You Learned to Choose Yourself Through Self-Abandonment

Choosing yourself isn't something you are born with and that’s why it takes practice. Most of the time, it's a practice you have to relearn from scratch because the version of choosing yourself you were taught as a kid was actually self-abandonment in disguise.

You picked yourself back then by picking what kept you safe inside a system that couldn't hold your full self. You also made yourself easier, quieter, more useful, more agreeable, whatever it took to stay connected to the people you depended on. That was survival that once worked right up until it started costing you the life you actually want as an adult.

The disappointment you're feeling now isn't about the same wound showing up in different costumes. It's about realizing that the way you learned to choose yourself was actually a slow abandonment of who you really are.

Your nervous system has spent decades building an internal map of what love, safety, and belonging look like, and everything about the way you attract, choose, and stay is running off that map.

Even when your brain knows better, your body keeps steering toward what feels familiar because familiar reads as safe in a system that was never given anything better to compare it to.

This is why you can spend years in therapy, read every book, understand your patterns intellectually, and still find yourself repeating the same dynamic with a slightly different face. Understanding a pattern doesn't dismantle it. Your wiring needs new experiences, not just new information. Until your body has actually lived something different, it keeps returning to what it was taught to expect.

Repeating the pattern isn't proof that you haven't grown. It's proof that your nervous system is trying to protect you the only way it knows how. That's worth compassion, not punishment or judgment.

What Choosing Yourself Looks Like

Back then, you chose yourself by shrinking. Now, you choose yourself by expanding. You stop translating your needs into their most palatable form, rehearsing your feelings before you're allowed to have them, and treating your boundaries like something you have to justify with a 20-page dissertation.

Choosing yourself means letting people misunderstand you without racing to correct the record. It also means trusting that the people who are meant to be in your life will grow toward the version of you that's finally telling the truth, and the ones who aren't will drift toward whoever's willing to be smaller for them.

Everyone who leaves when you stop shrinking was only there for the shrunken version of you. Their exit is information. It's telling you the exact size of the container they had for your realness. Believe them, and let the door close without chasing.

🎙️ “We're Family" Is Not an Excuse for Being Treated Like Sh*t

If a friend treated you the way some of your family members do, you'd have been gone a long time ago. But because they share your last name or sat across from you at every holiday dinner, you swallow it, absorb it, and call it love. This episode is about the invisible contract you've been honoring your entire life and what it's actually costing you to keep it.

Give it a listen 🎧

Healing doesn't happen in one big overhaul. There's no single decision that dismantles decades of programming. What actually shifts you is the accumulation of small, boring, uncelebrated choices that nobody else sees.

Saying no to something you'd normally agree to. Sitting through the discomfort of a boundary you'd usually collapse under. Letting a conversation stay unresolved instead of managing your way to false peace. Feeling a feeling instead of intellectualizing it.

When you stop choosing yourself the way a scared kid does and start choosing yourself the way a whole adult can, the people around you start shifting…

You start attracting people who have room for you. They show up without you having to earn it. Their growth happens alongside yours instead of in reaction to it. Friendships and relationships that used to feel out of reach start feeling accessible, because you finally stopped making yourself unavailable to them.

You are your own reference point now. The kid inside you who once had to self-abandon to belong is finally getting to see what it looks like when the adult in charge chooses instead. And speaking from personal experience, all of it is worth every uncomfortable moment it takes to get there.

See you next Saturday ❤️

Suttida

P.S. When you're ready to do this work, my 4-week digital workbook will walk you through it. Grab your copy here