprise,

Look at all the discomfort that you're already feeling anyway,

Not being yourself.

Right?

Feeling invisible.

So many people silence their voice.

They stay quiet.

They stay in the background.

It's safer not to be seen.

I don't need to share my opinion.

You might feel like you have a real you that no one gets to see.

Or you might not even know who that is because you've been staying silent for so long and just going with the flow.

When you become the person that other people expect or want you to be instead of who you truly are.

And what you're sacrificing is your authenticity.

You're sacrificing your right to take up space.

You're sacrificing being seen and heard.

You are disappearing.

That is emotionally very painful.

That can lead to depression and apathy.

That doesn't help you feel like you have a lot of energy or vitality to go out in the world to explore and to create.

When you stay so quiet and so small in the external world,

There's a good chance that's happening when you're alone.

And often that type of invisibility can also lead to feeling emotionally numb.

Like it's just safer to just feel disconnected.

Because it's too overwhelming now to feel connected to my emotions or connected to other people or even acknowledging or digging in to your truth.

So I'm just gonna check out.

A lot of people can do this with drugs and alcohol and TV and porn.

There's a lot of things that help sustain that.

And a lot of times people don't even know that's what's happening.

Oh,

I'm just relaxing.

Oh,

This is normal.

Oh,

I've been doing this since I was 15.

Oh,

I'm,

You know,

All these addictions that we have.

My therapist said to me that when people seek a frictionless life,

They want to stay safe.

They don't want to experience any friction or discomfort.

So they keep their worlds very small.

This is a codependent behavior.

Because it means that someone really can't handle being in the reality of a world in a life that has friction,

That has the whole spectrum of emotions and experiences.

And when we don't allow ourselves to experience life to its fullest.

And if you try to keep yourself in a place of safety,

You're blocking out so much life and vitality and excitement and joy and possibility and exploration.

And on the other end of the spectrum,

You could be seeking so much dopamine all the time because it's uncomfortable to be with yourself,

To be in silence,

To be in intimacy,

To be in the quiet of who you are.

And so you keep yourself super busy,

Constantly helping others,

Constantly just seeking that next dopamine hit.

All right,

It's time to go.

Let's go.

Okay,

I get it.

I don't need to talk about it.

I understand.

Okay,

I'll do different.

And you move with that energy on the other end of the spectrum.

And that can be exhausting.

It's like chasing something that you're not ever going to get or catch up to.

And you're sacrificing peace and being with yourself.

You might find yourself feeling a deep confusion about what you want,

Who you are,

Who is the authentic self.

Marisa,

How can I return to my authentic self if I don't even know who they are?

And that's going to be in the next episode.

Sadness,

Melancholy,

Grief,

Anger,

Rage,

Anxiety,

Fear,

Apathy.

What emotions do you feel most in your life right now?

And you can notice that there's different areas of your life where you might feel like joy.

Like,

Oh,

With my friends,

I feel comfortable being with myself,

With my students,

With my partner.

And then in this other area of life,

I feel like absolutely no way.

Every time I get up in the morning and I'm driving to work,

I'm just frozen.

Or I'm depressed or I'm anxious.

I can't wait to have a drink.

Now,

There's no way that our bodies are not paying the price for the emotional costs.

I personally believe that our trauma lives in our bodies.

And I believe that every physical symptom we have is connected to something deeper in our lives.

And my own personal experience was feeling healthy,

Energetic,

A lot of life and vitality.

And then coming into a place of such physical illness and sickness and digestive issues and going to the doctor and getting just things that never,

I never had to worry about on a regular basis.

And for years,

I was like,

What is happening?

Is this about getting older?

I didn't really understand.

And I not one time thought this was before I really moved into somatic work and moved into the body.

It never occurred to me that all of this could be happening because of all of the emotional symptoms that I was experiencing from self abandonment and codependent behaviors inside of my relationship.

So here are some things to ask yourself if you're feeling or experiencing in your life.

And you're going to ask yourself if you could see or feel how they could be tied to codependent behavior and self abandonment.

I'm not here to tell you they are for you because I don't know your medical history and I don't know your physical body.

This is just an invitation for you to check it.

So chronic fatigue,

Like are you feeling a constant state of exhaustion?

