My Future Isn't Built on How Much I Give

Recorded on the other side of a burnout, this episode is about what happens when overgiving finally runs you out of fuel. Stephanie traces the pattern back — the women she watched give until they were empty, the belief that exhaustion means you did a good day's work, the men who taught her that asking for help costs you — and into a freeze response that shut her down for a full day after a good conversation with her partner.

The lesson underneath it: it's not about how much you give. It's about where and when.

And letting your guard down isn't weakness — it's opening the door when someone's already driven two hours with the gas can.

Honest talk about the freeze response, energetic boundaries, brainspotting, and what it takes to be human with another person.

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Today's podcast is brought to you by the burnout that I just experienced and I'm coming out of since the last podcast recorded. And the topic of the lesson that I've learned is my future isn't built on how much I can give. It's built on where and when I give. And as a Pisces sun-moon rising, I struggle with overgiving a lot. And I do it in conversations. I do it when I'm holding space for somebody else. I do it in my thoughts and my feelings for everybody else. And it's been a lifelong process to learn that my life vest not only has to be put on, but it has to be working. All the clicks and the straps and everything has to be working. And I have to make sure that I am double checking that because brains are tricky and it might look like you have the right everything. Everything looks great, but if you go to put it on and it doesn't fit over your head, or you put it on and the strap breaks because mice have chewed through it, then you're in the same struggle bus as you would have been had you not had a life fest at all. So let's get started. Growing up, everything that I learned about being a good human was about acts of service, how much you can give, and how much life can you live being depleted. And I think about from grade school to middle school to high school to marriages, divorces, and all of these things that, and not only my own life, but the experiences of my grandmothers, my mother, my grandmothers, the women around me. This idea that our lives are not as important as our children's lives, as our spouses' lives, as our parents' lives, that we should just give, give, give. And somehow we expect that giving to be given to us. And I think there's just this perpetual cycle of everything's fine, I'm good, look around me, look at, I should be grateful, should be happy. And this pattern that I've had for so long is so distressing to me. And it makes me just wonder if there's anything past it. And then I have this vision of those little hands that are like sticky, and you whack it on stuff and it sticks to it and brings it back to you. And how my core being has these little moments of positivity, of happiness, and it whacks it, grabs it, but eventually the stickiness wears off and it goes away, and I'm stuck right back at this core feeling that I am not enough. So we learn to live with it. And we learn that exhaustion is representative of a hard day's work. If you're tired, if you have nothing left to give at the end of the day, you've done a good job. And as I'm sitting here saying it, I'm realizing like how fucked up that is. Because it's not about giving all the time. It's not about overfunctioning, it's not about masking up so that you can function in the world that is designed to keep you small. It's about pleasure and excitement and creativity and love and movement and life. And for some reason, the closer I get to that, the more open I crack, the deeper more sharp the crash outs become. So before when I would crash out, and crashing out means like um I go into self-preservation mode. And it's obviously a very good technique that our bodies and our minds do to keep us safe. But what happens is I get triggered by something. And in this instance, it was the last podcast when I was sitting across from my boyfriend, and we were having a very great conversation, and something in my mind told me that what if this isn't real? And I've invested all this energy and all this time, and I'm thinking in two months I'm going to move in with him. Like, what if it's not real? And what if he's lying? What if what he says isn't who he is? And it's such a hard struggle for me. Because I've given my life to men that lied to me, that cheated on me, that told me I was too much, that you know, like from 16 when I got pregnant. My twins are 28. They're the father of their children has never been in their life. He knows about them, he's contacted them. He had a moment, I believe, a summer when the kids were 13 or 14 that he came around. Um, but he was an alcoholic and abusive, not to my children, but they were unsafe in his care, especially with a special needs son. And um that's a pretty early age, 16, to think and know that men aren't safe. And from there to my first marriage, which was very unsafe, to my second marriage, which I was told I was too much, my emotions were too much. It's like I I can't win with with life, it doesn't seem like when I'm with somebody else, when I'm in a relationship with somebody else, I can't win. I lose. I'm a loser. I'm a I'm not great at relationships. And I think there's just so much self-doubt in those from those moments of not being seen, not being heard. And it makes it really difficult to trust that another human being is gonna see you and trust you. And what happens in that trigger is that I just