When You’re Everything to Everyone… But Nothing to Yourself

Are you the strong one? The dependable one? The one who’s always holding it all together… even when you’re falling apart inside?

This episode is for the women who do it all and feel like they’ve lost themselves in the process.

Trauma-informed coach Clare unpacks the emotional weight of being everything to everyone, the silent burnout of emotional labour, and why your nervous system is crying out for boundaries, not burnout.

Expect truth, science, soul, and radical permission to stop abandoning yourself. You’ll learn:

• Why “pushing through” keeps you stuck in survival mode
• The neuroscience behind burnout and boundary collapse
• How emotional labour rewires your brain (and how to undo it)
• What interoception is and why it’s the missing link in your healing
• How to begin reclaiming your needs, your energy, and your self-worth

You don’t have to be everything to everyone.
 You’re allowed to be you.

🌸 Tune in and take the first breath back to yourself.

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🎵 Music by LemonMusicStudio

Transcript

Hello. Welcome back to The Happya Life Podcast. I’m Clare Deacon, and if you’re new here, I’m a trauma-informed coach and nervous system educator, here to walk alongside you as you heal, reset, and reclaim your self-worth one gentle step at a time. And today’s episode… it’s a big one. It’s a mirror. Because if the title alone made something ache a little in your chest, that’s not just a reaction, it’s recognition. That ache is your body saying, “She’s talking about us.”

Let me paint the picture. You’re the capable one. The one everyone leans on. You’re the emotional airbag, the fixer, the go-to person when things fall apart. You remember the birthdays, smooth over the conflicts, carry the mental load of five people, and still make it all look effortless. But inside? Inside, you’re unravelling quietly, maybe even invisibly. Because somewhere along the way, you learned that being valuable meant being needed. That being worthy meant being available. That love was earned through service, sacrifice, and silence.

But here’s the truth you probably haven’t been told enough: That’s not love. That’s emotional survival.

This week, I hit that wall myself. Even with all the healing, all the awareness, all the boundaries I’ve rebuilt, the emotional labour snuck in again. It was a regular day. Nothing dramatic, just the slow erosion of small things: a barrage of messages, people pulling at my energy, expectations that I didn’t agree to but still felt obligated to fulfil. I smiled through it. I coached. I supported. I gave. Until I realized by 3pm… I hadn’t eaten. I hadn’t breathed properly. My jaw was tight. My stomach was a knot. I’d left myself behind. Again.

And what I want you to know is this, even when you’ve done the work, these patterns creep back in. Not because you’re weak, but because they were wired in young. Being everything to everyone isn’t a role you chose; it was a role you were assigned to survive. And that means, neurologically, your body has been rehearsing this performance for decades. So of course you default to over giving. Of course, you forget your needs. That doesn’t make you broken. It makes you human and deeply, beautifully aware if you’re ready to change it.

Let’s bring in some of the science. When we talk about burnout, overwhelm, emotional exhaustion, we’re not just talking about a mental state. We’re talking about a nervous system response. Specifically, prolonged activation of the sympathetic nervous system, the part responsible for fight-or-flight. When you’re constantly anticipating needs, suppressing your own emotions, absorbing tension in relationships, or performing happiness… you’re actually in a low-grade state of survival. And when that continues day after day without repair, your body enters what researchers call allostatic load. That’s the cumulative cost of stress on your brain and body. Your memory gets foggy. Your sleep breaks down. You feel disconnected. You snap, or you go numb. Your body is trying to survive a life that’s out of sync with your truth.

There’s another layer here, something called emotional labour. The sociologist Arlie Hochschild coined the term. It refers to the unseen work involved in managing other people’s emotions: making them feel comfortable, avoiding conflict, softening your truth so no one else feels awkward. And it’s disproportionately carried by women, especially women in caregiving roles, women with trauma histories, and women socialised to equate niceness with safety. Emotional labour isn’t just tiring; it rewires your sense of self. You start to believe that your feelings are a problem to fix, rather than a truth to honour.

What happens then? You get good at disappearing. You become fluent in self-abandonment. You get so used to tuning out your needs that you can’t even feel them anymore. And neuroscience backs this up. People who chronically override their inner experience often have disrupted interoceptive awareness, that’s your ability to sense what’s happening inside your body. Hunger, thirst, fatigue, even emotional cues like sadness or anger, they go offline. So, when I say you’ve been running on empty, I don’t mean metaphorically. I mean your brain literally stopped noticing what you needed. And that’s terrifying. Because you can’t meet needs you don’t even register.

But here’s the good news: you can rebuild that connection. You can repair it. Gently. You can rewire safety in your body so that it becomes possible to pause, to say no, to take up space, and not feel guilt, but relief.

So how do we start?

We don’t start by fixing. We don’t start by doing more. We start by noticing. The next time you say yes, pause. Was that yes from your truth or from your fear? The next time you feel resentment build in your chest, ask yourself, “What boundary didn’t I honour?” The next time you realise you haven’t eaten, haven’t breathed, haven’t even checked in with yourself all day, don’t scold yourself. Celebrate that you noticed. That’s step one. That’s everything.

And I want you to hear this part loud and clear: Boundaries are not walls to push people away. Boundaries are bridges to bring you back home to yourself. They are the way we declare, “I exist. My energy is not infinite. My worth is not tied to how much I produce or how little I complain.”

You don’t need to become someone else to be okay. You don’t need to perform calm or curate your pain or earn your rest. You are already worthy of gentleness. Of being met. Of taking up space without justification.

And if you’re worried that saying no will make people upset, they might be. And that’s okay. Other people’s discomfort is not your responsibility. Your only job is to stay in integrity with yourself. Because when you do that, something magical happens you stop betraying yourself for breadcrumbs of approval. You stop performing peace while your body burns out. You stop living in survival and you start to bloom.

You’re not here to be everything to everyone. You’re here to be you, fully, freely, fiercely.

And I know it’s scary to put yourself first when you’ve been taught that love is conditional. But let me reframe it for you. This isn’t selfish. This is sacred. This is reparenting. This is nervous system repair. This is reclaiming the parts of you that were never nurtured, never mirrored, never allowed.

So today, just try this: One moment of noticing. One conscious breath. One choice to pause. One gentle no. And if that’s all you do? That’s enough. That’s massive.

And if this episode stirred something in you, I want you to know this:
 You’re not alone.
 So many women are walking through life like this, burned out from being good, exhausted from being useful, aching for space they’ve never been given permission to take.

So let this be your permission.
 Let this be the moment where you stop waiting for someone else to choose you… and start choosing yourself.

I’ve got more to share with you over the coming weeks gentle, grounded, soul-led guidance to help you reconnect with your needs, your body, your boundaries. But not today.

Today… just let yourself feel it.
 Let it land.
 Let your body know you’re listening now.

You are allowed to be more than a role. More than your usefulness. More than the strong one. You are allowed to exist, simply because you do.

Thanks for being here with me today. I’m proud of you. Truly.
 Share this with someone who needs it. Save it for yourself. And if it resonated, leave a review. I always love hearing what moved you.

Until next time… be kind to yourself. You’re not here to survive. You’re here to bloom.