He Chose Comfort. You Paid the Price.

What if the problem isn’t that he can’t change, but that he keeps choosing not to do the uncomfortable work change requires?

In this episode of Pattern Breakers Collective, Lisa explores the difference between wanting a relationship to improve and actually taking responsibility for making it happen. Because when one partner repeatedly avoids therapy, accountability, difficult conversations, or emotional growth, that discomfort doesn’t disappear. Someone else ends up carrying it. 

We talk about emotional labor, relationship burnout, false promises of change, overfunctioning, and what genuine accountability actually looks like. We also explore what happens when you become the person finding the therapist, sending the podcasts, buying the books, initiating every conversation, and essentially managing someone else’s healing.

At some point, you have to stop asking, “Does he want to change?” and start paying attention to what he is actually choosing.

And if you’ve spent years waiting, hoping, explaining, and giving another chance, we’ll talk about the harder question too:

What is waiting costing you? 

If you’re ready to stop carrying someone else’s growth and start investing in your own, visit PatternBreakersCollective.com to learn about the 12 week Pattern Breakers program and individual support.

Share this episode with a woman who needs it, and please leave a review to help more women find the podcast.

Topics: emotional abuse, emotional neglect, toxic relationships, relationship burnout, emotional labor, narcissistic abuse, coercive control, false promises, accountability, relationship repair, self abandonment, people pleasing, boundaries, healing after emotional abuse.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:18

The very first episode I ever recorded for this podcast was called If It Were Really Abuse, I'd know, right? At the time, I thought I was making a podcast about recognizing unhealthy behavior, about helping women name what they were seeing. And I believed the hardest part of that work was seeing that once a woman could identify what was happening, the rest would somehow follow. I was wrong. After hundreds of conversations, thousands of comments, women in my coaching programs, women in my inbox at all hours of the night, I have realized something that I wasn't expecting when I started this work. Most women don't struggle to recognize the behavior. They struggle to stop explaining it away. Oh, well, he had a hard childhood. Oh, well, he's just under a lot of stress. Oh, well, he doesn't know how to communicate. Well, he's just afraid. Oh, he's just overwhelmed. Oh, well, he says he wants to change. And maybe all of those things are true. I'm not here to tell you that they're not. But today I want to ask you a question that I think is more important than whether all of those explanations are accurate. What is he choosing? Because every single day, whether we realize it or not, we make choices. And those choices don't just affect us, they affect the people we love. Sometimes in ways we don't intend, and sometimes in ways that, if we're being honest with ourselves, we've been willing to keep happening because changing them would cost us something. Today we're going to talk about that cost, about who's been carrying it, and about the question that I think changes everything. Not does he want to change, but what is he choosing? Welcome back to Pattern Breakers Collective. I'm Lisa. Before we get into it, the note that I always give. When I use he throughout this episode, I am speaking from my own lived experience and from the experience of the majority of my audience. These dynamics aren't gender-specific though. Women can create unhealthy patterns too. Men can be the ones who've been carrying the weight. If your story looks different from what I describe, I hope you'll hear yourself and the principles, not just the pronouns. Now I want to start this episode with something that might actually surprise you. This is not gonna be an episode about blaming men or your partner. I mean that. Because if I'm gonna ask someone else to take accountability, I have to be willing to do the same. And the truth is that doing the work, the real work, the kind that requires looking at yourself honestly, is hard. I know that because I'm still doing it every day. I still have patterns that I'm working through. I still catch myself people pleasing in moments when I should be honest. I still have days when an old version of me wants to take over. I still find conversations that I would genuinely rather avoid. That hasn't changed. What's changed is that I no longer use those things as permission to stay the same. Because I don't want the people that I love paying the price for the work that I'm not willing to do. And I think that that's where today's conversation begins. Not with blame, with choices, and specifically with the question of whose discomfort is being chosen and whose is being avoided, and what happens when those two things stop being shared equally. When the timing is right, when they have reached a certain point, when enough has happened that they're motivated to change. Growth doesn't work like that. Not in my experience and not in anything that I've watched happen. Growth happens when someone decides that staying the same has become more painful than changing. And that is a very different thing from feeling ready. Think about anything difficult that you've ever done. Going to therapy, leaving a relationship, getting sober, going back to school, starting over in a career, setting a boundary with someone you love. None of those things happened because they suddenly became easy. They happened because at some point you decided the discomfort of changing was worth more than the comfort of staying exactly where you were. That's the thing about discomfort. It's unavoidable. Every single one of us is going to experience it. That's not in question. The only question is which discomfort we're going