Self-Neglect is a Form of Self-Betrayal

We often think betrayal comes from other people—a broken promise, a lie, or someone walking away. But what if the greatest betrayal is the one we commit against ourselves?

In this episode, we're taking an honest look in the mirror. Every time we ignore our own needs, silence our voice, abandon our boundaries, or put ourselves last, we send ourselves a painful message: everyone else matters more than I do.

Self-neglect doesn't always look dramatic. Sometimes it looks like chronic exhaustion, skipping doctor's appointments, never taking a day off, saying "yes" when your soul is screaming "no," or believing you'll finally take care of yourself after everyone else's needs are met.

The truth is, every act of self-neglect is a withdrawal from your own emotional, physical, and mental well-being. And over time, those withdrawals become self-betrayal.

In this episode, we'll explore:

• How self-neglect quietly becomes a lifestyle.
• The hidden ways we betray ourselves every day.
• Why guilt keeps us stuck in unhealthy patterns.
• The difference between selflessness and self-abandonment.
• Practical action steps to begin rebuilding trust with yourself.

Because healing doesn't begin when everyone else changes. It begins the moment you decide that you deserve the same love, care, grace, and protection you've been so freely giving away to everyone else.

Mirror Moment: Where in your life have you been abandoning yourself in the name of being available to everyone else? What is one promise you can make to yourself today—and actually keep?

Remember... every time you honor your own needs, you restore trust with the person you'll spend the rest of your life with: yourself.