completely shut down. It starts out, the feeling happens, this like feeling in my gut just starts to destroy me. It's just like a sinking feeling. And I try to tell myself everything's okay, everything's fine, it's just thoughts, it's just old patterns, it's just old this, it's just old that. And then all of a sudden everything just kind of goes dark, and I just I um I build a wall around me, it happens pretty quickly, and I'm aware that I'm in it, I'm in self-protection mode. I'm it, it's a it's a freeze response to a trigger. And for those of you who don't know, there are four. There is flight, fight, fawn, and freeze. And I'm gonna tell you real quick, I'm just gonna do a Google search on what exactly freeze is. So it says that fight or flight are, you know, like your basic, everyone kind of knows about those. But the third response is freeze, and freeze as a response to a threat might seem effective, a sort of playing dead in the face of danger. However, in humans, it manifests itself as being an inability to communicate, react, or take action. It's a self-preservation. And it stems from being a child and feeling unsafe or unprotected by their parents or guardians. And it's involuntary behavior rooted in evolutionary survival mechanisms, automatically engaging when fighting or fleeing is not possible. So when a child isn't able to fight or run from perceived danger, it incites a panic response, making one numb or immobile in the face of a stressor. Um goes on to talk about trauma. We don't need to do that. It's feeling stuck in a certain part of the body, feeling cold or numb, physical stiffness or heaviness of limbs, decreased heart rate, restricted breathing or holding of the breath, a sense of dread or foreboding. The freeze state is marked by a sense of immobility or being able to act as the body conserves energy and prepares to avoid detection. So it's an it's a response that is necessary, and I'm completely aware that the response, the behavior that I exhibit is inappropriate to whatever has happened. Like it could be like the littlest thing, like, right? It wasn't really anything, it was just a it was a deep conversation that triggered something inside me that said, Oh, wait, we don't do this with men, like men hurt us, and it's exceptionally hard for the people around me that I love the most because they get hurt the most by it. So then there's this other part of me then that just feels horrible because when I shut down when I go into my um freeze mode, like my voice gets very low and slow. Thoughts are very hard to articulate. I can't respond to texts right away. It takes me much longer to think about what I'm gonna say. Like everything just slows way down, and a part of me goes dark. And so this happened after the podcast with my boyfriend, and the next day he's like, What the what the fuck happened? Like, we were so good, and now like you're barely talking to me. And his reaction is that he's afraid that I am obviously gonna break up with him, that my silence means that I'm no longer like all of our like our whole relationship is basically over because I was one person, now I'm not, and he it's confusing for him because he thinks I'm playing a game. And um, based on his own trauma, his reaction to my reaction to the trigger is to try to figure it out, to try to fix it. And when you're a fixer and you're trying to fix somebody that shut down, it there's nothing that doesn't work. There has to be an understanding, an appreciation of our own human experiences, our own human humanness, what it's and when I was manifesting him last summer before I met him, I said, I just want somebody to experience life with all of life, not just the good times, not just the bad times. I want to explore what it means to be human with another person. And what I really didn't want to explore with another human is my crash outs. Like, I'd rather keep those private. And unfortunately, it doesn't. So throughout the day, he's like texting me, are you okay? Everything I'm like, I'm fine, everything's okay. And to him, he thinks I'm lying. To me, I'm like, I am okay. Like, I just need some space to like get out of this. I need to move my body. I have these things I know I need to do, but the thing I want to not do is talk about it. Like, I do not want to talk about it. And the only thing he wants to do is talk about it. And what's different about him versus others is he's not mad about it. And this is how I see it. Let's say, because it's a crash out, I'm I ran out of gas. So let's just use that analogy of I'm going on a road trip, I'm two hours away, and oops, I ran out of gas, right? I didn't mean to run out of gas, I thought I had enough gas to get to the next destination. Everything seemed like I was gonna make it, and I didn't. I ran out of gas. My own fault. I should have been better, right? And um, and then calling somebody for help. And there's two reactions somebody could have. They could be angry about it, that I ruined their day, that I ruined their work day, that now now whatever they had planned, they now cannot do that thing because they have to come bring me gas, which is my experience in the past, which puts me in another another trigger mode of fear state. And then the second reaction would be oh man, that sucks. That sucks that that person that I care about is stuck on the side of the road somewhere and they need help. And to understand that for the first 45 years of my life, 44 years of my life, that men in my life had the reaction of anger, and now I'm with somebody that has the reaction of caring. It's kind of hard to wrap my head around and and understand that it's