to choose. Because if you go to therapy, you're choosing the discomfort of facing yourself. If you apologize, you're choosing the discomfort of humility. If you challenge beliefs that you've held for years, you're choosing the discomfort of being uncertain. If you set a boundary, you're choosing the discomfort of disappointing someone. Every healthy decision has a cost. The growth is always going to require something. But here's what I want you to really sit with. In unhealthy relationships, and this is the part that I think women recognize immediately, even if they haven't had words for it, one person keeps choosing discomfort while the other person absorbs the cost of it. He avoids the conversation, she carries the loneliness. He avoids therapy, she carries the confusion about what's even happening. He avoids accountability, she carries the self-doubt that maybe she's the problem. He avoids change, she carries the emotional labor of a relationship that only one person is trying to maintain. Do you see what's happening there? The discomfort didn't disappear. It simply got transferred. It moved from one person to another. And that transfer, that quiet, consistent, ongoing transfer is at the heart of what I want to talk about today. Now I want to be careful here because I don't think that most people wake up in the morning thinking, well, how can I make my partner carry my discomfort today? I genuinely don't believe that. I don't think most people wake up wanting life to feel easier, wanting to avoid shame, wanting to avoid looking at parts of themselves that are painful. That's just human. I understand that. But here's where it stops being simply human and starts being a pattern. When avoiding your own discomfort repeatedly creates someone else's suffering, and you continue making the same choice anyway, that's no longer just avoidance. That's a decision. And decisions have consequences. Sometimes women will say to me, Oh, but he's scared. And I believe that. Oh, but he feels ashamed. I believe that too. Oh, but he doesn't know where to start. Yeah, I understand. And I have genuine compassion for all of that. Growth is terrifying. Looking at yourself honestly is one of the hardest things a person can do. I don't minimize any of it. But compassion for someone's fear cannot become permanent permission for someone else's suffering. Because eventually, however unintentionally, we are asking another person to carry the weight of choices that we've decided not to make. And that is not love. That is self-protection at someone else's expense. The discomfort doesn't disappear when someone chooses not to grow. It just moves, it finds somewhere to land. And in relationships where one person keeps choosing comfort, it almost always lands on the person who loves them the most. And I want to address something that I know is sitting in the back of a lot of people's minds right now. Because when I talk about this, I sometimes hear women say, okay, so what am I supposed to do? Just stop communicating, stop trying. And I want to be really clear. No, that is not at all what I'm saying. Healthy relationships require communication. They require honesty. They require us to tell the people we love that something hurts. What I'm talking about is something that happens after the communication, after the honesty, after the conversation. I think there comes a point where you've done your part. You've explained it. You've shared the article that put words into something that you've been feeling for years. You've sent the podcast. You've forwarded the reel. You've recommended the therapist and explained why you think it could help. You even found the phone number and handed it to him. You bought the book. You even highlighted the relevant sections. At some point, you've offered everything you have to offer. And now it is genuinely, legitimately his turn. But what I see so often is women who can't stop there. They keep going, not because they're doing anything wrong, but because they love someone and they desperately want the problem to be solvable. So they become the project manager of someone else's healing. They keep searching for the next thing that will finally make something click. Maybe this creator will reach him. Maybe if I explain it differently, he'll understand. Maybe if I pick a better moment. Maybe if I don't sound so emotional. Maybe if I write it in a text instead of saying it face to face. And I want to challenge that because I don't think that's your job. I think your job is to make sure someone knows the door exists. Whether they walk through it is up to them. Let me give you an analogy that I find really helpful. Imagine someone you care about tells you that they've always wanted to learn Spanish. So you say, Oh, I know a great app, and you send it to them. A few weeks later, they tell you again that they really wish that they could speak Spanish. So you find them a book. A month after that, same conversation. So you locate a tutor. Six months in, you've researched classes, created flashcards, sent encouraging messages every week, and reminded them regularly. And meanwhile, they haven't opened the app. They haven't read the book. They haven't scheduled the tutor. They haven't done a single thing with any of the resources that you've lovingly assembled. All they've done is said, I really wish I knew Spanish. At what point are you no longer helping? At what point have you become more invested in their goal than they are? Relationships can become exactly like that. You keep gathering resources, they keep gathering excuses. And because every excuse sounds perfectly reasonable, he's overwhelmed. He never learned to talk about feelings, he's embarrassed, he doesn't know where to start. You mistake understanding the excuse for evidence that something is about to change. Those are not the same thing. Here's what I've come to believe about this. If you share a resource and he engages with it, if he listens to the podcast and comes back wanting to talk about