Like you're carrying the weight of the world because maybe you are carrying the weight of other people in your lives.

And maybe you have a story like I have to because nobody else can do it.

That's one of those control patterns.

If you are always focused on keeping other people happy,

Other people safe,

And there's no fuel left for yourself,

Then you might feel that chronic fatigue,

That emotional drainage or the drama that every day you find yourself calling someone and telling them the story of what happened today and how you had to show up for this person and you had to do this and you had to do that.

And then you call someone else because you need to tell them the same thing.

So not only are you living in all the pain that comes with self-sacrifice,

But then you're sharing it with other people and it's just this constant exhaustion energetically and emotionally and spiritually.

Could that be a part of your fatigue?

Is your codependent behavior?

Hypervigilance.

If you're trying to keep yourself safe all the time by shifting your behavior and looking at other people,

That's exhausting.

How can you have any energy or vitality for yourself if there's no room for yourself?

Physical tension,

Tightness,

Headaches,

Jaw pain,

Clenching at night,

Not being able to sleep as if your body is always bracing,

Bracing for something to go wrong.

And when you're sacrificing a sense of safety and ease in your own body,

For me,

I wasn't feeling safe in my body.

I was having all this physical tension and all this chronic fatigue because of my hyper awareness around the person that I was living with.

My safety became reliant upon them.

I was orienting myself and regulating myself based on someone else's behavior.

That doesn't work.

Especially when their behavior I'm perceiving is negative or unloving or unkind or their energy and so I'm in fear and fight or flight.

How can I orient myself to that?

That's like I'm just waiting for somebody to be kind or be loving so I can feel loving.

I'm waiting for them to be happy so I can feel safe in my home or safe with myself.

My body becomes like a battlefield for this hyper vigilance,

Not a sanctuary.

I had no sense of my body even being a part of this equation because I wasn't in awareness yet.

I didn't really understand.

I was just in a hyper vigilant state of self protection.

And when you're not in a natural flow,

In my experience,

If I'm not in a natural flow,

How can my physical internal organs and digestive system and gut be in flow?

Because my gut health was horrible.

It was frightening.

And I didn't know when it started.

Started when I moved in with someone.

So I didn't know where it was starting,

But at that stage,

I was just so focused on fixing them so I wouldn't feel this way.

If I could fix them,

Then I wouldn't have these issues.

I didn't realize I could fix myself.

I didn't realize that I could come into a place of love and understanding and patience and kindness with myself,

Even if the person I was living with wasn't feeling that way towards me.

I didn't have the tools to do that yet.

So I was just waiting.

My sleep was suffering.

This is a big one for anyone who struggles with obsessive thoughts or replaying what happened or what you wish you could say or what you're going to say in therapy the next day.

That hyper vigilance can come in that night time where we're just laying there and we're quiet and we're with ourselves and we're not distracted by TV or the phone.

How could we possibly rest?

How are we having any time for restoration?

And without having that,

Are we ever restoring ourselves?

Are we ever really receiving?

Or is it just this constant uphill battle?

This constant,

Okay,

Now we're going to go into the next day and it's going to be exactly the same.

And the poor body is holding all of this for us.

And what I didn't know at the time that we're going to talk about and what we kind of talked about in terms of understanding when we're in codependency and true caring,

Are we in a trauma response?

Does this feel like it's coming from anxiety or fear?

Does it feel like it's coming from peace and love?

Is that the body can be our greatest ally?

And it often feels like a problem that we need to fix when really the body is saying,

Hey,

I need you to heal your mind and spirit.

All these things that you're taking for your gut health or to be able to go to the restroom or to be able to go to sleep,

That's great,

But we're not healing why this is such a struggle for you right now.

So the body is saying,

Hey,

Please tune in to your mind and your spirit.

I'm a spiritual person.

All the work I do is spiritual in nature.

Whatever you believe is absolutely welcome here.

You don't have to be spiritual to heal your codependency.

I personally find a lot of joy and love and purpose in my life from believing that I am a spiritual being and I am divine and that my journey is remembering my divinity and my spirit and that life force that I was born with before I had knowledge,

Before I could talk to myself,

Before I had domestication,

Before I had society of origin,

Family of origin,

I was life,

An opportunity to live on this planet,

To experience love,

So much love that I would experience grief,

To experience the desire to be alive so I would experience fear.

