Right before a breakthrough, your nervous system stops bracing for a second, mid-exhaustion. Hands loosen on a steering wheel you’ve been gripping too hard.

Your eyes catch your reflection in the mirror, and you look for the first time in a long time. Your breathing slows enough to ask:

Are you slowing down, or giving up?

I know that stillness personally.

For years, I ran on a program I didn’t know I was running: relentless empathy, relentless giving. From the outside, people told me, “You’re so kind, Sabrina.” I won’t lie, that was fuel that kept me in the program. Just feeling seen fed my ego, while my soul struggled to believe it. It felt good, until it didn’t. That program was bracing, the whole time.

What was unconscious was becoming conscious. I was spiritually bypassing what I hadn’t let myself feel.  The pain arising from the current experience was really the pain that had been suppressed for decades. I had gotten so good at manufacturing reasons to feel worthy that I lost touch with the part of me that was exhausted, grieving, aching for genuine connection, and longing to be in meaningful, honest, and growing relationships.

Even still, I noticed how terrified I was of what would happen if I stopped adapting.

Little did I know I would unconsciously outrun the truth: I hadn’t just been surviving hard things; I had contributed to some of this inner chaos out of fear. Out of every old belief that love had to be earned, measured, that women had to do all the sacrificing and if you shared your thoughts and opinions you were out of line. 

In order to keep myself safe through the lens of a child, I learned how to hide, accommodate and compromise for other people. 

Mostly if I gave enough, and smiled enough, I could keep the peace and remain wanted.  Family was everything.

I want to sit with you in that moment for a minute, because I think a lot of you are standing at that exact edge right now, one hand already on the door.

I always thought loving relationships were meant to withstand difficult conversations. “It hurt me when…” or “I want to apologize for how I treated you when…” In today’s society, we bury these instead, because honesty feels too costly. Few people are willing to look at their own actions because admitting responsibility for someone else’s pain is hard.

I choose to believe most people don’t set out to cause pain. Hurt people hurt people. So, people will often repeat pain nobody ever helped them process. Rather than facing the discomfort of accountability, most people keep moving forward without acknowledging how they’re hurting those around them. And for those people, that’s where resentment starts.

The question some people forget to ask

If you’re lying awake replaying a conversation, or googling why am I so unhappy at midnight, ask yourself: what’s my part in this? It doesn’t occur to many they have a part at all. When it surfaces, it feels uncomfortable. Could admitting you have a part mean you caused the whole thing?  No.  The question doesn’t assign blame. It points at what’s yours to notice, nothing more.  Developing your awareness about how you’ve been acting on what you’ve been expecting from someone else.

As a counsellor and wise woman who feels she’s lived several lifetimes in this body, I’ve learned: most people aren’t disconnected from their values because they lack them. They’re disconnected because somewhere along the way, they learned that honouring those values cost too much: a relationship, a sense of belonging they weren’t willing to risk. So they adapted, they over-gave. They stayed quiet when they needed to speak, and fixed instead of felt.

And it worked, in the sense that the peace held. But it wasn’t peace. It was suppression disguised as peace.

When you recognize your adaptation, you’re not blaming yourself. Blame keeps you stuck. You externalize. You wait for someone else to change first.

When you take ownership, you get your power back.

The shift from “this happened to me” to “here’s what I did with it” is one of the most liberating moves you can make. It’s the only version where you’re holding the tools instead of standing in the wreckage.

The part most people skip

I eventually ask almost everyone who sits across from me some version of the same question: What are your values? The ones you feel in your body when they’re honoured, the ones that lead your soul in everyday life.

Most people struggle to answer quickly, and that struggle itself is information. When you don’t know your values with clarity, you can’t recognize when you’re abandoning them. And if you can’t recognize them, you can’t hold yourself accountable for living in alignment with them.

You just react:

• You say yes to hosting the holiday again this year and call it kindness, even when at that moment you don’t want to.
• You take on the finances, the school forms, the birthday planning, and call it love, even as you’re quietly exhausted.
• You laugh off the joke that stung and call it grace, at the sacrifice of your own worth.
• You go along with the decision you didn’t agree with and call it peace, though some part of you knows you’re settling instead of choosing.