something, it made him realize, if he reads the book and follows the thread to another book, if he finds a therapist and then starts looking for more tools on his own, that is someone who is genuinely moving. You don't have to chase that. You just watch it happen and feel the relief of not being alone in this. But if the podcast becomes another thing that you have to remind him to listen to, another thing sitting in his I'll get to it pile alongside the book on the nightstand and the therapist he keeps meaning to call, then eventually the question isn't, did I give him enough information? The question becomes, what did he choose to do with the information that he already had? And that question has an answer. You just have to be willing to look at it. One of the healthiest things you can do is stop adding more. Not to punish anyone, not to play games or to send a message, but because if someone truly wants to become healthier, if they are genuinely moving toward growth, they won't need you to keep building the path in front of them. They will start building it themselves. And when that happens, you'll know without any doubt that they're doing it because they chose to, not because you managed them into it. Because I think it is genuinely missing from the conversation when it happens online. Because most of the time, we describe what avoidance looks like. We describe what it sounds like when someone isn't choosing growth. And that's important, and I want women to be able to recognize it. But I also think it's important to describe what ownership actually looks like, what it looks and feels like when someone is genuinely doing this work. Because without that picture, it's hard to know what you're comparing it against. Real change has a quality that I find really distinctive. It is self-directed. No one has to chase it, nobody has to remind it. It doesn't stop with one resource you offered. It follows the thread and finds more. Someone who is genuinely taking ownership of their growth doesn't wait for the next assignment. They come back wanting to tell you what they're learning on their own. They bring new awareness into the conversations that you didn't prompt. They catch themselves in old patterns and name them without you having to point it out first. I know so many people who were terrified to start therapy. They went, anyways, because becoming healthier mattered more to them than staying comfortable. I know people who had never in their lives been good at apologizing, who grew up in homes where no one apologized and it didn't feel like a natural language. They learned anyway. Not because it suddenly felt easy, because they decided the cost of not learning it was higher than the cost of the discomfort. And here's something I think is worth paying attention to. When someone is genuinely in their own growth process, the energy around it just feels different. There is a quality of curiosity rather than performance. They're not trying to convince you that they've changed. They are genuinely interested in understanding themselves better. They're not looking for your applause. They're not tracking whether their effort is being recognized. They're absorbed in the work itself. Compare that to what I call motivated by the crisis. That's when the effort arrives in full force the moment things reach a breaking point, when she finally says she's thinking about leaving, or where there's a rupture so significant that it can't be ignored. Suddenly he's doing everything right. He's present, he's showing up, he's saying all the things, and it can feel genuinely hopeful. But there's a question we're sitting with during those windows. Is he asking, what do I have to do to keep this from falling apart? Or is he asking, who do I need to become, regardless of what she decides? One of those is managing an outcome. The other is doing actual character work. And women can usually feel the difference even when they can't explain it yet. Genuine growth shows up in conflict, too. When you bring something up, what happens? Does he move toward you or away from you? Does the conversation become about your delivery or about the substance of what you said? Does he sit with something uncomfortable about himself? Or does he find a way to explain it away within three minutes? Does he repair after a hard moment? Or does the silence last until you feel it? And here's one of the truest things I know about real sustained change. Eventually, it becomes boring. I know I've said this before, but it is honestly my favorite thing. It's not a bad boring, but a steady, predictable, reliable, boring. You stop wondering which version of him you're getting today. You stop doing the calculation before you say something. You stop bracing when you hear his key and the door. There's a steadiness that develops. And that steadiness, that quiet, ordinary, unexciting reliability, that is what emotional safety actually feels like from the inside. It's not the grand gesture, it's the consistent Tuesday. Real change doesn't need an audience. It doesn't ask you to notice how much it's trying. It just keeps trying when you're watching and when you're not, when things are stable and when they're hard. Not because it's getting credit, but because it genuinely has decided that this is who it wants to be now. Have you become more invested in his healing than he has? Take a minute with that. Pause this if you need and sit with it. I'm not asking to shame you. I'm asking because I had to ask myself that same question at one point, and the answer was one that I did not like. There was a period in my life where I realized that I was reading all the books, listening to every podcast I could find, researching attachment styles, communication frameworks, nervous system regulation, and I told myself I was doing it to grow. I told myself this was my healing. But if I'm being completely honest, I was doing a lot of it because I thought that if I could just understand things clearly enough, if I could finally find the