And What Else?

Letting go of 'I have to do it or no-one will'

• Wendy O'Beirne (The Completion Coach)

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What if your worth isn't just tied to how much you can do for others? Join me as we unravel the belief that we must keep everything together or risk it all falling apart. This episode explores how childhood experiences with unreliable or emotionally unavailable parents might have shaped this narrative, pushing many into taking on too much responsibility too soon. Learn how this overwhelming sense of duty can lead to exhaustion and loneliness, and discover how we can begin to open up, delegate, and rebuild trust in others. By questioning the origins of these beliefs, we aim to let go of over-responsibility, realising that our value extends beyond our actions alone.

In a world that equates vulnerability with weakness, we emphasise the power of embracing emotional openness. This episode challenges the misconception that vulnerability is merely performative, while highlighting the adverse effects of hyper-independence, such as emotional guarding and isolation. We discuss the journey of moving away from over-functioning, inviting more joy and connection into our lives. Finally, we touch on the transformative process of rewiring deep-seated beliefs with the aid of therapists or coaches to escape the productivity trap. As we set the stage for our next conversation, consider sharing this insight with someone who might benefit from breaking free from survival mode.

If you've enjoyed this episode, please leave me a review and subscribe! And if you want to learn more from me, come and say hello on Instagram @thecompletioncoach or via email at wendy@thecompletioncoach.co.uk or find out more about working with me on my website, thecompletioncoach.co.uk.

Speaker 1:

Welcome to, and what Else, the podcast with me, wendy O'Byrne, also known as the Completion Coach, and today we're going to dive in, dive into something that might feel a bit sticky, but it's a belief that I guarantee many of you will have wrestled with, and that's the belief if I don't hold it all together, no one will. If I don't hold it all together, no one will. If I don't hold it all together, no one will. And this isn't just about being busy and it's not just about your productivity, which is going to be another podcast in itself but it is that inner feeling of carrying the weight of the world on your shoulders, of being the emotional rock, the one everyone turns to, the one who is quietly internally screaming who's going to help me. And we're going to have a look at where this belief comes from, together with the payoffs and the costs of holding on to it and, most importantly, how you can start letting go so that your life won't fall apart. I mean, the chances are you haven't just got a really random belief on this. There will have been experiences that created this mechanism within you, a survival mechanism. It's likely in childhood.

Speaker 1:

And, in reality, most of the people that I work with had unreliable, emotionally unavailable parenting, and they learned at a really early age that nobody was really going to step in. These people became what I'd say were little adults. So they matured internally with a level of responsibility at quite a young age, and that responsibility would have been to keep their emotions in check to avoid rocking the boat at any time. I think that would be the primary one my clients would say. They learn to keep their emotions in check to avoid rocking the boat. And so this emotional abandonment of yourself, of others abandoning you in some way, and it does tend to form the belief if I don't depend on anybody, I can't be let down, if I don't do it, it won't get done, and it fundamentally makes you believe that you have to be constantly on the go. And these are really protective patterns, because it is doing its best to protect you from feeling unloved, unworthy, all of the things that we're doing to avoid feeling.

Speaker 1:

But it's also what's exhausting you. This is where burnout gets its roots, from this very idea. But look, there's payoffs to everything. So what is the payoff to you? Believing that it's all down to you. If you don't do it, nobody will. It is a feeling of control, because you know your capability, you know what you will do, you know that you don't let anything slip through the cracks. You're a perfectionist. You're getting on, you're doing it. You probably take quite a lot of pride in being the rock at the person who can keep everything together and in it has served you in some ways, whether or not that's been an advancement in career, whether or not that's been, you know, some way or other that has felt rewarding at the same time as exhausting.

Speaker 1:

There is always a cost, and the cost of holding it all together is that you're always holding it together. That is the main cost. You carry the emotional labor, the physical responsibilities, the mental load, not just for yourself but primarily for other people, and that's draining. Worst of all, that's lonely and it leaves little to no room for you to feel held, supported or like you can rely on somebody else, you can let go, you can pull it down. So there's an over-responsibility and guilt that comes if you can't do something.

Speaker 1:

And the trickiest part is this belief reinforces itself because the more you take on, the more people come to expect from you. You can't, or feel like you can't, give others a chance to step up and into it, because you're used to stepping in first and when you do let something go and someone drops the ball, it confirms the story which then reinforces. I have to handle it. I want you now just to. If you're listening to this and you can close your eyes and take a really big breath into the body, just bring yourself into the body. And when you're thinking about over-responsibility and abandonment, I'd love you to ask your body not your mind, but your body. Where do I feel the heaviness of holding everything and everyone together? Where do I feel the heaviness of holding everyone and everything together? Just breathe, just notice where it is and allow that to soften a little, just acknowledge it and in that belief, if you don't hold it together, no one will. I want you just to think about when was the first time I felt like I couldn't trust anyone to show up for me and what did I decide about myself or the world because of that experience? Because what this is doing is also pulling your internal energy out of whack highly masculine energy, but it's wounded, it's not healthy masculine energy, it's really wounded.

