The Hidden Reason You Feel Disrespected At Home

Ever walked in the door after a trip—or even just a solo grocery run—only to find your house in complete chaos... like nothing was done while you were gone? Cue the rage, the overwhelm, and that familiar sense of “Do I even matter around here?”

In this raw and relatable episode, Katie breaks down why moments like these hit so hard—and spoiler alert—it’s not just about the dishes.

You’ll learn:
Why seemingly small acts of disrespect trigger such big emotions
How your brain (yes, your amazing brain!) reacts to past hurts in real time
The hidden childhood patterns that keep you overfunctioning
The exact 4-step process to pause, regulate, and respond differently
What to say instead of yelling—and how to make your needs actually heard

If you’re the default parent, the invisible partner, or the one who “just does it all,” this episode will feel like a breath of fresh air—and maybe a loving kick in the pants to do things differently.

What You’ll Walk Away With:

• A new understanding of how your nervous system reacts to feeling devalued
• Scripts to help you express your needs without the yelling or guilt
• Brain-based insights that explain why your reactions make so much sense
• A loving reminder that your worth is not tied to how much you do for others

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Transcript

 Hey there. Welcome back to the podcast. Have you ever had that moment where you walk into your house after being gone, maybe on a trip or a work event, or even just a rare solo errand and nothing's been done? Did your skin just crawl as I said that because mine did. The dishes are still in the sink, the same piles are sitting there, and your whole body is screaming, seriously, if you have felt unseen, disrespected or like the default manager of everyone's life, this episode is for you, so go grab a warm drink and let's take a collective deep breath before we dive into this episode. Welcome to relationship, reset, reignite, reconnect, rebuild. The podcast for high achieving couples who want to transform their relationship from surviving to thriving. I'm Katie Roessler, a relationship coach and counselor with over 15 years of experience helping busy, overwhelmed couples rebuild connection, trust and intimacy. If you've been together for years and feel stuck on autopilot, disconnected and frustrated by constant miscommunication, you're in the right place. Each week, we'll explore practical tools, relatable stories and strategies to help you reignite the spark, rebuild your bond and create the relationship you've always dreamed up. Because no matter how long you've been together, it's never too late to hit reset. Let's dive in. Okay, let's talk about that moment of silent or not so silent, rage. You walk through the door and it's like nothing has changed since you left. It's almost like time stood still, except it didn't. You were gone for days. Things should have been done, and somehow things are actually worse than they were before you left. The people who live in your home just didn't handle it at all. And what you feel isn't just frustration. It's complete disrespect, right? It's invisibility. It's I guess no one thought about me while I was gone, and what it would be like to come home to this that simmering anger. It's not just about the mess. It's about what the mess represents, the lack of initiative, the lack of care, and the reality that you're always the one who notices, who fixes, who handles everything. It always falls on your shoulders. And let's be real when this happens often, it's not long before you start feeling resentful, not just towards your partner, but towards your whole family, the same people that you love deeply, you also find yourself quietly feeling out. And some people stop going on trips because they're really tired of this pattern happening. Now I want to pull back the curtain a bit, because, you know, I always bring up the fact that when we have deep, major emotions about something, they have a source, and it isn't always the thing in front of us. What often drives our reaction or overreaction isn't just the present moment, okay, it's the past echoing in your nervous system. No, not again. Why does this keep happening? I don't want this to happen again. So I was talking to a friend recently. She's a powerhouse woman, someone I hold deep in my heart, and a high achiever, a mom does all the things she was telling me how disrespected she felt by her family, like no one valued her even noticed how much she does. And she said to me, I know I'm about to come home from vacation and nothing will be done. Like it's not even me predicting the future, it's me just knowing, because this is what happens every time. So I asked her, because she was getting really worked up as she was talking about it, when did you start feeling this way? This is the like truth about being friends with a therapist. We ask really deep questions when it's supposed to be like, Hey, I'm just venting to you, but I did. I asked her, when did you start feeling this way? And she took a pause, and she started tracing it back to moments in her childhood when she felt unseen and unappreciated