Podcast Episode #56 - Why Do Relationships Change When You Start Choosing Yourself?
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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 Something slightly uncomfortable happens when women start healing that I don't think we talk about enough.
Sometimes other people don't particularly like it. There, I said it. Because we talk a lot about boundaries, finding your voice, choosing yourself, [00:01:00] stopping people-pleasing, letting go of over-responsibility. Lovely. Put it on a beige Instagram tile and we're all sorted. But what happens when you actually do it?
When you stop organizing everything, when you say no, when you don't immediately smooth over the tension, when somebody is annoyed with you, and instead of writing the three-page text explaining your decision, providing supporting evidence, character references, and possibly a small PowerPoint presentation, you let them be annoyed.
Because healing doesn't happen in isolation. You change, and the relationships around you have to respond to that change, and [00:02:00] sometimes that is where things can get really uncomfortable. And I've been thinking about this a lot lately because I keep noticing women becoming aware of the roles that they play, the responsible one, the fixer, the helper, the one who holds everything together.
A woman I spoke to recently described herself very simply as, "I'm the fixer." And that word stayed with me because so many women know exactly what their role is. They already know they're the one people call, the one who sorts it, the one who checks it, the one who remembers the birthday, who mediates the argument, the one who says, "Leave it with me."
So awareness isn't always the difficult part anymore. Sometimes the difficult part is this: what happens when you stop? Because if you've spent years being [00:03:00] the woman who keeps everything running, everyone around you has also spent years getting used to you being that woman, and that matters Think about something as ordinary as a family group chat.
Someone asks, "What are we doing for mom's birthday?" Silence. Five minutes pass, 10 minutes, and if you're usually the organizer, you can almost feel the gravitational pull towards your phone. Fine, I'll find the restaurant, I'll check everybody's availability, I'll make the booking, I'll remember the dietary requirements for everyone, I'll organize the cake, and I'll probably remind everyone the day before because apparently we are now running a small events company.
And usually, you [00:04:00] do. Everyone gets lunch, everyone's happy, and you feel useful. But imagine you don't. Imagine you don't respond. You put down the phone Now, nothing terrible has actually happened. Nobody has been abandoned in the wilderness. There will probably still be cake, and yet suddenly your body is uncomfortable and you start wondering, "Am I being selfish?
Am I being difficult? Should I just organize it?" And then somebody sends, "Well, I thought you normally sort this stuff." And there it is, that tiny sentence, and suddenly the boundary isn't really about a restaurant anymore because now there is [00:05:00] something else underneath it. A relationship expectation has been disturbed So can I offer you a different way of seeing this?
What if the reason changing feels so threatening isn't simply because you're becoming different? What if it's because changing one person changes the relationship? Because relationships develop rhythms, roles, expectations, unspoken agreements, not necessarily conscious ones. Nobody sits down at the beginning of a friendship and says, "Right, I shall be emotionally unavailable.
You shall over-function, and we'll reconvene in 12 years when you're absolutely knackered." That would at least save us some time. [00:06:00] But patterns form. You become the listener, someone else becomes the talker. You become the flexible one, someone else becomes the one whose preferences usually win. You become the person who reaches out after conflict, someone else learns they can wait.
You become the one who notices everyone else's emotional state, someone else doesn't have to. You become the one who gives, someone else becomes very comfortable receiving. And over time, that can start feeling like the relationship itself. So when you change your part, the whole thing wobbles, not necessarily because the relationship is unhealthy or because the other person is bad, but because something familiar has changed, and humans are very attached to [00:07:00] familiar, even when familiar isn't particularly fair or healthy And this is where belonging becomes really important because sometimes being useful wasn't simply something you did.
It became one of the ways you understood your place in relationships. If I help, I matter. If I'm easy, people stay. If I don't ask for much, I'm not a burden. If I keep everyone happy, connection stays safe. If nobody is upset with me, I still belong. And those rules may be very old. They might have been learned in childhood, in previous relationships, through family expectations, through watching the women around you, through what happened when you were outspoken or emotional or inconvenient or angry or [00:08:00] needy.
Maybe nobody ever said, "You must abandon yourself in order to belong." Of course they didn't. These things are usually much quieter than that. They're learned through reactions, approval, withdrawal, praise, criticism, who was called selfish, who was called difficult, who was considered the good daughter, the easy child, the lovely woman, the one who never caused any trouble.
