Retiring from Martyrdom: The Strength to Be Held

What happens when the body finally refuses to keep carrying what the heart has learned to endure?

After a severe Ménière’s disease episode left her unable to stand, move, or push through, Lizzi found herself confronting far more than vertigo. As memories surfaced—from childhood injuries to surgery, illness, and years spent proving she could handle anything—she began uncovering an invisible contract she had lived by for decades: keep going, do not inconvenience anyone, and never need so much that you become a burden.

In this deeply personal episode of Untamed Voices, Lizzi explores the rules our bodies remember, the protective parts that confuse usefulness with worth, and the vulnerability of receiving care without apologizing or rushing to repay it.

This is a reflection on rest, illness, hyper-independence, parenthood, and the quiet courage it takes to say, “I am not okay,” without immediately promising everyone that you will be.

Because perhaps the opposite of martyrdom is not selfishness.

Perhaps it is trust.

And perhaps real strength is not carrying everything alone, but finally allowing yourself to be held.

Transcript

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Hello everyone and welcome back to Untamed Voices. As always, thank you for being here. There are some episodes that begin with an idea, some begin with a question, and some begin with an experience that quietly rearranges the way you understand your entire life. This is one of those stories. For most of my life, I believed strength looked a certain way. Strength meant showing up. Strength meant following through. Strength meant carrying whatever needed to be carried, even when it was heavy, especially when it was heavy. If I was tired, I could push through. If I was grieving, I could push through. If I was overwhelmed, well, you get that point, right? I could push through that too. Now I want to be fair to myself. Over the last six or eight years, I have actually become much better at listening to my body. I've learned to rest more than I used to. I've become more aware of my nervous system. I've slowed down in ways that the younger version of me never would have imagined or allowed. So I genuinely believed I had already learned this lesson. I thought I had already uncovered the deeper beliefs around rest. I thought I had already made peace with my body. I was wrong. Not because everything I'd learned was true or wasn't true, but because healing has a way of unfolding in layers. Just when you think you've reached the bottom, life gently lifts another stone and says, There's one more thing I'd like to show you. Don't we all love this? That was sarcasm, by the way. A little over a week ago, I woke up before the sun. At first, nothing seemed terribly wrong. There was just this strange feeling in my body, an uneasiness, anxiety, a little nausea. The kind of feeling where you tell yourself, I'm probably just need some water, maybe some caffeine. I'll get up and it'll pass. So I did. I got out of bed, and immediately something was wrong. The floor no longer felt solid beneath me. And it's not that I felt weak necessarily, maybe a little bit, but it was almost as though my body and the earth had stopped agreeing on where up was. Every movement felt uncertain. Every step felt like I was trying to walk across the deck of a ship in the middle of a storm. Within minutes, the nausea became unbearable. The room spun so violently that I couldn't tell whether I was moving or whether the world around me was. I couldn't stop vomiting. My whole body began to shake. Every time I tried to lift my head, the spinning became worse. The only thing I wanted was to curl into the smallest ball I could become, close my eyes, remain perfectly still, and wait for it to stop. Have you ever had a moment where your entire world became one single prayer? Mine was incredibly simple. Please let this stop. Nothing else mattered. Not work, not responsibilities, not tomorrow, not my plans, just please let this stop. But it didn't. It became worse. My husband called my doctor's office, and after hearing what was happening, they told us not to wait. They said to go straight to the emergency room. I remember lying there, unable to trust my own body. And it struck me later how strange that really is. Most of us move through our days without ever thinking about balance. We simply stand, we walk, we trust that when we place one foot in front of the other, the earth will still be there to meet us until one day it isn't. As it turned out, my body was fighting an infection. That infection had also triggered an episode of Meneer's disease. If you've never heard of Meneer's disease, it's a disorder of the inner ear that can cause severe vertigo, hearing changes, ringing in the ears, pressure, and problems with balance. I learned I had it about a year ago after losing suddenly, losing much of the hearing in my left ear. At the time, I remember thinking, well, that's unfortunate and inconvenient, right? I learned what I needed to learn. I adjusted, and then I did what I've always done. I kept moving because somewhere inside me lived a belief that as long as I kept moving, everything would eventually be okay. So after medications, blood tests, scans, hours of waiting, and more questions than answers, I was finally able to go home. And the spinning gradually eased, not immediately, not completely. I was, you know, in bed. I couldn't, I couldn't get