Ep. 31 Self Abandonment As A Midlife Woman (And Why You Keep Playing Small)

Self abandonment is one of the most common patterns running underneath the surface for midlife women — and most of them don't even know it has a name.

If you've ever downplayed a win the second someone noticed it, apologized for taking up space, or told yourself to just get over a feeling that was actually real — that's not modesty. That's not personality. That's self abandonment. And it's been running a lot longer than you realize.

In this episode of The Emotional Truth, we're naming what self abandonment actually is, where it gets installed in the body, and what it feels like when you finally catch yourself shrinking instead of expanding.

I also share why I renamed this show from The Intuitive Drop to The Emotional Truth — and honestly, the real reason wasn't just strategy. It was that I launched something real and still found a way to hold back how loudly I said it. Same pattern I see in clients who are quietly succeeding in their careers but won't let anyone know. Same pattern that's been running since I was a kid learning it was safer to stay in the background of my own life.

This is body based healing in action — not as a concept, but as something you can feel in real time when you notice yourself getting small.

What we cover in this episode:

Why self abandonment gets installed early — and it's not just one reason. The nervous system regulation piece that most people miss when they're trying to understand why they keep playing small. What it actually feels like in your body when you're shrinking instead of expanding. A real client story about a woman who spent her whole life succeeding quietly so she doesn't make anyone uncomfortable. Why people pleasing and self abandonment are not the same thing — and why that distinction matters for midlife women doing this work.

You don't have to keep running a program that was written for a version of you that doesn't exist anymore.

If your body just said "hey, pay attention to this" — hit subscribe so you don't miss what's coming.

The Intuitive Circle is open now. This is where midlife women stop circling and start actually moving — body based healing, live with me, twice a month. Join at lesleyturner.ca/theintuitivecircle.

Related episodes:

• What We Get Wrong About the Eldest Daughter

Resources mentioned:

• Podcast Coach: Jan Ditchfield

Book 1:1 www.lesleyturner.ca/services

Subscribe to the pod:
Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/730IxK6Le9bwgAwKQBbrfM?si=a649923b6d4f4a4b
Apple Podcasts - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-emotional-truth-nervous-system-regulation-somatic/id1896858957

