A Lifetime of Keeping It Together at the Cost of Her Own Heart

Meeting Everyone's Expectations Nearly Broke Her

A reflection on what happens when we suppress our own needs to keep it all together

I saw a client the other day, an older woman with a strong presence, but something behind her eyes gave away the exhaustion. She’d lived a life doing everything right. She met expectations, stayed productive, didn’t complain. But in our session, something cracked open.

She admitted she never really stopped to consider her own wellbeing, though she had been ill several times.

And I knew immediately what she meant.

She wasn’t lazy. She wasn’t unaware. She had simply inherited this way of living, from her mother, and her mother’s mother before that. Generations of women who had to hold it all in and get on with it. Women who weren’t given space to feel. Who had no choice but to push down their grief, rage, loneliness, tenderness… and wear strength like a mask. Do anything but FEEL.

As a little girl, my client absorbed this. She watched her mother hold everything together. She watched her suppress everything messy or inconvenient or vulnerable. And somewhere deep in her bones, my client decided: this is what a good woman does.

So she learned not to cry. Not to ask. Not to want too much.
She learned to perform strength even when she was crumbling inside.
She lived her whole life this way. Until her body started to rebel. Mirroring the unhealthy kept parts of her. The suppression. Her family started to become dysfunctional—not because they didn’t love her, but because they couldn’t feel her.

They could sense that everything was being managed, not felt, and they acted in accordance with that.

They felt her trying to hold it all together with white-knuckled effort. They felt how her emotions bounced off them like a wall, how they couldn’t quite reach her. Because she couldn’t quite reach herself.

When I asked her what it would feel like to not meet people’s expectations, her answer was chilling.

She said:
"It would feel like dying."

That’s how deep this goes.

That’s how deeply we are conditioned to abandon ourselves in the name of being enough for others. Even though our whole world is falling, we still keep the facade.

She realised, right then, how her entire life had been shaped by an inner terror: If I disappoint others, I disappear. If I put myself first, I will be unloved. If I feel my real feelings, I will fall apart.

And yet, what really broke her was not feeling them.

What broke her was not letting herself be seen, known, and held by her own self, and allowed unloving behaviours be the brunt of her existence.

What broke her was keeping it all together for everyone else, and slowly drifting further and further from her own truth.

You can’t connect with others if you’re not connected to yourself.
You can’t offer real love if it’s built on self-repression. The feedback system (or Law of Attraction) will show you that.

This is the cost of emotional repression.
This is what gets passed down in silence.
And this is what we get to interrupt.

If this resonates, you’re not alone.
And if you’re ready to stop performing and start feeling, I’m here to walk with you.

Because your feelings are not too much.
Your inner child has a right to feel how they really felt, before the suppression.
And your worth is not measured by how much you endure.