enough sleep. I just I couldn't really stand up for a while, right? But the next morning my body was steadier. My heart wasn't. And that's when the fear arrived. It wasn't dramatic or anything, but it was kind of quiet. It doesn't, you know, something that just shows up and says, What if this happens again? What if next time I'm alone? What if my body is changing in ways I can't control? When is this going to happen again? Right. And for the first time in my life, I had to admit something that my younger self never would have allowed. I am not invincible. Now, I know none of us are, obviously. Intellectually, I've always known that. I was grieving something much, much bigger. I was grieving the illusion that I could always push through. Because there was no pushing through this. My body had simply said no. It didn't negotiate, it didn't ask. It didn't care how many responsibilities I had. It didn't care how many people were counting on me. It didn't care that I wanted to keep going. It simply said, we're done. And if I'm honest, excuse me, that realization unsettled me far more than the diagnosis itself. Because for most of my life, my relationship with my body had sounded something like this: just get me through the day. We'll rest later. We'll deal with this later. Just keep going. And for years my body said yes. Or perhaps I simply stopped listening every time I tried to say no. Until one morning it refused. And it wasn't punishing or betraying me. But maybe it was trying to save me from continuing to live a life that required me to abandon it. I didn't really know it then, but lying in that hospital bed, I wasn't just losing my balance. I was beginning to lose a belief that had quietly shaped my entire life. And sometimes, before we can find a new way of standing, we first have to discover the old ground was never as steady as we believed. So when I came home from the hospital, I expected the dizziness to fade and life to slowly return to normal. Like every other time, right? Instead, everything became quiet. Not necessarily peaceful, but just quiet. Have you ever noticed that after a storm passes, there's a strange silence? It's almost unsettling. The wind is gone, the rain has stopped. But you're standing there looking around, realizing the landscape isn't the same as it was before. To be honest, this is what it felt like. Physically, I was beginning to recover. Emotionally, something had cracked open. I found myself asking questions that medicine couldn't answer, questions an MRI couldn't answer, or a blood test, or, you know, anything else. But it was, they were questions that only my heart could ask. Why did this frighten me so much? Why did I feel guilty for not being okay? Why was I already thinking about reassuring everyone else before I had even allowed myself to feel what I was feeling? And maybe the question that changed everything why is it so difficult for me to simply say, I'm not okay, and just let that be enough? So that question stayed with me and it followed me through the day, and it sat beside me in the quiet, right? It whispered every time I caught myself saying, I'm feeling better. Even before I actually knew if I was, then something happened that I wasn't expecting. Memories began to surface. And it's not necessarily because I sat down and started to analyze my childhood or because I really wanted to. I remembered shoulder surgery years ago. The day after surgery, I was exercising, not with my injured arm, but with the other one. I was doing rows because I was determined not to lose muscle. I remember people telling me, Lizzie, your body needs to rest. And I remember thinking, my shoulder needs rest. The rest of me is fine. Now looking back, I kind of smile a bit. And honestly, it's not because it's funny. It's because I genuinely believed that. A year later, after next surgery, I did something similar. I insisted that my sister drive me 45 minutes to my niece's recital that very next day. The ride was incredibly painful, not pleasant at all. Every bump in the road, but I kept telling myself it's important, I'll be okay. Looking back now, I don't think I was trying to prove anything to anyone else. I think I was trying to prove something to myself that I could still do it, that I wasn't weak, but also kind of putting myself in that martyr place, right? I can sacrifice for somebody else. Also that my body wouldn't determine what I could or couldn't do. Then another memory surfaced. My years in law enforcement. People often asking me what that career taught me. It taught me many beautiful things courage, commitment, teamwork. But it also reinforced something my nervous system already believed. Keep going. Don't let people down. Don't be the weak link. There was a season when I became very sick with mononucleosis. I was out for weeks, maybe even months. Every time I tried to return too quickly, my body pushed back even harder. But I remember something else much more vividly. The pressure, the feeling that I needed to get better. And it's not that I wanted to, it's not necessarily that I wanted to feel better. I did want to feel better, but it wasn't that that was pushing me. It was I needed to get back. I worried about what people thought. I worried that they believed I was taking advantage of sick time. I worried they saw me as unreliable. You know, so a lot of that pressure did come from other people, but a lot of it I was putting on myself as well. I know for sure that my body hurt it. Then I