Transcript

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A few years ago I had a thought that made me go, hey, wait a second, why not me? I have been the background person my whole life, the one keeping everything running so everyone else could be out front, like the crew, not the lead. And one day that question just showed up out of nowhere. Why can't I be the one out there? That question is the actual reason this show changed its name, along with some SEO strategy, and we will get into both. You're listening to The Emotional Truth, somatic healing and nervous system regulation for the midlife woman who's done everything right and still feels stuck. I'm Leslie Turner, somatic practitioner and intuitive coach. I work in the body, and I have a pretty uncanny ability to see what's actually running underneath. The stuff that therapy touched but never quite moved. Because understanding why you do something and actually stopping it are two completely different things, and that's exactly where we work. We cover people pleasing, mom burnout, perimenopause, relationships, money, and what it actually costs the woman who's always been the responsible one. Short episodes, real stories, specific enough to stop you in your tracks. Let's get into it. If you're ready to stop circling, the intuitive circle wait list is open right now at Leslie Turner.ca forward slash the intuitive circle. We start back up in September. It's $33 a month. Come do this work with me. There's a moment in the movie, The Holiday. You know, the one with Kate Winslett, Jack Black, who else is in it? Cameron Diaz, of course. So Kate Winslett's character, after spending the beginning of the film being the one that everyone else leans on, no one really sees, finally realizes she's been living like a supporting character in her own story instead of the one it's actually about. I watched that movie years ago, probably when it came out in 2006, and it just landed differently than other movies I'd seen. I didn't think at the time that I was a leading lady. I put everyone else's needs first, everyone else's opinions first. I'd been doing that so long I didn't even register it as a choice. Now, I do talk about this in the Eldest Daughter episode. Please listen to that one, What We Get Wrong About the Eldest Daughter. So when I started this podcast, it should have been a huge step out of that pattern. And it was a little. I had the gumption to think people might actually want to hear what I had to say. And that's not nothing. But I still hedged it a bit. I didn't launch it properly. I didn't have a trailer, no real strategy. I just put it out there and hoped it would land for someone. And some of that's just how I work. I take imperfect action. I get excited about an idea that I want it out into the world now. And that's it's it's served me in the past. But some of it was the same old pattern of playing small, wearing a brand new outfit. Even my real one act of stepping forward, I made sure it was small enough that no one would really notice. Now it's been seven months of doing this show, and I've started to notice this exact thing, this playing small, kind of everywhere, both in my own life, my clients' lives, my friends' lives. And it doesn't always look like staying in, staying at home all the time. Sometimes it looks like being visibly busy and actually successful while still managing to stay small underneath it. So I had a client two weeks ago, I suppose, hugely successful, the kind of successful most people would shout from the rooftops, and she doesn't let on that she is successful. So we traced it back. And growing up, her family's rule was be humble or you'll make people uncomfortable, and then they'll leave. So she learned to downplay everything good that happened to her. And here she is, decades later, still running that same program, successful, but keeping it under wraps. Same pattern I've seen over and over. And I asked her, So are you done with this? Done playing small to keep people? And we walked through it together. What actually happens if you celebrate out loud? Or what does your body say, your mind say, your pattern say is going to happen? And she got there. If someone's rattled by my success, well, that's their trigger, not mine. And if they leave over it, well, they probably weren't real friends to begin with. Exactly. I said, you've been running this program that says you're not allowed to be visibly successful, and it's the very thing keeping you from going further. You're so capable, but you're also afraid of what happens if you actually let yourself get that big. She sat with that for a second and said, Yeah, I am. I actually call this something different, both in her case and mine. This is self-abandonment. Because playing small, the term playing small almost sounds polite or humble, like a personality quirk, a modesty setting you just dial up or dial down. But self-abandonment is the more accurate word for what's actually happening underneath it. Every time you downplay what you want, hide what you're proud of, make yourself smaller so someone else stays comfortable. You are choosing someone else's comfort over your own truth. That's not humility. That's leaving yourself in real time to keep the peace. And self-abandonment doesn't just show up with hiding success. It's also what happens with feelings. You could feel genuinely excited about something and you downplay it before anyone else can. Because along the way, someone said to you, that's not that exciting. That's abandoning the version of you who is excited, or you feel sad and you tell yourself, there's nothing to be sad about. Buck up. That's abandoning the version of you who's sad and resisting what you're actually feeling, bypassing it, numbing it, ignoring it, downplaying it, it's all the same move. You override what's actually true for you in favor of what feels safer to show to the world. Now, this got installed for a reason. And if you don't know the reason, you can't actually let it go. So we're gonna talk about a few of those reasons. For a lot of people, it's very direct. As a kid, being visible meant being a target. You speak up, you get yelled at. You stand out, you get blamed or criticized, or something worse, maybe. Your nervous system did the math fast. Invisible means unharmed. And this is not a failure. You were just trying to survive as a kid. Now, for others, it's modeled to you. Nobody sat you down and taught you to play small. You just watched someone you love do it first. Your mom, your dad shrinking