When Did You Stop Asking Yourself What You Needed?

The First Time I Learned to Abandon Myself

The first time I learned to abandon myself was when I was 4 years old. I can still hear the inflection in my mother’s voice telling me not to be too loud. This was my indoctrination into patriarchy. My dad was just home from work and he needed time to wind down. In our house his energy was protected above everyone else’s and my mom ran interference keeping me and my brother quiet while he napped, worked, or watched TV.

My mom also worked outside of the home, and on Wednesday evenings she worked late and my dad took care of us. He picked us up from daycare, fed us dinner, bathed us when we were little, and put us to bed. Looking back now, I remember that my mom always left a meal that she prepared on her day off in order to make his life easier.

She did a lot of things to make his life easier which taught me that men’s lives should be made easy by the women that love them. I carried a lot of those things with me into the early years of my marriage. I prepared all the meals, did all of the household chores and shopping. I planned most of our social activities and made sure we spent an equal amount of time with each set of parents. I also worked full-time.

When Being a “Good Wife” Meant Taking It All On

When we had kids and I felt weighed down by postpartum anxiety and OCD, I finally began to realize how much of what I was doing was never discussed. I had unconsciously taken on the brunt of the responsibility in my home while my husband had meals ready, clothes ironed, and lunches prepared for him. This was how women showed love in my family and this type of love was passed down several generations.

When I started to do my own healing work it became obvious why adding a baby into our lives was so challenging. Even if I hadn’t been struggling mentally - I was already working 40+ hours a week, handling all of the household responsibilities with very little outside support. Going back to work while still sleep deprived hit me like a tidal wave. Not only was I drowning in intrusive thoughts and panic, but I had set myself up to fail by trying to be a “good wife.” Taking it all on was what I learned to do in order to be loved.

When Did I Stop Asking Myself What I Needed?

By allowing the part of me to take over that believed she needed to earn love through self-sacrifice, I was held captive by the wants and needs of others. I would try to anticipate what they needed and then use up what little energy I had left to show up for them. I rarely stopped to ask myself what I needed. This made me feel frustrated and resentful.

What I know now is that I was taught to self-abandon from a very young age. I was taught to be a “good girl” and to sacrifice myself for others. It took a while to finally meet myself and begin showing up in the world as my true self - not who others wanted me to be. I was deathly afraid of losing people that I loved through the process.

I did lose a few who were only there to benefit from my over-giving, but I also gained an entire community of people who love the real me. Not for what I can do for them, but because they can trust me to say no when I’m too depleted. They honor and appreciate not having to guess or wonder if what they might ask for is too much, and I love knowing the same about them.

What Parts of Yourself Did You Leave Behind?

I sometimes wonder how different our lives might be if, instead of teaching little girls to be good, we taught them to know themselves.

What if we taught them that the discomfort of someone they love does not automatically mean they have done something wrong? That they are allowed to have needs that inconvenience other people. That love does not have to be earned through usefulness, sacrifice, or making themselves smaller. That saying no does not make them selfish. That their anger, desire, intuition, pleasure, grief, and longing all carry information worth listening to.

Many of us weren't taught those things.

Instead, we became incredibly skilled at reading the room. We learned to notice the subtle shift in someone's voice, anticipate what would make things easier, and adjust ourselves accordingly. Eventually, we became so fluent in everyone else's needs that we stopped speaking the language of our own.

And then one day, we find ourselves asking: What do I actually want? What do I need? Who am I when I'm not trying to be good for everyone else?

Those questions have become some of the most important questions of my own healing.

Because healing self-abandonment hasn't meant that I stopped caring for other people. I still love deeply. I still give. I still take care of the people I love. The difference is that I no longer believe I have to disappear in order to do it.

I get to belong to myself, too.

Group Therapy in San Diego: An Invitation to Becoming

Maybe that's where the work begins—not by becoming someone new, but by remembering the woman who existed before she learned who she needed to be in order to belong.

This is part of the work we will explore in Becoming, my 8-week online healing circle for women. For women looking for group therapy in San Diego, Becoming offers a space to do this work in community from the privacy of your own home.

This isn't a group about becoming better at meeting everyone else's needs. It's a space to begin turning your attention back toward yourself—to explore the patterns you've inherited, the roles you've learned to play, and the parts of yourself you've quieted along the way.

Together, we'll practice listening beneath all the noise of who you should be so you can begin hearing your own knowing again.

You don't have to blow up your life or stop loving the people in it.

You may simply need to stop leaving yourself out of it.

If something in you recognizes herself in these words, I would love to welcome you into Becoming.

Alicia Taverner, LMFT, is a licensed marriage and family therapist who helps couples heal after infidelity, years of resentment, and the exhaustion of feeling stuck in the same painful patterns.

Her work helps partners begin to understand each other again, rebuild appreciation, and create lasting change with a focused, supportive approach. Alicia uses brain based techniques, including Brainspotting and ketamine assisted psychotherapy, in an intensive format that gives couples more room to heal without the start and stop of weekly sessions.

Learn more about Alicia’s work with affair recovery intensives, relationship therapy, and ketamine therapy, or visit her About page.