Are you able to give yourself the same support that you give everyone else? If you were, what could your life look like? Not the version of your life where you're constantly putting yourself last. Or the other version of your life where everyone else's needs come before your own. But the life where you actually give yourself the support you need. Where you can trust yourself. And where you support yourself the way you support everyone around you.
Somewhere along the way, we learned that self-support is selfish. That putting yourself first is wrong. We tell ourselves that our needs don't matter as much as everyone else's. And now we're here, exhausted, resentful, and wondering why we feel so disconnected from ourselves.
Could it be that supporting yourself feels so hard because you don't know what you want? And in not knowing how to best support yourself in going after it. It could be that you're not feeling ready to back yourself? So, you're not trusting yourself. And you're definitely not prioritising yourself and the support you need. Not really.
When the life you're living right now looks like this…
And you do it all without question and just get on with it because that's what good people do, right?
Except while we're busy supporting everyone else, we're also usually unknowingly abandoning ourselves. It starts out with us not checking in with ourselves about what you actually want. Then we can forget to ask ourselves if we're okay. And it usually progresses to not giving ourselves permission to rest, to say no, or to choose differently. We just keep going, keep giving, and keep showing up for everyone except ourselves. And then we're exhausted.
So we continue about life. Helping, supporting, cheering others on. But we're also resentful. We're feeling disconnected. Because when we've spent so long supporting everyone else that we forget how to support ourselves. Or maybe we came from families where supporting ourselves was seen as selfish, so we never even learned in the first place.
Let's be honest about why we don't self-support. It's not because we don't care about ourselves. It's because we've been conditioned to believe that self-support is selfish. We learned that putting ourselves first makes us a bad person. That our needs don't matter as much as everyone else's. And we learned that supporting ourselves means letting others down.
That if we say no, if we choose ourselves, and if we prioritise our needs, that someone's going to be disappointed (and we feel it's with us). And we usually can't handle that. For many of us, our worth is tied to how much we give. So we've built our identities around being the person who shows up, who helps, who supports. And if we stop doing that, who are we?
And when we're this way inclined, self-support feels uncomfortable. It feels foreign. And in some cases it feels just plain wrong. Simply because we've spent our whole life doing the opposite. We don't trust ourselves enough to back ourselves. Because deep down, we don't believe we deserve support. We don't believe our needs are valid. And we don't believe we're worth prioritising.
When we start self-supporting, our lives start to change. It won't happen overnight. Or not necessarily in some dramatic, life-altering way. But slowly, steadily, you start to shift. You stop tolerating situations that drain you. And you stop saying yes when you mean no. You definitely stop putting yourself last. And you start trusting yourself. You start backing yourself.
You begin to make choices that align with your truth, not everyone else's expectations. The most beautiful part is that when you start self-supporting, you don't just change your circumstances. Who you are gets to change. You become someone who doesn't need external validation, because you've learned to validate yourself. Someone who doesn't wait for permission, because you give yourself permission. Someone who doesn't abandon yourself, because you've learned that self-support isn't selfish. You figure out that it's actually essential.
And that version of you is the version of you who creates the life you've always wanted. Not one day. Not eventually. But this month. Today.
We don't have to wait for a life bomb to force you into self-support. We can choose it now. You can give yourself permission to start right now. When you start self-supporting, you'll discover why you've been stuck. You'll understand the patterns, beliefs, and stories that have kept you abandoning yourself. And you'll learn how to rewrite them.
You'll finally reconnect with what you actually need, not what everyone else needs from you. And you'll find clarity about what you genuinely want. This means you'll develop the courage to start choosing it, even when it's uncomfortable, even when people don't understand, and even when it means disappointing others.
*This isn't about wishing for change. It's about creating it. And it starts the moment you decide you're ready to back yourself. If you're ready to unpack your story and make sense of what's been keeping you stuck, the Come Back To You Retreat might be exactly what you need. As a space to reconnect with yourself and discover what supporting yourself truly looks like.