When I'm in the macro,

When I pull myself out of my day-to-day in the mundane and I can see how much more powerful it is to live in a remembrance of my divinity,

I'm not obsessed with the micro as much.

There's no time to be afraid.

There's no time to not live.

I have one life,

Is this version of me anyway.

Why am I wasting it in self-obsession over other people,

Especially people that like I might never even see in 10 years from now around my deathbed,

I'm sure not going to care.

Each spiritual symptom to me signals a sacred connection that's been sacrificed.

So if you're feeling empty,

Like nothing really touches your heart,

You could be sacrificing a connection to purpose,

Sacred purpose,

Divine meaning.

If you feel cut off from your own intuition or your inner wisdom,

You're sacrificing your own soul's voice.

If you're not feeling worthy,

That you're worth knowing,

You're worth speaking,

You're worth trying,

You're sacrificing this deep knowing that you're inherently and divinely worthy of love and being seen.

Every single person is.

If you're like,

I believe in spirit,

But I don't really feel connected to anything,

Or I believe in God or I believe in nature,

I believe in all these things,

But I don't feel connected to any of it.

You sacrifice a sense that you are a part of something greater,

Larger,

Sacred,

And loving.

Whether you know it or not,

Or you think it's spiritual or not,

There is most likely a quiet ache that you want something more.

And when I think of the simplest definition of spirit,

Love,

The energy of love,

Look at what is created from love.

Look at what has been created in our world from the energy of love.

Look at relationships that thrive in the name of love.

Healing our relationships is coming to a place of love for ourselves.

The spiritual sacrifice is love and being disconnected from love is incredibly painful.

Whether somebody realizes or not,

Whether somebody thinks they're keeping themselves safe,

So they reject love,

Or whether you use love as a tool to fill you when you're saying,

Hey,

I need your love.

I need you to love me.

I need you to fill this void.

I need you to affirm me.

You're cutting yourself off from the source of your own love.

We can source our own love.

And when we source our own love and we live from love for ourselves,

Then everything in our external world will change because we will stop showing up from a place of fear.

We will stop taking the bare minimum.

We will stop pushing people away because they can feel that we're asking them to source us.

And these are the relational costs because each relational symptom reflects something sacred that we're giving up.

So attracting one-sided relationships,

If you keep attracting partners or friends who take more than they give,

You're sacrificing true reciprocity in love.

If you stay in relationships that drain you because the idea of feeling alone is just so terrifying,

Then you're sacrificing your freedom and the possibility for genuine connection with someone.

When you struggle with boundaries because you're afraid it'll push people away,

Or they're not going to like what you have to say,

Or they're going to turn it around on you,

Make you the bad guy.

You're sacrificing your own sovereignty and your own safety.

When you choose loneliness despite company because you want that frictionless life,

You're sacrificing true intimacy and being loved for who you are.

So the tragedy is,

Is the people who would really love to love you might never get to meet you.

And a greater tragedy is you might not get to meet you.

When I came into this work at 23 years old,

Not wanting to live anymore,

Hating myself,

So uncomfortable in my body,

Not understanding,

Not feeling connected.

When I was seven years sober and still struggling with disaster mind and anxiety and fear and not understanding why I could be doing all this work and I still wasn't safe in my body and I still wasn't safe to be my authentic self and I still didn't know who I was or why I was here.

When I found myself in my late 30s struggling with this codependency and once again realizing and coming to in a place of awareness that while I was growing and I liked myself and I was trying to like be myself and I was on this journey,

I was still self abandoning.

I never thought in a million years I would get to a place where I deeply love and revere myself.

I couldn't even fathom what that would feel like.

I think maybe because I thought it would be this place of perfection.

I didn't realize that unconditional love means loving myself through all of my human experience,

My grief,

My anxiety,

My fear,

My sadness,

My insecurity.

Being patient with myself if I found myself in a relationship that still wasn't serving but I was still doing it.

Being patient with myself when I noticed I was still engaging in codependent behavior,

Trusting myself that I don't have to fix everything today or change everything today because I trust myself and I trust my higher power and I trust spirit.