Clarity changes the equation.

When you know that honesty matters more than comfort, you stop dodging the hard conversation with your partner. You have it, even when your voice shakes. When you know that presence matters more to you than performance, you stop white-knuckling your way through your kid’s meltdown, trying to look like you’ve got it handled, and you get curious about what the behaviour is a symptom of. When you know that your own peace matters as much as everyone else’s, you stop saying yes to the thing you don’t have capacity for, and you say the harder, truer thing instead.

Your values become the measuring stick for you, not for other people. The real question becomes: do I choose this? That single shift is the difference between a relationship built on honesty and one running on resentment.

It gets worse before it gets honest

I won’t tell you this part is easy, because it isn’t, and you’d stop trusting me the moment you found out otherwise.

People will notice when you start being slower to fix, quicker to speak the truth, and less available for the old role. Some of them will be relieved. They’ve wanted you to know your worth for a long time. But others will get uncomfortable. They may get cold. They may accuse you of changing, like change itself is the problem. They may even call you arrogant.

The people around you are adjusting to a version of you that no longer absorbs what it used to. That reaction doesn’t mean you’re doing something wrong. Both behaviours, theirs and yours, tell you something. Theirs tells you what they’d grown used to. Yours tells you what you’re willing to stop carrying, and what you’re no longer willing to enable.

I lost relationships I cherished during my own growth journey. This happened in my story. It doesn’t have to happen in yours. Some people I loved pulled away, because I stopped playing the role I used to play and grew stronger in my values. I felt the grief of it, even as I kept choosing myself. If something similar is happening for you, or if you’re afraid it might, those old parts, in you and in the people around you, are doing everything they can to stay safe. Fighting the change is their version of protection, because the old version is what’s familiar. Teasing the truth apart from protection isn’t easy.

That’s why values are the anchor.

On the other side of every loss, I found a version of myself who could look at my own life without flinching. The version of me who no longer sacrificed her worth to fit in. The version of me that offers greater compassion and honesty.

Not everyone will accept the changes in you. That’s terrifying to sit with, and it’s also honest. But it builds something rare: resilience and clarity about who values you. The people who stay were never loving the role you played. They’re loving you. They know who you are at your core, and the change doesn’t threaten that. Isn’t that worth having for the rest of your life, more than the relationships you settle for?

Hard is where it starts, ease is what follows

If you’re standing at the very beginning of this, unsure whether the discomfort is worth what’s on the other side, I want you to know one thing. It is.

Not because the process is graceful. It rarely is. A life lived in alignment with your values feels different in the body than one lived in reaction to everyone else’s expectations. It’s the difference between racing and pacing.  It’s the difference between being loved for the role you play and being loved for who you actually are.

You will have hard days. You will lose your temper, second-guess a boundary, and wonder if you’re doing any of it right. The old patterns will still show up sometimes. None of that is failure.  What’s different now is how often and how long they have authority over you. The awareness you’ve built catches them sooner. The connection to yourself brings you back faster.  Those slips are human moments.  Keeping honest about them is a far more sustainable place to live than pretending you have it all figured out.

So if you’re asking, “Why is this still happening?” sit with it. Most of the time, your answer traces back to one place: you’re reacting instead of choosing and that automation has disconnected you from your values. That’s your part in it. 

You were doing the best you knew how with what you’d been given, and in that moment.  Now you know better. This was your reminder. Start by naming one value you’re ready to stop abandoning. 

You still have a choice. You always did.  

If this is stirring something in you, if you’re ready to look honestly at your part in the patterns you’re tired of repeating, a complimentary consultation is a good, pressure-free place to start. No agenda, just a real conversation about what you’re looking for and whether we’re a good fit to get you where you want to go.

TL;DR

Sabrina shares her own journey out of chronic over-giving and peacekeeping, and argues that people abandon their values not from lack of them but because honouring them once felt too costly. Getting clear on your values, and asking "what's my part in this," lets you respond from choice instead of automatic reaction. That shift may cost some relationships, but it makes room for ones built on who you actually are.