thought about my shoulder again, and I knew something was wrong long before I finally had surgery. I kept working, I kept lifting, I kept telling myself I was fine until eventually I couldn't even lift my arm. The torn labrum wasn't simply an injury. It was another chapter in the same story. Ignore your body, keep going, don't inconvenience anyone, don't let them think you can't handle it. As all of these memories just came together, I realized something. None of them had created this belief. They had reinforced it, which meant the story must have begun much earlier. And almost immediately I knew exactly where my mind was going. I was about nine years old, and there was a playground with a set of bars. The tallest one was probably eight feet high. I had climbed all the way to the top, and I was trying to do flips. No one was really watching me at this time. Then I fell flat onto my back. The wind was completely knocked out of me. I remember lying there, unable to breathe. My back hurt so badly that I couldn't move. My dad walked over, looked down at me, and said, Get up, you're fine, try again. Now, I want to pause here for a moment. I don't share this story because I believe my dad was trying to hurt me. I think he genuinely believed he was teaching me resilience. He often said, get up and try again, without even thinking about what was happening for me. It was one of his favorite phrases. The problem is that children don't always learn the lesson adults intend to teach. Children learn the lesson their nervous system experiences. My nervous system didn't hear you're capable. My nervous system heard your body isn't where you go for comfort. It kept, it heard keep going. It heard pain isn't where you stop. Years later, as an adult, I had x-rays done because my back had continued hurting for decades. The doctor looked at them and said something that completely stunned me. He believed I had likely broken my back as a child and that it had healed that way. I sat there in silence, and you know, I was a little angry, but I also was wondering how many other places in my life had I simply learned to heal crooked because I never believed I could stop long enough to heal well, or never was allowed. So that question stayed with me. Because I think our bodies remember much more than injuries. They remember the rules that surrounded those injuries. And without realizing it, my body had been living the same by the same rule for over 40 years. Keep going, no matter what. After all those memories surfaced, I sat there for a long time. I wasn't trying to fix anything anymore. In fact, for the first time in my life, I wasn't even trying to understand it. I was simply willing to listen. And I realized something. For years, I had told my clients that healing happens in layers. We all have layers. We uncover one belief, we work through it, life feels lighter. Then months or years later, another layer quietly reveals itself. And it's not because we failed to hear the heal the first time or because we're regressing, it's because we finally became safe enough to see what was underneath it. I had honestly believed I had already learned this lesson. I thought, I listened to my body now, I've slowed down, I rest more than I used to, I've already worked through my relationship with productivity. And to some extent, all of those things were true. But healing has a way of humbling us. It gently reminds us that growth isn't a staircase, it's more like walking in a spiral. Sometimes we find ourselves looking at the same themes again, only this time from a deeper place. So one morning I closed my eyes and simply asked my body, What have you been trying to tell me? I wasn't expecting words, but what came were images instead, sensations, almost as though my body had its own language, and had been speaking fluently all along while I kept trying to translate everything into thoughts. My feet felt tired, not injured, not weak, just tired from caring. My calves felt incredibly tight, almost as though they had been preparing for to run for so long that they had forgotten how to rest. My thighs, they surprised me. They didn't feel exhausted at all. They actually felt pretty strong and ready, almost like they were saying, We're here, we'll support you, but just tell us where we're going. And the truth was I didn't know. My hips gave me the clearest image of all. They felt like old an old wooden fence trying to hold back a herd of wild horses. The fence wasn't broken, the horses weren't wrong, but the fence was simply trying to contain something far greater than it had ever been designed to hold. So when I reached my stomach, it felt like it was trying so hard to support me. As if it had been working overtime just to keep everything functioning. As if it had been working overtime just to keep everything functioning. My kidneys, for whatever reason, felt exhausted too. Almost like they had spent years filtering not only what belonged to my body, but somehow trying to filter everything life had handed me. Then I reached my chest. I almost cried. It felt so heavy. Not necessarily broken, but heavy, as though someone had quietly placed stone after stone after stone on it. My heart didn't feel shattered, it felt hidden, locked behind a gate that had once been built for protection, but had quietly become a prison. My throat, it felt so tight that I could hardly imagine words moving through it. My shoulders felt like they had forgotten what life felt like without weight. My