TEDX 2017 - The Gift of No - https://bit.ly/thegiftofno2017

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

We spend so much time talking about toxic people that we rarely stop to ask a harder question. What if the most toxic relationship in your life, our lives, my life, is the one that we have with ourselves? If you're constantly putting yourself last, ignoring your own needs, speaking negatively to yourself, running on empty and convincing yourself that you'll rest one day. You may be participating in your own burnout. This episode isn't about shame, it's about awareness because sometimes the person crossing your boundaries is you. Today we're uncovering the subtle ways we sabotage ourselves through poor self-care, broken promises to ourselves, and the belief that everyone deserves our best except us. It's time to stop surviving yourself and start showing up for yourself. Let's get started. Well, hello, and welcome back to another episode of the Life Diet 365. I am your host, Miss Straight Talk, and I'm looking forward to this episode because this is an episode that I've actually had to live for myself. I've actually had to take that look in the mirror and ask myself, am I doing more harm to myself? Am I caring more about others than I am for myself? And so this is a very personal episode for me. And I hope that you're able to gain whatever it is that you need from this episode to take care of yourself first before you start taking care of others. And I have this motto that I always say, I'm not here to change your mind. I only want to offer you another perspective. And today's perspective might sting a little. Maybe some other ones have stung too, but this one's gonna sting as well. And so before we point the finger at everyone who has been draining us, as we have discussed in previous episodes, we've talked about, you know, work relationship, friendships, families. You know, I want us to consider someone else, another person. And that's the person staring back at you in the mirror. What if you've become the most toxic person in your life? Had you ever considered that? Let let that sit there for a while. You know, what if you have become the most toxic person in your life? Not because you're evil, not because you're selfish, but because you've made a habit of abandoning yourself. We and it doesn't seem like we're abandoning ourselves because it's something that happens very subtle. And when we when we hear the word toxic, we immediately think of someone else. You know, we think about that coworker or the the difficult family member, which we all have. So if you think that you're the only person to have difficult family members or your family's crazy, everybody got somebody crazy in their family, so you can let that myth go. Some of us have, you know, very demanding friendships, but toxicity isn't always something done to us. Sometimes it's something we repeatedly do to ourselves. Every time we ignore exhaustion, anytime we cancel ourselves, you know, cancel on ourselves and never on anyone else. When I say cancel on ourselves, meaning you may have made a commitment to do something. You know, for instance, a couple of weeks ago, I was supposed to join a walking group, and I was excited about going and had convinced myself that morning I was going to go. But then later on that day, it rained. Well, that morning it rained. And it, I mean, it rained all day. But about the time that it came time to go walking, it was clear and it was probably pretty dry, and the walk probably went on. But I convinced myself that I didn't want to get out there just in case it rained again. I didn't want to deal with traffic. See, that's a sign of us canceling on ourselves. But if someone else had asked me to do it and I was doing it with them, I probably would have kept the commitment. And so that's what I mean by we cancel on ourselves and not anyone else. You know, every time we, you know, we eat whatever's convenient, we just tell ourselves, we'll start the next day, or I'll do better tomorrow. Raise your hand. And if you're driving, not the hand you're driving with, but raise your hand. How many times have have you said that, have have you done that? And we always say we're gonna start tomorrow, we're gonna start on Monday, or I'm gonna start next month, or I'm gonna start in the new year. We keep putting things off when it comes to um taking care of ourselves. And every time we say yes, um when and our spirit is screaming no, like everything in us is screaming, like we we gotta do better. And we know that we have to do better. I think every time I try to put on, you know, my favorite pair of jeans, I say to myself, okay, I'm gonna stop eating them cupcakes. And the next thing you know, somebody has an event, and what do they have? Cupcakes. And so we we teach ourselves a painful lesson. And that lesson is I don't matter as much as everyone else does. I'm gonna say that again. When we when we do these things, we're teaching ourselves a painful lesson that we don't matter. We don't matter to ourselves, you know, everyone else matters more. And so self-taught self-sabotage, and that's what we're talking about, because that's pretty much what it is. Self-neglect is a form of self-betrayal, but it's it's self-sabotage, and it doesn't always look dramatic. You know, we think that it's about you know something big or something major. But most self-sabotage isn't loud, it's quiet. It sounds like I'll skip breakfast, I don't have time to walk today. I'll get some rest later. I gotta keep moving, I gotta do this. Or if you're working on something, I don't need a break, I need to finish. I'll I'll I'll deal with everything after this project, or I'll deal with everything after this happens, or whatever. I'll make myself a priority once everyone else is okay. Now listen to that. Listen if listen to that again once I make sure that everyone else is okay. But then you're putting all that out for everyone else, but you're ignoring yourself. And slowly but surely you're causing there's headaches, there's stress, there's things happening internally, and then they show up as big items, but we never really go back to see, hey, where did all of this begin? And the problem, everyone else eventually becomes okay. And we never do. We never do. We end up sitting in a doctor's office with the blood pressure cuff on our arm or in the lab getting blood work done to find out what's going on with us. That's where you have to stop. You have to stop and you ask yourself, what have I been doing? That's been ignoring myself, ignoring my health, ignoring my