Podcast Episode #49 - Why Do Women Feel Guilty For Having Needs?
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[00:00:00] Hello, and welcome back to yet another inspirational podcast episode brought to you by yours truly, Carina. I'm your truth speaker, truth seeker, truth keeper, and I am so glad that you're here with me today
One of the most heartbreaking things women say to me is, "I don't even know what I need." And they say it like it's normal, like it's a personality trait, like it's just who they are. But imagine if I asked, "What does your child need?" You'd know [00:01:00] What does your partner need? You'd know. What does your best friend need?
You'd know. But when I ask, "What do you need?" Silence. Not because women don't have needs, but because many women were taught they weren't allowed to. I'm Carina Bull, trauma-aware facilitator, intuitive mentor, and apparently a professional pattern interrupter these days. I help women recognize and interrupt the patterns behind hypervigilance, over-functioning, emotional exhaustion, and self-abandonment, so you can reconnect with who you were before survival taught you who you had to be.
And around here, we do emotional truth, nervous system awareness, and the [00:02:00] occasional lovingly delivered truth bomb. So today, I wanna talk about needs because I don't think the problem is that women don't have them. I think many women have become so used to ignoring them that they no longer recognize them when they show up because needs don't just disappear.
You still have them. The problem is you've become incredibly good at overriding them. You need help, but you say, "No, it's fine. I've, I've got it." You need rest, but decide to push through. You need support, but convince yourself everyone else is busy. You need space, but say yes anyway. You need a break, but keep going until your body eventually forces one on you.
You need someone to listen, [00:03:00] but spend the entire conversation talking about everyone else instead. You need to cry, but tell yourself you'll deal with it later You need an early night, but stay up scrolling for another hour because it's the only part of the day that belongs to you. Sound familiar?
Because this is what self-abandonment often looks like. Not dramatic, not obvious, just small moments repeated over and over again. Moments where everyone else's needs quietly become more important than your own. And before we go any further, I wanna just say something. This didn't happen because you're weak or selfish or broken.
This happened because many women were rewarded for ignoring [00:04:00] their needs. Think about it. The helpful child get, gets praised. The easygoing child gets praised. The child who doesn't ask for much gets praised. The woman who keeps everything running gets praised. The woman who carries everyone gets praised.
The woman who says, "Don't worry about me," gets praised. And eventually, survival learns something. My needs create discomfort. Other people's needs create approval. So which one do you think gets prioritized? Not because you're consciously choosing it, because your nervous system learned it, because survival learned it, because for many women, being needed felt safer than having needs.
But eventually, there's a cost [00:05:00] because needs don't disappear when we ignore them. They simply change shape. The need for rest becomes burnout. The need for support becomes overwhelm. The need for honesty becomes resentment. The need for space becomes irritability. The need for care becomes exhaustion. The need for, um, emotional expression becomes anxiety.
And then women wonder why they're so bloody tired, why they're snapping at people, why they're feeling disconnected, why they're becoming resentful, while they're fantasizing about running away to a cabin in the woods where nobody can ask them for anything And honestly, it's often because they've spent years [00:06:00] abandoning themselves in ways that looked responsible, productive, selfless, kind.
But self-abandonment doesn't stop being self-abandonment just because other people benefit from it. And this is where healing starts to look very different because healing isn't learning to become selfish. That's what many women are secretly afraid of. "If I start prioritizing myself, won't I become selfish?"
No. Selfish people don't usually spend years worrying about whether they're selfish, right? Healing is learning that your needs matter, too, not more than everyone else, too. It's learning that rest is a need, support is a need, boundaries are a need, alone time is a need, honesty is a need, [00:07:00] joy is a need. And the more disconnected you become from your needs, the more disconnected you become from yourself because your needs are information.
They're communication. They're one of the ways your body and nervous system tell you the truth. The problem is many women have spent s- so long ignoring the message that they stop hearing it altogether. So I wanna leave you with a question today. When was the last time you asked yourself, "What do I need right now?"
And more importantly, when was the last time you answered honestly? Not what everyone else needs, not what needs doing, not what would make everyone else comfortable. What do you [00:08:00] need? Because maybe the problem isn't that you don't know. Maybe the problem is that survival taught you to stop listening And if you're recognizing yourself in this conversation and wondering where you learned to disconnect from your own needs, this is exactly the kind of work we explore inside my Survival to Self sess- session.
Together we'll uncover the survival patterns shaping your life beneath the surface, identify where self-abandonment has become normal, and help you reconnect with the parts of yourself that have spent years carrying everyone else. You'll find a link in the show notes if you'd like to learn more. And as always, just because it was doesn't mean it will be.
You have a choice. You get to choose differently [00:09:00] This is not your personality. This is how you've had to survive, and healing begins the moment survival stops silencing the truth. With love, Carina