Speaker 1:

Over identifying with wounded, over-identifying with doing, holding, protecting, fixing, and the very idea of trust and receiving probably feels quite unsafe to you in one way or another right now. Learning how to create trust with people is the key here, so it's not necessarily just about doing less or asking for more. It's about how you build trust with people, and that will require you to open up to people, to share more of yourself, to trust people with you. With more of you, you allow other people then to start to make decisions, to allow people to do things, to step in, and you stay out and just notice how that reacts in the body. When you don't dive in to rescue first, to fix first.

Speaker 1:

When you let somebody else step into that role, what does it create in the body and what force does it give you? Do you think that you'll be replaced, that you won't be valued as much now, that you'll be less needed, less wanted, less loved? And how can you hold yourself through that, knowing that it's not true, that your role here is not what you give, your role here is not what you can overgive, and actually your role here is not what you can overgive, and actually what it's creating is a cycle where you are being less authentic. I hate these buzzwords now because of the coaching industry online using them in such a way, but less of the true you, less of the true you, and you're masking yourself to belong, to be wanted to, to be needed. So it's creating this internal conflict with who you want to be, who you are at your core and who you have to be which is exhausting.

Speaker 1:

But it's also, you know, we all crave connection. We talk about community, but what we're talking about in some way is connection where we feel deeply connected to people, to ourselves, to our voices, to what we're doing, to what we're saying, and connection requires us to be more honest and open and true, authentic. And in doing so and in bringing that to the table, we create deeper connections. When we create deeper connection, we feel as if our life has more purpose than the things that we do, because those deep connections make us feel alive. Those connections to people, places and things give it more value. And when there is more value in your life, more value in your life that feels like you're living on purpose, value in your lie that feels like you're living on purpose, most people who are chasing a purpose still believe it's something that they will do that adds value to them, and so it's just another way to chase that external validation on something that's not necessarily true or something that proves that you're good enough.

Speaker 1:

So the reality of being more open and true about who you are with people, building connection, adding more value to your life, means that you're creating trust, you're microdosing trust and in doing that, in doing that, you're starting to trust yourself a little bit more with yourself and you're creating trust with other people. And as we do that, we can create more trust to soften a little and not have to be this hard exterior can do it all, get by with it all, got it all together shell, because then we start co-creating dynamics, just in our work, in our teams, in our friendship groups, in our relationships, where we're not the container, we're in it with people. We're connecting with people. We're not holding the shit together for everybody and holding ourselves together in a way that doesn't let us soften ever. Because when you do feel like the one that's holding everything together at work, in friendships, in relationships, then you end up feeling overwhelmed and you become more distant. The thing that you desire from this overdoing and overproductivity is more connection. You want to feel more worth, more value, more love, and what it's doing is creating overwhelm and distance. So we really have to soften, because in softening we start to receive more value, more love, more connection, more intimacy, more desire, and in doing that, we can soften the power dynamics as well. Not that if I drop everything and let somebody else take over, but it is. I am allowed to be cared for, I am allowed to receive, I am allowed to rest, and it starts to build trust with yourself and others in a different way, because it stops looking for proof that people will let you down. There's a couple of questions that I would have shared on Instagram this week already. But what part of you feels safer expecting disappointment, and what part of you withholds trust to avoid vulnerability?

Speaker 1:

And doing this work, dealing with our shadows, looking at what's leading our behavior, understanding why we operate the way that we operate isn't just about sitting with heavy emotions or going in and having these big moments, but it's primarily and importantly about remembering how to feel lightness, pleasure and joy, how to experience more lightness, pleasure and joy, because that's the part you've forgotten, that's the part you push away as to roll over to another day, that's the part that you think isn't available to you until you've done all of these things. That's keeping you going and going and going. So we always want to figure out and look in how we can create the safety to enable ourselves to let go of the need of this control, which is an instinct to protect yourself from pain or chaos, which is an instinct to protect yourself from pain or chaos. But the more that you're working this way, the more that you are sitting in your fight or flight state, which means that you can't relax because you're hypervigilant and the one thing that you don't do is get into your body because you spend so much time in your head, because that's where safety has primarily come from for you. So, really understanding yourself with compassion, moving away from the belief that you have to do it all, and understanding that's going to stem from early experiences of your needs being unseen or unmet and I would put money on them being unseen which led them to being unmet.