right way to explain it to someone else, if I could just learn it well enough, maybe I could help them understand too. I literally got a whole master's degree around understanding. Do you know what I was actually doing? I was still trying to carry the relationship. It just looked healthier on the outside because I was calling it personal development. And I don't say that to discourage you from learning. Please keep listening to the podcast, keep reading, keep going to therapy, keep becoming the healthiest version of yourself. I mean that with everything in me. But I want to invite you to ask yourself the honest question about your motivation. Are you learning to change yourself? Or are you learning so you can change him? Because those are very different things. One leads to freedom, the other leads to a very specific kind of exhaustion, the kind that comes from doing all the emotional work for two people and slowly resenting both the work and the person who isn't doing their half. I think this is why so many women end up feeling resentful in these situations. And when I say that, I want to be careful because resentment gets treated like it's an ugly emotion, like something to be ashamed of. But resentment is just information. It's what happens when you give more than you have and the ledger stays out of balance for too long. It's the Natural result of noticing every pattern, initiating every hard conversation, scheduling every counseling appointment, finding every resource, sending every podcast, following up on every conversation you started, while the person who says they want to change is still waiting for the next thing you bring them. Without realizing it, you've become the manager of someone else's growth. And here's something that completely changed how I think about this. Adults manage their own growth. Healthy adults don't need another adult to supervise their healing. Support them, yes. Encourage them, absolutely. Celebrate them when they make true progress, of course. But manage them? No. Because the moment I take responsibility for making sure you're changing, I am carrying something that was never mine to carry. Think about your own life. Has anyone ever actually forced you to change? Really? Maybe someone inspired you, maybe someone challenged you or loved you enough to tell you a hard truth, but at the end of the day, you made the decision. Nobody could have done that work on your behalf, nobody could have gone to therapy for you, sat with your shame for you, challenged your thinking for you. You had to choose it. Every single day, you had to keep choosing it. So why do we believe it's our job to make someone else choose it? I think it's because it feels safer. If I keep helping, maybe I still have some control over the outcome. If I keep explaining, maybe this will finally be the thing that clicks. If I keep trying, maybe I won't have to face the possibility that he simply isn't choosing it. And facing that possibility, really facing it, is heartbreaking. But avoiding the heartbreak doesn't change the reality. It just delays it. And while you're delaying it, you're still carrying everything. Here's something I've observed over and over with the women I work with. The ones who finally begin finding peace aren't necessarily the ones whose partners changed. They're the ones who stopped standing between their partner and the natural consequences of not changing. They stopped rescuing, stopped translating, stopped reminding, stopped carrying the weight of someone else's growth on top of their own. Not because they stopped loving, but because they finally understood something that takes most of us a long time to accept. If I keep doing this work, if I keep managing, reminding, researching, explaining, and following up, he will never have to. And if he never has to, nothing changes. Sometimes the most loving thing you can do is step out of the way and let someone experience the full weight of their own choices. Not to punish them, but because you finally understood that you cannot want someone else's healing more than they do. I think one of the most painful mistakes we make in long relationships is believing that time is what changes people. It isn't. Choices change people. Time simply reveals those choices. And there's a significant difference between those two things because one of them requires something from him and the other just requires you to keep waiting. I've heard women say, and my heart genuinely breaks every time. I feel grief because somewhere along the way, waiting became a strategy. And waiting isn't a strategy, it's time passing. And while the time passes, something is happening to her, something important. And we'll come back to that. But imagine your partner comes to you tonight and he says the words, I know I've hurt you. I know I haven't shown up the way I should have. I know things need to change. Those are genuinely beautiful words. They really are. But tomorrow morning, he has a choice. The next day, he has a choice. The day after that, another choice. Does he schedule the therapy appointment? Or does he think he'll do it next week? Does he sit with the discomfort of hearing something unflattering about himself? Or does he find a way to explain it away? Does he come back to the conversation you started? Or does he hope you'll just let it go? Those are the moments that matter. Not because any single choice determines the future, but because repeated choices become patterns, and patterns tell the truth. Here's something I hear constantly from women. But he keeps telling me he wants this. And I believe he probably does want that outcome. I don't think most people are intentionally dishonest when they say things like that. They genuinely want a happier relationship. They genuinely want more connection. They genuinely want peace. They just don't want the process. They want a healthier marriage, but not therapy. They want more connection, but not the vulnerability that creates it. They want forgiveness, but not