How to Stop Abandoning Yourself In Relationships

Self abandonment in relationships (whether romantic, with friends or with family) doesn't happen all at once. It happens in small moments - one compromise at a time - until one day you don't recognise yourself anymore.

In this episode I share what it actually looked like when I lost myself, why we do it (and it's not weakness), and the specific steps I took to come back to myself that you can use too. Including what I did during three years of choosing myself completely.

If you've ever built your entire life around a relationship and lost sight of who you actually are - this one is for you.

Apply for 1:1 coaching: https://77z9uh9ts6v.typeform.com/to/p3IrXlMi
Follow on Instagram: @jessica_tiana_

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome back to the role model you never had. I'm Jess, trauma-informed, strength and identity coach, former crisis counselor, and the woman who rebuilds her body and her life from the ground up. Here's what I believe with everything I have. Your body is the foundation of your healing. Not the destination, not the goal, the foundation. It's the place where everything else starts. The first place where you stop abandoning yourself and start becoming her. That is the movement we're building here for women who have survived everything and are done just getting through it. Women who are ready to stop surviving and start becoming the role model they never had for themselves first, and then for every woman watching who needs to see that it's possible. Every episode, we're going to talk about the real stuff, the stuff that's underneath the fat loss goals, the fitness routines, and the I'm finds you keep telling everyone, your nervous system, your identity, the relationships that shaped you, and the woman that you are becoming. No toxic positivity, just conversations that actually change things. And today we're talking about something that I've lived deeply, something I see in almost every woman I work with, and something that I think honestly nobody talks about enough. How to stop abandoning yourself in relationships. Not just the toxic ones, any relationship where you've slowly, quietly stopped showing up for yourself. Let's start by talking about what self-abandonment actually looks like. Primarily, it looks like ignoring your gut. That feeling that something is wrong that you keep pushing down because you don't want to make it a thing. It looks like dropping everything to be available for someone to the point where you can't function or focus on your own life anymore. It looks like apologizing constantly, even when you did nothing wrong, taking the blame for things that were not your fault. It looks like cutting off friendships because someone, like your partner, was insecure and made you feel bad about it, even though you were completely transparent and had clear boundaries with people in your life. It looks like not sitting in your favorite spot on the couch because that was his spot, and you would rather just not sit there and deal with a tantrum from a grown man. Not eating what you wanted, not going to sleep when you needed to, not getting up early to sit outside in the summer because he was sleeping and you didn't want to disturb him. I remember being at my grandma's place. My favorite place on this planet. I have the coordinates tattooed on my ribs, and my dad was there. We spent all of my childhood up there in the summers. My grandma's place was a five-minute walk from the beach. I got up early and went and sat with my dad outside, the way I always had. And my dad looked at me and said, He's wasting your life. Why aren't you at the beach right now? You're always at the beach at this time. And I said, He's sleeping. And my dad continued to say, He's wasting your life. And I knew he was right, but I was attached and I stayed anyways. I abandoned something that was a core part of my childhood. The only thing that gives me any sense of peace to this day is sitting on that beach. And in that relationship, I neglected to do the very thing that was a staple in my life. It looks like giving up your travel goals, not planning anything for your future, building everything around the relationship until one day you realize you lost sight of what you actually want. It looks like not sharing your dreams because every time you did, all you got back was criticism. And then when you stopped sharing, you were made out to feel like you were hiding things. Self-abandonment doesn't happen all at once. It happens in small moments in your day-to-day. One compromise at a time, until one day you don't recognize yourself anymore. And do you want to know what drives this process of self-abandonment? It's often driven by fear. Fear of abandonment, fear of rejection. Especially if you grew up in an environment where love felt conditional, where you had to earn it or perform it in order to keep it. In those environments, your nervous system learns that your needs are a threat to connection. So you learn to people please, to fawn, to shrink yourself, to put yourself last so the relationship would survive and somebody wouldn't leave you. Because if they left you, it meant that you were unlovable. This is a huge driving factor of anxious attachment, by the way. And for a lot of women, it started long before any romantic relationship. It started in your childhood. In learning that expressing your needs created conflict or distance or withdrawal from your parents. Or maybe not your biological parents, but whatever parental figure you had that was modeling behavior for you. So you stopped expressing your needs. And that pattern followed you into every relationship after. And sometimes we don't realize this until we get into a toxic relationship and we look back and say, oh, well, that makes a lot of sense. That person is just like my dad, or that person is just like my mom. Understanding this though doesn't excuse bad behavior from partners. Please do not use this to justify somebody's poor treatment of you. What this does do is explain why you kept going back to those relationships that you knew were harming you, where somebody wasn't treating you right, why you kept apologizing. Why, yeah, leaving felt impossible. Even when you knew in your gut something was deeply wrong. Your nervous system was choosing the familiar over what was actually healthy for you because familiar felt like survival. Like you needed that, or you wouldn't be able to function. And now you're probably sitting there