Speaker 1:

And when we feel unseen, it is that root of loneliness in childhood. But all of this becomes to unconsciously run your life. You learn it's your job to hold it all together. You fear what will happen if you don't hold it all together and fundamentally, you will have within you somewhere a big doubt around trust and being able to trust other people. And trusting other people can feel terrifying when you've been let down repeatedly, especially when you've been let down repeatedly, especially when you've been let down in ways that other people think are totally acceptable. The trust, much like everything else, is not all or nothing. It's not all or nothing. This isn't throw everything out of the window, surrender and just trust everybody. This is about how you grow trust in small, intentional ways.

Speaker 1:

I use the term microdosing. Microdosing trust, you know, starting with some low-stake stuff, building up your tolerance and your capacity and building out to the bigger stuff. Let's not do all or nothing in anything that we're looking to change Bare minimum. Building up, creating capacity. That's how you communicate to yourself, to other people. It's looking at the words that you use, the proof that you're looking for. It's explaining how to connect with people, which means that you're going to have to connect with yourself in a way that you've been avoiding, and it's really letting yourself be vulnerable, truly vulnerable, which isn't for anybody else, it's for you. It's not for anybody else, it is for you.

Speaker 1:

Vulnerability is not performative, and I know that you think it is because, when you see it, you think it's performative. So I want you to really dig into that, like how can I be vulnerable with myself and allow myself to experience my body, my emotions, these sensations that are coming up, and to really process and experience them so that I can then start to build upon my capacity to change, to acknowledge them, first of all, and then to go on to change them, because you do deserve more joy, more fun, more ease, more connection, more grace, and to move away from being the expected one to pick up the pieces to do it, expected one to pick up the pieces to do it. You know there's independence, which is I can do it. It's like knowing I can do that. Two, I have to do that.

Speaker 1:

I'm self-reliant, rely on nobody. It's moving away from the risk of being let down and allowing that to be the case. There will be different levels of expectations and sometimes our expectations are too high when other people have had really high expectations of us at a time when it wasn't fair. So their expectations were too high on us at a young age. But don't let the risk of being let down become, don't rely on anyone and don't use the avoidance of vulnerability to keep your trust story the way that it is because, in reality, you carry the constant emotional burden of yourself and others silently.

Speaker 1:

You feel isolated, even in relationships, because true connection requires you both in it, requires you both in it and you are burning out from over-giving and under-receiving. So you're resentful. So it's proving it's not working and yet we continue to use it over and over again because it becomes more and more self-fulfilling, because it becomes more and more self-fulfilling. But the more you over-function in your role in relationships, just taking on more than your fair share, it just reinforces. If I don't do it, no one will, and it's going to leave you unconsciously aligning with people that love to take advantage of that or people that are able to be unreliable, because it doesn't matter, you'll pick it up and it's going to give you a confirmation bias. So it's going to completely cut out where people did want to step in, could have helped out, would have done it, because you're not opening up the space for that to even happen. So you're focusing purely on the letdowns.

Speaker 1:

You know, and this belief manifests as hyper independence, which isn't independent. It's hyper independent. It's struggling to delegate. You can't ask for help because you can't trust others to follow through. Self-reliance is the only thing that you know, because nothing else, nothing else, is possible. It creates emotional guarding because you can't fully open up. You stay in an avoidant sense to yourself because vulnerability feels weak, because it feels unsafe, and when something's unsafe unsafe, it feels weak and it makes you overly responsible. So you take on too much, whether that's emotional, mental or physical labor in relationships, friendships or work, you know which leaves you feeling exhausted and resentful. It creates this shadow that, no matter what you're saying about what you want, you're frustrated because you think you can't have it. But in reality your driving behavior is creating that story on repeat.

Speaker 1:

I know that you secretly wish someone would take the lead step in, you could lean on somebody, you could be looked after by somebody, you could be held by somebody off. I know there's a deep craving for that and I also know that it probably gives you the ick, because our icks fundamentally come down into the parts of rejection, and that rejection here will be based on the idea that it's not going to be safe and you don't want to do that, because if you do that, you know you'll be weak, it will go wrong and it will just prove that you can't rely on anybody. If you've been around here long enough, you know by now that I don't think we can change the mind before we have looked at the emotions and the somatics. So I always go bottom up and then head down afterwards, which is then we can work on the reframes, the beliefs and what we need to do to take action afterwards. But you really do have to meet the emotions within this journal, around it, meditate on it, feel it in the body, really start to experience what comes up.

Speaker 1:

If you need support, go and get that, whether it's by a therapist, a coach, somebody that's able to take you through that stuff and then challenge the belief as you're processing it, so that you can experience new things and let the new programming in. Then you can rewire from there. Don't try to rewire on top of faulty wiring. You need to go in and earth, earth, all of the wiring in you so that we can start to build and allow things to build up from there. I'm going to leave this with you here, but we're going to talk next week about how this leads into the productivity trap and how that leaves us in survival state and how survival state creates our entire identity. So I'll see you then if you think this might be helpful for somebody else, please do forward it on. Leave a review so more people can listen to the podcast and, as always, if you've got any,