real accountability. They want peace without the discomfort of examining why there hasn't been any. And here's the thing: we understand this in every other area of life. Nobody says, oh, I want to run a marathon and then expects to wake up one morning and be able to run 26 miles without ever leasing up their shoes before. Nobody says, oh, I want to speak another language while never practicing. Nobody says, I want to be a great musician while refusing to pick up an instrument. We all understand intuitively that desire is not the same as effort, that wanting something is the beginning, not the middle, and definitely not the end. But somehow, when it comes to relationships, we let intentions count as effort. We mistake hope for movement. We hear, oh, I want to change, and we treat it as though change has already begun. And sometimes maybe it has, and sometimes it most definitely hasn't. And the way you know the difference isn't by counting the statements, it's by watching the choices that follow them. Now I want to be careful here because I'm not talking about perfection. Someone who's genuinely changing is still gonna mess up. They're still gonna get defensive sometimes, they're still gonna forget things, old habits are going to surface in moments of stress. That's part of being human. The question isn't, does he ever get it wrong? The question is, what does he do after he gets it wrong? Does he take responsibility without you having to drag it out of him? Does he become curious about why it happened? Does he repair? Or does the same cycle simply repeat on a slightly longer timer? Because that's where the answer lives. Not imperfection, in direction. I remember something I heard years ago, and I don't remember who said it, but it has genuinely stayed with me. People don't drift into health, they drift into dysfunction. Health requires intention, it requires awareness, it requires choosing things that don't necessarily feel good in the moment, precisely because you've decided the long-term matters more than the short-term comfort. That is true for me, it is true for you, and it is true for him, which is why I want to push back on something that I hear so often. Oh, he's just not ready. Maybe, but while he's not ready, while he's still deciding whether or not he wants to do this, what is happening to you? What is happening to your nervous system, to your confidence, to your peace, to your joy, to the life that you're supposed to be living? Because while he's delaying a decision, you're still living in the consequences of it. That is not a small thing. That is your one precious life passing. And I know the question underneath all of this. I know it's the one sitting in the back of your mind, even if you haven't let yourself say it out loud yet. How long do I wait? I want to give you an honest answer, not a timeline, because I don't think timelines are what matters here, but a real one. First, not until you hate him. I say that because I've watched women use hate as the signal that it's finally okay to leave. Like they need to feel something extreme enough to justify the decision. But here's the problem with that hate still centers him. Waiting until you hate someone is still organizing your whole life around your reaction to them. And the woman that I want you to become, the one who's doing her own work, building her own life, choosing her own peace, she doesn't need to hate anyone to know that she deserves more than this. The answer to how long do I wait is actually much quieter than most people expect. You'll know it's time not when you feel angry enough to justify it, but when you've done enough of your own work that you've realized that you simply have no interest in waiting anymore. Not because you've given up on love, but because you've finally shown up enough for yourself that the idea of putting your life on hold for someone else's decisions feels genuinely deeply wrong. That is a different feeling than resentment. Resentment is still reactive. It's about him. What I'm describing is about you. It's the quiet clarity that comes when a woman has done enough of her own healing that she finally knows, not just intellectually, but in her body, what she's worth. And what she's worth is not a life lived in a waiting room. Sometimes we become so focused on understanding why someone else isn't changing that we stop asking ourselves what this waiting is costing us, not financially, not practically, emotionally. Who are you becoming while you wait? Are you becoming more grounded, more connected to yourself, more at peace? Or are you becoming smaller, more anxious, more doubtful, more exhausted? Because those questions bring the focus back to the only life that you actually have control over. When I recorded that very first episode, if it were really abuse, I'd know, right? I genuinely believed that the biggest challenge women faced was recognition. That if they could just see clearly what was happening, everything else would follow. I don't think that anymore. I think the hardest part isn't recognizing the behavior. I think the hardest part is accepting what the behavior means. Because once you stop explaining it away, once you stop minimizing it, once you stop telling yourself maybe next month, maybe after vacation, maybe once work slows down, maybe after he listens to that podcast, you're left with something much harder. Reality. And reality doesn't always feel kind. Sometimes the reality is he really does love you. And he's still not choosing to grow. Sometimes the reality is he feels genuine shame about what's happened, and he's still not choosing to grow. Sometimes the reality is he genuinely doesn't want to hurt you. He really truly doesn't. And he's still not choosing to grow. Those things can all be true simultaneously because love and willingness are not the same thing. Good intentions and repeated choices are not the same thing. One of the things that I've learned over years of this work is that we often give people credit for the person