eating, that I got to this point. And broken promises create broken trust. You know, imagine having a friend who constantly promised to show up and never did. Eventually you wouldn't trust him. No one would. Now think about how many promises you've broken to yourself. Going back to what I said earlier about my promise to myself about going in this, participating in this walking group. How many promises have I broken to myself? How many promises have you broken to yourself? I tell myself all the time I'm going to exercise. And I don't. I'm so guilty of that. I go through the whole mental rehearsal. I got to get up early, I gotta put on workout clothes, and you know, then I got, you know, all of these excuses that we make. And then my biggest one is I'm going to rest. Now I'm gonna say this. Now I do admit that I push myself a little bit, but when I know that I need rest and I know that I have been moving too much, I will absolutely sit myself down and I will just lounge out, which means I'm just gonna lay on the couch. Especially those who say they're gonna drink more water. Let's talk about drinking that water. Think it's amazing. I've heard people say, Well, I don't like the taste of water. I need to have flavor. Well, you don't really have to drink water, you can get the water that you need from fruits and vegetables. And when I learned that, I started consuming more fruits that were high in water content, more vegetables that were high in water content because it's really about cell hydration and not about looking at a measurement on your water jug to see how much water you put in that day because it just flushes right out. But you want to hydrate your cells. So I learned to drink more water that way. You know, I'm gonna take my vacation. Now it's not hard for me to take time off from work. It is not hard for me to take time from work, but it is hard for some people because all they think about is the people at work who need them, the things that's on their desk that need to be done. And if they're not done by them, they think that the world will fall apart, the company will crumble. No, no, no, no, no, no. They'll go on. So you know what? Go ahead and take that vacation. Um, stop answering those work emails after hours we talked about in a video a video, a conversation before. The thing you have to do is you just have to say, I'm going to make more time for myself. Make more time for yourself. One of the greatest forms of self-care is rebuilding trust with yourself. And you may not think about it as not trusting yourself, but things are subtle. And when they start to form into the habit, that's when we have to look back and say, hey, where did all this begin? Where did this start? Where did I start not believing in myself and trusting in myself and better and better yet, not taking care of myself? And you know, at the end of the day, you're not just tired, you're underfed in every area of your life. And you know, sometimes the problem isn't that we're physically tired, we're emotionally dehydrated. When we have a lot going on and we're just continuing to move and we're thinking about this, and we got this coming up and that coming up, and we have this event, and that we got to go take care of this, and you become emotionally dehydrated, mentally exhausted, spiritually empty. We've been pouring and pouring and pouring without re ever refilling our picture. No wonder we're always running on fumes. And so the the hard thing for us to accept is that no one can love you enough to make up for the ways that you're neglecting yourself. So that means that you know, while you're out there making sure everyone else is taken care of, no one can love you enough to make up for the ways that you've neglected yourself. So you've made sure everyone else is fine, but you've been neglected, and none of that is gonna be reciprocated back to you. No amount of encouragement, no motivational quote. I know we're we're just you know overburdened with motivational quotes. And while I'm not knocking them, they're great, it's a great nugget to hold on to, but that's not gonna refill your cup. No great boss, no wonderful friends can replace your responsibility to take care of you. And you know what? That's your assignment. So today and every day, I want you to ask yourself a couple of questions. Where have I or where am I abandoning myself? That means that you've left yourself sitting in the corner somewhere just waiting until you get back, until you get back from taking care of everyone else. Waiting until you get back from work or waiting from just waiting. You just put yourself in a corner and said, I'll I'll get back to you later. What promise to myself have I been postponing? Now, for me, my postponement has been working out, and I've got to get better. So, this conversation, like I said, is about me and for me that I'm sharing with you. And what unhealthy habit have I normalized? Uh, what does my body need from me today? Sometimes our body just needs for us to sit still and shut everything down, shut our minds down, shut our phones off, shut the television off, and just sit still. If I've treated my best friend the way I treat myself, would we still be friends? Some of these answers, and you may not even get to all of them, but some of these answers may actually change your life. So, what I want to say in closing is remember sometimes the greatest detox isn't removing another person, sometimes it's removing the habits, excuses, and beliefs that keep you disconnected from yourself. Because healing isn't just about who you let who you let go, it's also about who you finally decide to become. And every healthy decision you make is one more way of saying, I deserve to be cared for too. This has been another episode of Life Diet 365. Take care. And just like that, another conversation, another perspective, and hopefully another step toward reclaiming yourself. Listen, every time you say yes to everybody else at the expense of yourself, you are teaching people that your boundaries are negotiable. Listen, constantly sacrificing yourself to keep everybody else comfortable will eventually leave you emotionally bankrupt. You do not have to arrest, apologize for protecting your peace, or explain every boundary you set. Because around here, we don't say no with guilt, we say it with clarity. Until next time, protect your peace, guard your energy, and remember what drains you will never sustain. This has been the Life Diamond365 Podcast with Mr. Great Talk. Thanks for listening, and I hope you will subscribe and join me the next time. Take care. Bye bye.