a safe place to ask for help, and that's where this is leading is to eventually like that night. So this, I mean, the crash-outs happen, they happen deeper and they're shorter than they used to be. They used to be, I mean, forever, right? Because if somebody's mad at you for crashing out, like it just perpetuates it. And um, so, anyways, having this partner that is very deep, very aligned, very in touch with his emotions and my emotions has honestly like helped me come so far in my crash outs that it's ridiculous. But um so I eventually like the next I needed a day. I needed to um have the day, I needed to sleep, and then I knew in the morning I would have to like deal with it. But I really just need I was so exhausted, it's so exhausting to be in that state that I really needed sleep, and I really needed time, and I also needed to be open and honest with him about who I am, where I am, and what I have gone through that make me this way. And I also had to be honest with him that although I've been in so much therapy for this, including, you know, years and years of talk therapy, which didn't really help. I think more so than anything, that was like a gaslighting situation and made me feel worse about who I was instead of understanding myself better. But what really helped was brain spotting therapy, and I've done that a few rounds. So, you know, I and all the self-help books, all the podcasts, all the things. Anyways, so I digress, and I had to be honest with him that this is who I am, and if this is too much for him, then that's okay too. Like people can only handle so much, and I know I am a lot, and what happened was quite amazing, and this just says a lot about how far we actually can come, is that he was totally fine with it as long as I could tell him like where I was, which is very hard to do when you're in freeze mode. But if I can just allow him in so that he can help me, like that's all I need to be able to do is just open the door for him. So imagine somebody driving those two hours to give you gas, and then you don't open the door and accept help. I mean, that's kind of where I was. Like I told him where I was, and he understood that I was in a I was out of gas. And he he drove to me, but I wouldn't let him in, you know? And these are all like emotional that like that did not happen. So if you fast forwarded it from something to now, it's a metaphor. And but when you're stuck in a location, when you're stuck inside yourself, and the only person you've ever relied upon to get yourself out of it is yourself, it's like To and not to be offensive, but it's the blind leading the blind. And if you can put out your your call for help, and you can open the door for that help, everything just moves so much quicker, and healing happens so much faster. So when they say let your guard down, it really means open the door for help. And we ended up having a really great day. By the end of the day, he was joking about it with me, which was actually kind of funny that in the past that could have ruined and has ruined relationships before. Because I'm an overgiver to the point where, and it happens in conversations sometimes. When I am holding space for a deeper conversation, I need to be okay with saying, okay, this is like a little too deep for me right now, and I need to take a step back instead of digging down and holding that space. I need to know where my energetic boundaries are too. And boundaries are really hard because as a people pleaser, as a helper, and like what I said at the beginning about exhaustion, it's all these balls, all these boulders rolling down a hill. And the healthy version of you, the version that I think we are supposed to be, is a person that can navigate through all those boulders falling down the hill and still get to the top. But the unhealed version is trying to grab them all and save them all and save all the people. Sounds morbid. Save all the people that the boulders might crash into. I just want to save everybody, and that's not what we're here to do. We're not here to just, you know, like I said at the beginning, with the little hand, the little sticky hand, stick your hand out, grab something, bring it back until it the unstick doesn't happen anymore. It's about opening up all of it. Hey, this isn't working. Hey, I'm not feeling great about this. Hey, and I'm not talking about just relationships with your spouse or your significant other. It's relationships with everybody. And by talking about it, maybe we can help the next person below us on the hill navigate their way up the hill too. Because we can't save anybody, and the more we think we can, if we can save somebody from our own self-destruction, we're only adding more not only pain to ourselves, but pain to other people. So as we grow into more evolved humans and we face darker, deeper setbacks, I think that it's important to talk about it. I think it's important to embrace it, own it. It's just part of who we are as humans. And I think we'll get there. And I believe our future isn't built on how much we can give, how exhausted we feel at the end of the night, but it's about feeling like you're in alignment, that you love yourself at the end of the day, that you accept yourself, that things happen to you and you're okay with it because you know that it's leading you to a better place. I think that's what we need to feel at night. And we need to learn the skills to get there. Anyways, I hope you have a great, wonderful day. Thank you, audience, so much for listening. I would love to hear your comments. Please share, like, subscribe to the podcast, and I will see you all next time.