themselves at the dinner table, downplaying their wins, apologizing for taking up space. You didn't need a lesson on that. You absorbed it just by watching what safety looked like in the person closest to you. And for me, if I'm honest about a deeper layer to this, a lot of it is about scrutiny. The more visible you are, the more people are watching. And the more people watching you, the higher the standard you're held to. Sometimes I think I just wanted a room to be a person who made mistakes without an audience for them. So staying smaller meant I got to work things out privately instead of publicly. There's other routes to this too, and they're worth a bit of a mention, even if they're not hitting the hardest for you. Sometimes there's a loyalty bind here. So shining too bright risked making a parent or a sibling feel small, or surpassing someone's success felt like a betrayal nobody ever said out loud. So you dimmed yourself to keep the relationship intact. And sometimes it's about control. Staying small keeps your whole world small enough to predict. And being seen invites the unpredictable in. Wherever yours comes from, the pattern made sense at the time. The question now is just whether it still does. There's a thing about shrinking. Most of the time you don't actually catch yourself doing it. And that's kind of the whole problem. You just do it automatically, the way you've always done it. So the next time you notice, maybe after the fact that you shrank, you downplayed something, you swallowed an opinion, you made yourself smaller in a room, pause and ask what your body was doing right before that. In your chest, your jaw, your shoulders. It was probably bracing, bracing for an outcome you were taught to expect a long time ago, even if that outcome hasn't actually been true for years. Now compare that to a moment of expansion instead. When I said the new name of this show, The Emotional Truth, and said it out loud for the first time, it wasn't that my body relaxed. It was more that it felt so true in my body that I could take a deep breath that actually had room to expand. This is what it can feel like, not okay, this is fine. This is like this makes sense to me. And that's really the whole reason the name changed beyond the strategy of it. My original podcast was called The Intuitive Drop, which started as an Instagram broadcast channel. I was channeling intuitive messages and it was real, but it was only ever one piece of what this show is actually about. This show has never been just the woo-woo energetic intuitive hit side of things. It goes into the actual emotional pattern underneath it all, where the pattern came from, what it's protecting, why your body still runs it. So the emotional truth says all of that. The intuitive drop only ever said one corner of it. And that's the whole show in one sensation. Not an idea you understand intellectually, but an actual shift you can point to in your own body the next time you catch yourself, yourself shrinking instead of expanding. So the podcast, it's the same me, same work, same voice you've been listening to for seven months. What's changing is that I stopped hedging. I got a podcast coach, and for the first time I looked at the actual strategy behind this instead of just hoping that things would land for someone. Numbers, let's be honest, were never my language. They still aren't entirely, but learning to look at them was its own version of stepping into the front room instead of staying at the back. Practically, here's what stays the same for you, though. It's still going to be weekly, still 10 to 15 minutes, still built for the school pickup line, quick walk. You're in between moments of the day. It's still built for the wait. Is she talking about me moments? What's sharper now is that every episode is built around who you actually are and what you actually need to hear, not just kind of whatever I feel like saying that week. And this is exactly what I do one-on-one with people, by the way. I see it before they do. Someone comes to me thinking they need help with one specific thing, and what we actually find underneath it is a pattern, whether it's playing small, people pleasing, when we can see it, we can shift it. I've helped people finally ask for the raise they've been worried about for years. I've helped people say what they actually need in their marriage instead of just managing around it and walking on eggshells. I've helped people navigate a divorce without losing themselves in it. We're not abandoning anymore. And every single time we can trace these patterns back to a root. Somewhere they learned that staying small was safer than being fully seen. And every single time the work has helped them see it clearly enough to then choose differently. It might be possible to work through this alone at 11 at night, circling the same thoughts, but it's a lot easier, faster, and gentler to do it with someone reflecting it back to you than to beat yourself up running the same pattern again and again. So here's where this all lands. The intuitive drop was me putting something real into the world, but still holding back how loudly I said it. And that's self-abandonment. The same thing as downplaying a promotion or telling yourself you're fine when you're not, or staying quiet so nobody gets uncomfortable. It gets installed early for real reasons, and it makes sense that it's still running, but it doesn't have to keep running. The emotional truth is me no longer holding back. And every time you catch yourself shrinking instead of taking up the space you've actually earned, that's your invitation to do the same. If this episode landed somewhere, don't just let it sit there. That feeling you have right now, that's not a coincidence. That's your nervous system telling you something is ready to move. The intuitive circle is my membership where we stop talking about it and actually do something about it. Twice a month, live with me, body-based, real time, and specific to what's actually running for you. Doors open back up in September, and the wait list is open now at Leslie Turner.ca backslash theintuitive circle. Go put your name on the list. And if this was the episode that made you pull over and think, wait, is she talking about me? Please subscribe, leave a review, and send it to the woman in your life who needs to hear it. You know exactly who I'm talking about. Find me on Instagram at the Leslie Turner. Until next time, the fact that you're here and listening means you're already doing this work.