that they're trying to become while forgetting to pay attention to the person that they're consistently choosing to be. We fall in love with potential. We stay because of possibility. We wait because of promises. But relationships are lived in reality, not in possibility. And eventually, all the possibility in the world cannot fill the gap between who someone could be and who they're actually showing up as. Let me offer you a picture of this. Imagine someone who tells you that they desperately want to become physically healthy. They talk about it constantly. They buy workout clothes, they watch fitness videos, they tell everyone around them, Monday is the day. Monday comes, nothing changes. Tuesday, nothing changes. The next Monday, same conversation, same enthusiasm, same intentions, same outcome. Would you eventually start believing that they don't actually want to be healthy? No, you'd probably land on something more accurate. They want the outcome. But they aren't choosing the process, and the process is the only thing that produces the outcome. There is no other way. Relationships work the exact same way. Someone can desperately want a healthy marriage, they can desperately want you not to leave, can desperately want the loneliness and the disconnection to stop. But if they're not choosing the uncomfortable, unglamorous daily process of becoming a healthier person, the outcome they're hoping for becomes unreachable. Not because you're withholding it from them, because outcomes don't change relationships. Choices do. And here's what I want to land today. You don't have to spend the rest of your life trying to figure out whether someone else is going to choose growth. That is their work, not yours. Your work, the only work that belongs to you, is deciding what you are going to choose. Are you going to choose yourself? Are you going to choose your peace? Are you going to choose honesty about what you're actually experiencing rather than what you've been promised? Are you going to believe the pattern that you're consistently living in rather than the potential that you keep being reminded of? Because those are choices too. And they matter just as much. Now I know some of you listening are still in the relationship, and I want to say something specifically to you because I don't want today's episode to land as, well, stop communicating or give up. That is not what I'm saying. Communicate. Tell the truth. Share your heart. If you find a resource that puts word to something that you've been trying to explain, share it, offer it. Sometimes that is genuinely one of the most loving things that you can do. Sometimes people need someone to point them toward the door. But once you have pointed toward the door, step back. Watch what happens. Not to test him, not as a game, but because you deserve to know what he's going to choose to do when the choice is fully and clearly his. If he walks through it on his own, that's a different thing than if you have to push him through it every week. One of those things belongs to him. The other one is still yours to carry. Because real change is curious. Real change keeps looking. It doesn't stop with one thing you sent. It follows the thread and finds more. It asks questions. It comes back wanting to share what it's learned instead of waiting for the next assignment. It takes ownership. Not because ownership is being demanded, but because the person has genuinely decided that they don't want to keep causing harm. That's what it looks like. And it has a quality that's very hard to fake over time. I know change is possible. I know because I'm living it. I am not the same woman I was 10 years ago. And I am genuinely not even the same woman I was when I started this podcast. I am still uncovering patterns. I am still catching old versions of myself trying to take over. I am still choosing discomfort over avoidance on a regular basis, not because I love it, but because I don't want the people I love paying the price for the work I'm unwilling to do. That is my responsibility. His healing is his and yours, yours belongs to you. So if there's one thing I hope you take away from today, it is this. Start paying attention to what he's choosing because every single day we are all making choices. Some choices move us toward healthier relationships, some move us further away. Some require real, honest courage. Some simply keep us comfortable, but every choice has a cost. The question is, who is paying for it? And for a very long time, you've been paying for choices that were never yours. Thank you for spending this time with me today. I truly say that with all of my heart. This episode came from something that I have been thinking about for a very long time, and I am so grateful to have this space where I can say it honestly. If this conversation made you think of someone that you love, someone who has been quietly carrying the weight of another person's choices without anyone naming what's happening, I hope you'll share it with her. Sometimes one conversation is all it takes to help someone see their situation a little more clearly. And sometimes hearing something said out loud finally by someone who understands it is the beginning of something. And if you're finding yourself at the place where you know you're ready to stop overfunctioning, ready to stop carrying the relationship by yourself, and start rebuilding the relationship that you have with yourself, I would love to support you inside of our 12-week program or even individual sessions. This is the work we do together, not changing someone else, helping you reconnect with yourself, rebuild your confidence, and break the patterns that have been costing you far more than they should. All of the details are on my socials or at patternbreakerscollective.com. And if you haven't yet, please leave a review wherever you listen. 60 Seconds, it helps other women find this space when they're searching for something they can't quite name yet. Until next time, remember this.