neck was rigid, my head felt strangely numb, not empty, not disconnected, just too tired to keep thinking its way out of everything. I sat with all of that, and I didn't try to interpret it or make it fit a theory. I just allowed it to exist. And then something dawned on me. Every single part of my body was telling the same story, holding, holding myself together, holding everyone else together, holding uncertainty, grief, responsibility, expectations, fear, hope, finances, family, clients, questions, holding, holding, holding. There was almost no movement, no flow, only containment. And suddenly I wondered, maybe I wasn't exhausted because life had become too difficult. Maybe I was exhausted because I had become someone who believed it was my job to hold everything. And that realization led me somewhere I wasn't expecting. I started thinking about every season in my life where I hadn't been okay. There were many, and I noticed a pattern every single time. I gave myself permission to struggle for a little while. There was always an invisible clock, an unspoken deadline. I could have a hard day, maybe even a hard week, but eventually I needed to pull myself together. I needed to reassure everyone, I'm okay. Don't worry, I've got this, I'll figure it out. And here's what fascinated me. Very few people in my life today are actually asking me to do that. Years ago, absolutely, many experiences reinforced that belief. But today, I have people who love me, people who would gladly tell me to rest, people who genuinely want to take want me to take care of myself. And yet the pressure remained, not because they were putting it on me, but because I was. Isn't that interesting? Sometimes the loudest expectations we live under are the ones no one else is speaking anymore. They're echoes. Echoes of old experiences, echoes of old rules. Echoes our nervous system can continue following long after the world around us has changed. And I worked really hard to get myself out of the spaces where life was too demanding of me. You know, spaces where I felt trapped, spaces where other people had more of a say over my life than I did. And yet here I am, right? Out of those spaces and still putting those restrictions on myself. So as I sat there, I realized I had been living by an invisible contract. No one handed it to me or asked me to sign it, but somehow I had. After you've earned it, you may cry, but make sure everyone knows you're going to be okay. Never let your pain become someone else's burden. Never inconvenience people, never become too much. And then I asked myself something that took my breath away. What if this has never actually been about strength? What if it's been about worth? Because underneath every one of those invisible rules was one quiet question that had followed me for much of my life. If I stop caring everyone else, if I stop being the capable one, if I become the one who needs, will I still be loved or accepted? I wasn't ready for the answer yet, but for the first time I was finally asking the right question. I sat with the question for several days, not trying to answer it, just letting it exist. And every time I tried to move past it, it gently pulled me back. If I stop caring everyone else, will I still be loved? Eventually another question appeared. One that felt even more honest. If all I have to offer someone is my need, will they still want me? That one hurt because I realized it wasn't just a thought, it was a belief. A belief that had quietly shaped so much of my life without me ever realizing it. And here's the fascinating thing about beliefs. Most of the time, they don't sound like beliefs, they sound like facts. We don't wake up one morning and consciously decide from now on, my worth will depend on how useful I am. No. Life teaches us moment by moment, experience by experience, sometimes through words, through silence, through what happened, through what didn't happen. And over time, our nervous system starts creating rules. Rules that once helped us survive. Rules that once made perfect sense. But rules that eventually begin costing us far more than they protect. As I reflected on everything that had surfaced over those weeks, something from my work as a therapist kept coming back to me. One of the things I tell my clients all the time is this our protective parts are incredibly intelligent. They are not trying to sabotage us. They are trying to love us in the only way they know how. Even the strategies that eventually become exhausting began as acts of protection. The part of me that learned to push through was trying to protect me. The part of me that became hyper-independent was trying to protect me. The part that reassured everyone else before allowing myself to feel was trying to protect me. The part that believed I had to be useful, guess what? That part was trying to protect me too. None of those parts are my enemies. They are exhausted because they've been working around the clock for decades. And I think one of the greatest gifts we can give ourselves isn't telling those parts they're wrong, it's thanking them. Thank you for getting me here. Thank you for helping me survive. Thank you for loving me the best way you knew how. And you don't have to work this hard anymore. That feels very different than trying to get rid of them. Because healing isn't a war against ourselves. It's a relationship with ourselves. And maybe that's the shift that I've been invited into. I'm not becoming someone new. I'm