and like she had to do things to matter. And if you're listening to this and you're thinking, ooh, this is striking accordingly, you know, it may have been situations where you felt overlooked by a teacher or a parent, or you felt like you were doing everything right just to keep the peace at home, like you were the one who was the glue holding things together. Or maybe there are times you felt left out by your friends, right? And you just felt like, am I not enough? What's wrong with me? The through line for my friend was, if I just do more, maybe I'll matter more to them. So now in her adult life, when no one helps around the house, she doesn't just notice it. Her younger self feels it, and her nervous system screams, here we go again. I'm not enough unless I over deliver that over functioning becomes a coping strategy, but it's exhausting and it reinforces the very cycle we want to escape. Like I said, the issue was, nobody cleaned up, but what she was feeling is, I'm invisible. I don't matter again, just like I didn't back then. And here's the thing, you could have had a great childhood, but just have a temperament or personality towards perfectionism or being a high achiever, gold star earner, or always wanting to set goals and more and more and be driven and still have these issues. Because when we are like that, when our temperament is really driven, we notice when people don't recognize us, we notice when we don't feel important. We notice when we don't feel valued, right? We're going to be more sensitive to it. So again, you could have had a perfectly great childhood and still have these challenges. So how do we shift this? How do we break the cycle? Here's what I told her, when you go home, I just want you to pause, because you already know what it's going to look like. Just pause. Don't do more, don't clean up, don't fix it, don't even say anything. Just stop. Take a deep breath. Go call a friend, go for a walk outside. Do something that helps you come back into your body and get grounded, because we tend to disassociate, and then we do what we know, old habits, stress, cleaning, fuming, yelling at everyone, throwing things, hitting things right, like we just go into reaction mode, but we need to pause. Why? Because when we react in the old, familiar way, we reinforce the dynamic that we're the only ones who will handle it, right? We've just said, Fine, okay, I'll do it. But when we take a moment to regulate our nervous system, we get to access our wise mind, which is our prefrontal cortex. Now, this area of our mind is like, think about your forehead, right? It's in that area, and it doesn't stop developing until our mid 20s, which is why we still make poor choices in college or questionable choices. Let's not be so judgmental, right? Our mind that area that helps us to logically think about what to do next, to think future oriented, to think about, okay, if I do this, these could be the consequences. It can't be activated without the pause. Why? Because the amygdala, the amygdala is a little almond shaped part of your brain that is where fight, flight, freeze and Fauci hangs out. It's like the reaction system, right? Oh, the emotions come up. And what's fun is the hippocampus, which is a part of the brain that hugs the amygdala, holds core memories. So when your amygdala is like, fight or flight, they didn't clean up, your hippocampus is like, Oh my God. I'm going to remind you the last five times has happened, and I'm going to share with you those three times of core memories where you felt invisible and not valued. And no, this is not happening consciously. It's subconsciously happening in the background. So you're just feeling the rage, but your brain's like, doo doo doo doo doo really fast. It's an amazing computer, isn't it? The brain is awesome. We just have to learn how to work with it. So you gotta pause, and then you allow that prefrontal cortex to go, Okay, how do I break this pattern? I want to do something differently. So my friend did just that. She went for a walk, she called a friend, she came back when she was ready to be calm and have a conversation with her partner and her family. She said, when you don't take initiative, I feel really disrespected and devalued, and I'm not willing to carry the mental or physical load alone anymore. I need things to shift. And you know what happened? They didn't get defensive, they didn't fight her. They actually hurt her. They apologized. They didn't realize she was feeling that way because of what they were doing, because what was happening is they didn't see the projects. It wasn't even on their radar our minds, again, interesting. Computers really good at what they do, but if we don't register a project as ours, we tend to not see it, and the person who tends to do it sees it right? So they didn't realize what they had done until they stopped and really did look around and go, Oh my gosh, I'm so sorry. She wasn't reactive. She was clear and calm and real, and that right there is the power of changing the pattern instead of just reacting to the moment. Now I want to share with you another story. This one is really funny one of my other dear friends, and she's