thinking, okay, so I understand why I was abandoning myself, why I became a people pleaser, and maybe how this may have shown up in my life when I reflect back on my relationships. But how do I actually stop the process of self-abandonment? And don't worry, I have some steps for you to follow because I've lived this and I know what it actually takes to come back from this cycle of self-abandonment. So step one, you're going to name what you're giving up. You cannot reclaim what you haven't named. So I want you to start paying attention to the small things. Like the examples of the couch, not going to bed on time, the beach at your grandma's place, whatever nostalgic place you have in your own life that you neglect to go to or people you neglect to spend time with because of a partner or toxic friends or whoever. Write them down so you can see the pattern. Because I promise you, when you look at the list, it's going to be a lot bigger than you thought. And sometimes we need to be slapped in the face with the truth. Step two, learn how to communicate your needs with specifics. This is a skill most of us were never taught. Expressing what you need in a relationship without apologizing it, without framing it as a problem, without making yourself smaller in the asking. If you're a people pleaser, this is going to be one of your most important steps. And as a recovering people pleaser, I know what it's like to not express my needs and how difficult it can feel because you don't want to hurt the other person's feelings. You don't want to feel bad. You don't want to be consumed by the guilt because sometimes it can derail your entire day. And you'll sit there and be overcome with thoughts thinking that somebody hates you. So here's what it actually looks like in practice so you can break that cycle. I'll give you a recent example from my own life. I sat down with my partner and had a real conversation about what I needed our life to look like. I talked about our bedtime routine, what I needed to wind down properly, how much time I needed to wind down at the end of the night. I talked about having a Sunday reset, what I needed to do on that day, specifically reviewing my fitness goals because I coach myself, meal prepping, how much time I need to decompress again before Monday starts, time for personal development goals. I talked about having allocated time for my friends, that was mine, and I didn't need to be negotiated every week. I wrote all of this down in a journal, and my partner took a picture of it to make sure that he could support me with those tasks. That's a need communicated clearly, specifically, and without an apology. I know, for example, that my highest functioning hours intellectually are between 6 a.m. and 10 a.m. or 11 a.m. And then I hit a wall. My brain needs a break, and then I come alive again at the end, end of the day. I need those blocks of time in order to get my best work done. That is a non-negotiable for me now. And if something interferes with that, well, see you later. You don't belong here. I'm never sorry for needing time for myself and communicating those needs now. Because I've learned the hard way that not expressing those needs keeps you stuck in toxic cycles. So now I explain what the need is and why it matters. And a partner who responds to that with defensiveness or minimizing is giving you important information too. A partner who hears it and works with you is showing you something as well. Pay attention to how they respond because you want somebody who is going to take that information and say, okay, how can I best support you in doing this? They should not be making you feel bad for having needs, especially when it comes to things like your livelihood or your health. If they are minimizing, and this, I will say, doesn't just extend to romantic partners. This is family and friendships as well. If you're somebody who falls into like that anxious attachment, anxious avoidant dynamic in relationships where you're the one who needs constant reassurance and the other person is constantly pulling away, that will show up in your friendships as well. One of my best friends, the feelings I had when I was friends with her were the exact same feelings that I experienced in toxic relationships. And your friends are not supposed to make you feel that way. So communicating your needs with specifics applies to more than just your romantic relationships. If that person is minimizing you, they are not the right person for you to have in your life. Remember that. Okay, step three after you've communicated your needs, trust your gut and stop talking yourself out of it. Because I know we all do that. Stop apologizing and talking yourself out of it because you're worried you're gonna hurt someone's feelings. I am currently reading a book called The Gift of Fear. It's about survival signals and how intuitive our gut actually is. And one of the things it talks about is how women specifically are conditioned to override their instincts, to give people the benefit of the doubt, to not want to seem rude or paranoid or difficult, and how people who want to manipulate or harm you will use exactly that tendency against you. If you are with somebody who is toxic and manipulative, abusive, they are aware of these things and they will use them against you. Your gut is not being dramatic. Your gut is your nervous system picking up on information that your conscious brain hasn't fully processed yet. It is an ancient biological threat detection system and it is accurate. You need to trust it. When something feels wrong, it's worth paying attention to. Not spiraling about, not making accusations, just sitting with it, naming it, and asking yourself honestly, what is my gut trying to tell me right now, and have I been listening to it? And then I want you to think about the last time you had a gut feeling about something, maybe a month, two months, six months, a year, however long went by, and you look back and you said, I should have listened to my gut. My gut was right. That is something that I've learned. When I get a gut feeling about something, I get frickin' scared because it's always been right. And I used to not listen to it. Listen to your gut. It will save you from being involved in really toxic situations. Step four protect your own life, your friendships, your goals, your sleep, your Sunday mornings. If that's when you want to have peace and quiet, the things that were yours before the relationship. Keep them and protect them actively. Practically, this