learning a new relationship with the person I've always been. There's something else I've realized. I've always been very comfortable being the person who sits with someone else's pain. As a therapist, it's one of the greatest privileges of my life. People entrust me with the parts of themselves they rarely show anyone else. Their grief, their fear, their shame, their heartbreak, their uncertainty. And never, not once, have I sat across from someone and thought, wow, they're asking for too much. I never thought, I wish they would hurry up and get over this. I never thought they're becoming a burden. Quite the opposite. I usually feel very honored, honored that someone trusted me enough to let me into one of their most vulnerable moments of their life. So I had to ask myself a difficult question. If I can offer that kind of compassion so naturally to other people, why have I always imagined that the people who love me would respond differently to mine? Why is it so much easier to believe in other people's worth than my own? And then it hit me. Maybe the opposite of martyrdom isn't selfishness. Maybe the opposite of martyrdom is receiving, receiving care, receiving support, receiving love, receiving without immediately feeling the need to pay it back, receiving without apologizing, receiving without rushing to prove that you're okay again. Receiving without earning it. If I'm honest, that feels much harder than giving. Giving feels familiar. It feels safe. It lets me stay in control. Receiving asks me to trust. And trust, it is vulnerable. As I thought about that, I found myself returning to the image of the Kinsugi that I shared earlier. The broken bowl isn't valuable because it hides its cracks. It's valuable because someone lovingly gathered every broken piece and cared enough to restore it. Not by pretending it had never broken, but by honoring where it had. Maybe we've misunderstood healing. Maybe healing isn't becoming someone who no longer breaks. Maybe healing is actually allowing ourselves to be held while we're still in pieces. Not forever, but long enough that we don't have to heal crooked anymore. You know, a few days after all this happened, I found myself saying something out loud that completely surprised me. I said, I no longer wish to be a martyr. The moment those words left my mouth, I felt myself exhale. Not because everything was suddenly better or all my fears disappeared, but because I realized I wasn't rejecting love anymore. I wasn't rejecting service. I wasn't rejecting generosity. I was rejecting the belief that my worth depended, my worth depended on how much of myself I was willing to sacrifice. Those are very different things. I still want to love people deeply. I still want to show up. I still want to serve. Because here's the truth: children don't learn primarily from what we say. They learn from what we repeatedly live. If they watch us continually override our bodies, they may learn to override theirs. If they watch us apologize every time we need support, they may learn that needing is shameful. If they watch us say, I'm having a hard season, I need to rest, I need to, I need help, I'm still worthy. Then maybe, just maybe, we give them permission to become fully human too. And just to add to that, you know, part of my concerns of not being functional for the few days that I was not functional, was that my children would suffer from this. And you know what? They didn't. They leaned a little bit more on their dad, which was okay. It was good for him, good for them. They were very understanding and compassionate. They would come in and give me hugs when they could. You know, my daughter came and sat next to me, and we cried a little, you know, and talked a little and just supported each other. And it was beautiful. And so that taught me that not being able to function is not always a bad thing. Sometimes it's good, not just for me, but for everybody else as well. You know, that's when we learn to lean on each other, and that's such a beautiful human thing. So today, I don't want to leave you with a formula or five easy steps or pretend that I've completely figured it out, because I'm still living it. I'm still learning. I'm sure there'll be way more learning to come as well. I'm still discovering new layers of this, and maybe I always will. What I can offer you is an invitation. If your body has been whispering to you too, please don't wait until it has to shout. If you spent years believing your value comes from what you carry, I hope you'll gently ask yourself, who taught me that? And if, like me, you've lived under the quiet belief that love requires self-abandonment, may this be the season you begin laying that belief down, not all at once, not perfectly, just one stone at a time. Because I no longer believe we're here to become martyrs. I think we're here to become whole, to love without disappearing, to serve without abandoning ourselves, to rest without guilt, to receive without shame. And maybe, just maybe, to discover that the people who truly love us never asked us to earn our place in their hearts in the first place. So thank you for spending this time with me, and thank you for letting me share this chapter of my own journey. I suspect many of us are walking this road together. Until next time, be gentle with your body. It has been carrying your story long, long, long before you knew how to tell it. And maybe today it is finally inviting you to write a new ending. See you next time.