And eventually your nervous system starts recognizing certain versions of you as relationally safer than others. You know, helpful Carina, safe. Easygoing Carina, safe. Carina with a strong preference, a boundary, and absolutely no intention of writing an explanatory thesis afterwards. Apparently, we're in uncharted territory.[00:09:00]
That is why changing behavior can feel disproportionately uncomfortable. You're not simply practicing a boundary. Your system may be asking, "Will I still be loved here if I behave differently?" Because sometimes people will push back. Not everybody, but some people. Some might say, "Oh, you've changed. You never used to be like this.
You're being so selfish. You're making everything difficult. You're overreacting. You're too sensitive." Or perhaps they don't say anything at all. Maybe there's just a look, a tone, a bit of distance, and suddenly every survival instinct you've spent years strengthening starts screaming, "Fix it. Explain yourself.
Apologize. Backtrack. Make them comfortable. Become recognizable again," because the old version [00:10:00] of you knew how to restore connection. She surrendered herself, and I wanna be really careful here. This doesn't mean every uncomfortable reaction proves somebody is toxic. It doesn't mean healthy relationships never struggle with one-- when one person changes.
Of course they do. You're human. They're human. Adjustment can be messy. The question isn't, did somebody dislike my boundary? The more useful question is, can this relationship eventually make room for a version of me who has needs too? Can we renegotiate? Can we talk? Can they be disappointed without punishing me?
Can I disagree without fearing the relationship will disappear? Can I stop fixing everything without everything becoming my fault? Can the relationship [00:11:00] stretch? Because maybe that is a part of what healing reveals. Not simply who you are becoming, but which relationship has space for her
And this is why choosing yourself doesn't have to mean burning your life down. You don't need to dramatically resign from your family WhatsApp group. You don't need to announce, "I've healed now. Please adjust accordingly." Please don't do that. Sometimes it's much quieter. You stop automatically volunteering for things.
You express your preference. You let somebody solve their own problem. You allow a small misunderstanding without immediately racing in to repair your image. You let another adult experience disappointment, and then you notice what happens, not just in them, in [00:12:00] you. Because every time you remain connected to yourself while somebody else has a feeling, you gather new information.
Maybe disagreement doesn't automatically mean rejection. Maybe disappointment doesn't automatically mean abandonment. Maybe another person's discomfort doesn't automatically become your responsibility. Maybe connection can survive honesty, and maybe some relationships become stronger because there is finally more than one full person inside them, not one person and another person constantly shape-shifting around them.
So here's the thing I want you to take from this conversation. It's that not every relationship will immediately know what to do with the version of you who stops abandoning herself. That [00:13:00] doesn't automatically mean you're doing something wrong. Sometimes it simply means the relationship is being asked to change, too, and change can become uncomfortable before it becomes familiar And here's a question I also wanna leave you with this week.
Where are you still managing yourself to preserve a relationship that has never had to make room for the full you? Not the useful you, not the agreeable you, not the easygoing you, not the version who ne- never needs anything, just you. And I want you to notice what comes up. This week, as you move through it, I want you to notice one very specific moment You behave differently.
Maybe you say no, maybe you disagree, maybe [00:14:00] you don't volunteer, maybe you let someone else organize it, and somebody reacts. And I want you to notice what happens inside you next. Do you immediately want to explain? Fix? Apologize? Backtrack? Reassure them? Make yourself easy again? Don't change it. Don't judge it.
Just notice the pull, because that moment might show you exactly where belonging and self-abandonment have been tangled together. And if this conversation has you wondering where else you might be quietly leaving yourself in order to keep life, relationships, or other people comfortable, I've created a free private six-part audio series called Six Hidden Ways Women Quietly Abandon Themselves.
It explores some of the survival patterns women often mistake for personality: [00:15:00] the responsible one, the hyper-independent one, the woman who overthinks everything, the woman who has become so used to coping that she barely notices what it's costing her anymore. And you can listen privately and in your own time.
I'll leave the link in the show notes. And until next week, remember this: someone being uncomfortable with the version of you that is changing doesn't automatically mean you need to become the old version again. With love, Carina.