a therapist now, but at the time she was not her husband used to ask her where the toilet paper was in the house, not just once, but on repeat, like anytime the toilet paper was out, he'd ask where the toilet paper is, and she would remind him it's in the hallway, closet, by the bathroom every time, obviously, at times, with The snarky attitude, but it was always the same answer. And so she realized she had to change Saturn. She had to break the cycle, because she was feeling resentment and anger and feeling like the maid, and why can't he just figure it out for himself? And why can't he just at least search for it if he can't remember? But how do you not remember where the toilet paper is when it's in the same place every time? So he comes to her one day, Honey, where's the toilet paper? And she takes a deep breath, that pause that we need, and she lights her face up big, and goes, oh my gosh, where's the toilet paper? He met her with the biggest perplexed look, and she just laughed. And he got it, he realized the toilet paper is always in the same place, and it is absolutely annoying. You keep asking. And I can't say that it never happened again, but I know she said that it stopped for a considerable amount of time, right? She was able to break the cycle. Sometimes we have to break the pattern in funny ways, and sometimes we have to own our stuff to be able to do that. So it's your turn. I want to ask you, when was the last time you felt truly seen in your home? When was the last time someone asked you what you needed or asked how they could help, and when was the last time you allowed yourself to not pick up the slack and instead said this is not mine to fix, like allow someone else to do it, even if it means three days later. So here's your invitation, one pause the next time you feel disrespected. Two, regulate before you respond. Remember. We want the prefrontal cortex to come up with some ideas. Think before it acts. So go. Take a deep breath, go for a walk, listen to music, watch something funny, whatever helps then. Three, share how you feel using when you do XYZ, or when you all do XYZ, I feel, and be very specific, please stop using angry. Not that I'm attacking you for using angry, but they know that we're angry. They see it all the time, right? They get that we're annoyed and angry. You've got to get to the real root of what you're feeling. I feel devalued, I feel disrespected. I feel invisible. Like get to these shameful feelings that come up because of what they're doing. I feel like I do not matter at all. And if I didn't exist tomorrow, you would just hire somebody to do this work, right? And then I need and be very specific what you need them to do. Then four state clearly what you will Speaker 1 11:24 and won't continue doing and stick with it. Don't budge. Well, this one time I flipped that. Nope. We need to be more consequential when we want to break cycles and change patterns. You don't have to yell to be heard. You don't have to do more to matter. You are valuable just as you are. It has nothing to do with what you contribute. You just need to choose a new way forward and break these cycles. So if this episode struck a chord with you and you're ready to break these cycles for good, if you're tired of being the one who always holds it together, I want to invite you to book a complimentary call, and I have two different ones for you to pick from. The first one is a relationship game plan call that's for you and your partner to do together, so they need to be on board too, with coming and learning a new way of responding and understanding what are some things that can change in your relationship so that you both feel fulfilled and happy in it. The second one, if it's just going to be you, is the map to clarity call, and this is a space where we can get really clear on what's triggering you, what's impacting you, and how to start breaking those cycles. These are not therapy sessions, and it's not about finger pointing. It's a strategic, empathetic conversation about what's really happening underneath the surface of your relationship or for you, and what we can shift to create real change. You don't have to stay in this loop, and you can rewrite the patterns, and I'd love to help you do that. So pick out the one that suits you best, book your free call at the link in the show notes below. Okay, you deserve to be respected, valued and supported in your own home, and don't settle for less by doing these steps, not only are you teaching your family members how to respect you more you're respecting yourself, and that's key. So until next time, take that pause and a deep breath and go communicate what it is you truly need in your home to feel valued and supported. I'll see you next week. Thanks for tuning in to relationship reset. If you found this episode helpful, share it with a friend who might need it too, don't forget to rate and review the podcast, it helps more couples discover these tools to rebuild their connection, too. And be sure to hit subscribe so you don't miss next week's episode. It's gonna be a good one. Your relationship is worth the work and the rewards, totally worth the effort. See you next week.