Why?

Because I'm connected.

I'm connected because my relationship to myself,

My relationship to source,

My relationship to love is more important than my relationship to a partner.

It's more important than being seen by you as perfect or lovable or right or worthy.

It's from realizing that it's not conceded to love yourself.

It's a basic human right.

If somebody would have told me it was going to take 17 or 18 years to get to this place,

There's a good chance I probably never would have done the work.

That would seem nearly impossible.

But every single part of my journey was imperative to getting to this place in the same way that every single part of your journey is imperative.

Because what you're doing is you are seeking and finding your authentic self and that doesn't happen overnight.

Your authentic self is love,

Is life force.

How you choose to live inside of those energies is going to be up to you.

But if you don't ever give yourself the opportunity to seek it,

You're not going to find it.

And what most people need and why I do this work is they need someone to help them walk through the fires and the painful pieces and parts that this work requires because it's not always comfortable healing trauma,

Digging in,

Doing the hard thing,

Living with awareness.

And a lot of people won't get there.

In this lifetime,

It's not part of their journey.

They might never really be able to receive or know love because they don't come into a place where they can know and love themselves.

But what I do know is that my parents' generation didn't have as many tools as we do today.

They weren't talking about trauma.

They weren't talking about codependency.

There weren't tools.

There wasn't a safe space.

We do live in a society where it's safe to talk about our feelings,

To ask for help,

To go to therapy,

To try these somatic healing practices like EMDR and neurofeedback therapy.

I think we're also learning that life experience is powerful.

And there are so many people out there that are committed to doing their inner work and they share that inner work to inspire.

The help is available.

You just have to say yes to yourself.

So I want to give you some practices or writing prompts or things for you to think about.

If you could just choose,

You could start with one area of your life,

The emotional,

The physical,

The spiritual,

Or the relational.

And just gently ask yourself,

Where do I feel the costs?

Where do I feel the cost of leaving myself behind?

Where do I feel the cost of staying emotionally unavailable and walled off?

And if I am experiencing pain or discomfort in my physical body,

You know,

What could that be telling me?

Can I go back and kind of see like,

When did this start for me?

Could it be related to my codependent patterns?

Seeing the cost is often what wakes us up and helps us come into a place of awareness.

And then after that,

There could be this fear,

This question of like,

Wow,

Who am I with even out these patterns?

This is scary.

I call this the in-between.

And it can be really uncomfortable.

It was uncomfortable for me.

I didn't know how to authentically sound when I set a boundary.

I sounded like a robot.

So it's really normal to go,

Wow,

What do I want?

And who am I without these roles?

And is there a real me underneath it all?

And we're going to talk about that in the next episode about discovering your authentic self beneath these layers of survival and remembering who you are at your core,

Which like I said before,

Is I really believe it's love.

It's divinity.

It's this energy of life force that you are sacred.

You are powerful.

You are utterly unique.

And when we can learn to love and appreciate that about ourselves while also holding ourselves accountable,

While also being in a place of radical self-honesty,

While also being in love and patience and kindness towards other people,

At least having that intention because you're not going to do it perfectly.

I do not do it perfectly.

I really want to name that for you.

I don't do any of this perfectly.

There's no such thing.

It's a practice.

It's a way of life.

I still get angry.

I still engage in codependent patterns sometimes,

But I'm aware.

And even more importantly is I love myself.

I know how to hold myself accountable and I know how to love myself through it.

And that is what is on the other side of this is that you are going to love yourself.

You are going to see your worth.

You are going to know your value.

You will be able to trust yourself.

I really believe that it is a human right to be in a place of love for ourselves.

There's just a lot of muck you're going to have to clear and it's going to require you to go deeper.

It's probably going to require you to potentially see a therapist,

To do some trauma work,

To change your diet,

To start moving your body,

To start putting down the things that you're ingesting that aren't good for you.

It's going to require sacrifice and it's going to require hard work.

But I promise you that it's worth it.

I promise you that you are worth it.

We are far more resilient than we know we are.

So keep hanging on.

Ask for help when you need it.

I love you.

I'm proud of you.

And I'll see you on the other side.