looks like sitting down and actually scheduling your life. Having a conversation again with your partner about when you see each other so you both have clarity and you're not constantly negotiating your own time. Having non-negotiable time for your friends that isn't contingent on his mood or his schedule. Having allocated time to your goals, your business, your health. This isn't up for discussion. Your life and your goals, your health are non-negotiable. Stop treating them like they are. A partner who is threatened by your individual life is showing you something important. You need to take that information seriously. And step five, reinvest in your body and your health. This one again, super non-negotiable. This one is 100% non-negotiable for me. When you are abandoning yourself in a relationship, your body is the first thing to go. It is the first thing that sends you signals that you are abandoning yourself and that something is off, something is toxic for you. So your sleep, movement, nutrition, money that used to go toward your health starts going towards things that don't actually nourish you. Reinvesting in your body is a form of self-reclamation. Investing in a coach or a program, choosing whole foods over convenience, protecting your sleep, moving your body consistently. These are not small things. They are how you come back to yourself physically. And from that physical foundation, everything else gets clearer. After the relationships that cost me the most, I made a pact with myself that I was going to be selfish. Not in a harmful way, in a this is my time way. I was single for three years, and I used every single one of them to reinvest in myself. I traveled solo, I went to France, I went to Greece. All the places I had put on hold that were at the top of my bucket list. I invested more into my education, got more certifications, I invested in a business coach, I invested in sales training. Every dollar that used to go toward making a relationship work started going toward building my own life instead. I focused heavily on rebuilding my body, nourishing properly, training consistently. I ran a half marathon. I learned how to fuel for that and support my body through it. My body became something I was proud of again, and not because of how it looked, but because of what it could do. I made time for my friends and their families. I didn't bring any men around my friend group because that was my allocated time, my intimate circle, and I did not want any toxic memories with potential toxic man because that was my pattern at the time to ruin any of these any of these memories for me. My relationships with the women in my life got stronger than they had been in years. And I temporarily switched careers to finance to give myself a mental health break before going back into a role where I was supporting others full-time. I recognized that I needed to not be pouring from my professional self for a while. And I made sure that the people around me were actually aligned with growth. People who wanted to build something, who encouraged me rather than minimized me. And even last year, I cut off, again, if you listen to one of my other podcast episodes about the friends who let you die, I cut off my entire group of university friends who I had built all my memories with in the last five, six, seven years. I didn't have any support from them in the ways that actually mattered to me the most. I had had several I had several conversations with one of those girls in particular about what I needed as a friend to feel good in our friendship. And then if you remember that episode, there was a lot of other big things that happened too. And I realized that those people were not aligned with me. And I always pictured when I looked five, 10 years in the future, I did not see these people standing there with me. I didn't know who I saw standing there with me, but I knew it wasn't going to be those people. I knew that I had hit my ceiling with these people. They had served a purpose in my life. If you've heard the term or the expression, people come into your life for a reason, a season, and a lifetime. These people were in my life for a reason and a season to teach me some lessons about what I would accept in friendships and to not lose sight of my own value and to support me through a really difficult season. I had people I could lean on when I was healing from my abusive relationships. But once I outgrew that identity of that survivor and that victim, I no longer aligned with these people. And sometimes people will want to keep you small. It's okay to let go of those people. But overall, that is what my reclamation looked like in a nutshell. It wasn't one big moment. It was a thousand small choices to choose myself over and over every single day, even on the days where I didn't feel like it, the days that I felt suicidal, the days where I couldn't eat anything, the days where I just wanted to lay in bed and cry all day, until choosing myself started to feel more natural than abandoning myself ever did. As usual, you know I'm not gonna leave you without some piece of homework so you can actually implement and learn and stop abandoning yourself. So, what you're gonna do this time is you're gonna name one thing that you've been giving away. Just one. If it's helpful to pick one specific relationship that you want to reference, you can do that. One of your romantic relationship, a friendship, relationship with your mom or your dad, even your relationship with your workplace. Just one thing and write it down so you can see it clearly. And then ask yourself what it would look like to take it back. Because again, you can't reclaim something that you haven't named. And you cannot become the role model you never had while you're still abandoning the woman who needs her the most. And if this episode hit close to home and you're ready to stop abandoning yourself, the link to apply for one-to-one coaching is in the show notes. This is exactly the work that we do together. Everything that I support you with, the nervous system work, the strength training, the nutrition, rebuilding your identity so you can become the role model you never had is all stuff that I've studied, it's all stuff that I've worked on with clients, it's all stuff that I have used to actively rebuild my life. It is tried and tested, and it makes a difference. And remember, every no to what drains you is a powerful yes to yourself. Your body is the foundation of your healing. I'll see you next episode.