70 Quotes About Choosing Yourself (After Years of Choosing Everyone Else)
Seventy quotes from psychotherapists, poets, memoirists, and scholars about permission, self-respect, and the long practice of putting yourself back on your own list, for driven women who have spent years being the person everyone else counted on.
Brynn’s Forty-Five Minutes
It’s 10:33 on a Sunday morning. Brynn, thirty-one, a pediatric resident, is sitting at a small table near the window of the coffee shop two blocks from her apartment. Brynn is an illustrative example, not a real client. The light is flat and good. The music is low, something instrumental she doesn’t recognize. In front of her is a journal she bought herself three months ago as a gift, then felt vaguely guilty about for a week afterward, as if the money should’ve gone to something useful.
She opens it. At the top of the page she writes the date. Then she stops. The page is blank, and she doesn’t know what comes next.
Her phone is face-down. She set a timer before she sat down: forty-five minutes, no exceptions, no chart reviews, no texts. It reads 44:12 remaining. She looks at the blank page and thinks: I don’t know what I want. I’m not sure I’ve ever been asked.
That sentence, “I’m not sure I’ve ever been asked,” names a pattern I see again and again in my work with driven women. It isn’t said with self-pity, and it doesn’t come from women who haven’t accomplished things. It comes from women who have accomplished a great deal, and who, somewhere in the middle of all of it, stopped being people with private preferences and became very efficient systems for meeting everyone else’s needs.
If that sentence landed somewhere in your chest, this collection is for you. These 70 quotes aren’t motivational filler. They’re organized by where you might actually be: waiting for permission, trying to picture what choosing yourself looks like on an ordinary Tuesday, rebuilding self-respect, naming what was asked of you, holding the guilt, seeing the larger system, and imagining forward when you’re ready. Take what fits. Leave what doesn’t. The blank page is still there.
What Self-Abandonment Actually Is
Before the quotes, it helps to name the pattern. Self-abandonment isn’t a formal diagnosis. It’s a plain-language name for a habit: setting aside your own needs, wants, and emotional signals, again and again, to keep a relationship steady, avoid conflict, or stay in a role that others rely on. Many driven women recognize it in themselves long before they have a word for it.
Self-abandonment isn’t always dramatic. It can look like volunteering for one more committee, agreeing to a dinner you didn’t want to attend, or answering a work email at 11 p.m. because saying no felt more costly than the sleep you lost. It looks like Brynn buying herself a journal and feeling guilty about it for a week.
The APA Dictionary of Psychology defines conditions of worth as “the state in which an individual considers love and respect to be conditional on meeting the approval of others.” The entry notes that the concept was proposed by Carl Rogers and that “this belief derives from the child’s sense of being worthy of love on the basis of parental approval.”
In plain terms: If you learned early that you were loved most when you were helpful, easy, or impressive, it makes sense that choosing yourself now feels like a risk. That isn’t a character flaw. It’s a belief that was learned in a specific relationship, and beliefs that were learned can be examined and, over time, loosened.
The first group of quotes is for the moment before the moment: the place where permission lives, or doesn’t yet.
On the Permission You’re Waiting For
You don’t need anyone to sign off on this. Sometimes, though, it helps to hear it said out loud by someone you respect, in language that gets past your defenses. These quotes are for that.
“There are times when you simply must trust that you have worked hard enough. It is okay to give yourself permission to take time to rest. Too much focus on growth can lead you to deplete your resources.”
Arielle Schwartz, PhD, The Post-Traumatic Growth Guidebook: Evidence-Based Strategies to Recover from Trauma and Build Resilience (2020), p. 162
“I could just take care of myself. I could stop proving my worth and step into it.”
Ingrid Clayton, Fawning: Why the Need to Please Makes Us Lose Ourselves, and How to Find Our Way Back (2025)
“We must believe we are worthy of rest simply because we are human, not because we have earned it.”
Tricia Hersey, Poet, Activist, and Author, Rest Is Resistance: A Manifesto (2022)
“trying to convince myself / i am allowed / to take up space / is like writing with / my left hand / when i was born / to use my right”
Rupi Kaur, poet, Milk and Honey
“i’m learning to become all the space i need.”
Danez Smith, Don’t Call Us Dead (2017)
“She stepped into the work of loving herself, not as a substitute, but as the thing she needed and deserved.”
Ingrid Clayton, Fawning: Why the Need to Please Makes Us Lose Ourselves, and How to Find Our Way Back (2025)
“You can claim the freedom to express yourself and take action on your own behalf.”
Lindsay C. Gibson, PsyD, Clinical Psychologist, Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents (2015)
“Rebuilding self-trust involves tuning in to your experiences and courageously choosing to believe yourself, even when no one else does.”
Sharon Martin, DSW, LCSW, Cutting Ties with Your Parents: A Workbook to Help Adult Children Make Peace with Their Decision, Heal Emotional Wounds, and Move Forward with Their Lives (2024)
“I recognize I am not perfect but I accept myself anyway.”
Beverly Engel, It Wasn’t Your Fault: Freeing Yourself from the Shame of Childhood Abuse with the Power of Self-Compassion (2015)
“It is safer to rupture relationships with people and systems than to rupture your relationship with yourself.”
Tamu Thomas, Women Who Work Too Much (2024)
“And given my time all over again, / rest assured that I’d rather speak for myself.”
Carol Ann Duffy, Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom, The World’s Wife (1999)
Many driven women describe waiting for a crisis, a relationship ending, or some outside permission before they let themselves consider what they want. The permission was never really someone else’s to give. What usually needs time is the ability to receive it.
Why Is Choosing Yourself So Hard?
Choosing yourself isn’t a problem of motivation. If it were, every inspirational quote would work on the first read, and you wouldn’t be here. The difficulty tends to be deeper than that. It’s rooted in how you learned to organize yourself around approval, safety, and belonging.
When your sense of being acceptable was tied to how useful you were, a need of your own can register as a threat to the relationship rather than an ordinary part of being a person. That’s why the guilt can arrive before you’ve finished the thought. It isn’t evidence that you’re selfish. It’s a very old alarm doing what it learned to do.
The APA Dictionary of Psychology describes self-compassion as “a construct derived from Buddhist thought and entailing a noncritical stance toward one’s inadequacies and failures,” and notes that “self-compassion may promote well-being by protecting one from the negative emotional implications of one’s perceived failings.”
In plain terms: Self-compassion means treating your own struggles with the steadiness you’d offer a friend, instead of the harshness you may be used to aiming at yourself. It isn’t letting yourself off the hook. It’s refusing to add a second injury to the first.
If you find yourself agreeing with every quote in this collection and feeling nothing shift, that’s worth paying attention to. Understanding a pattern and changing it are two different things. Some patterns need more than language to move, and that isn’t a sign that you’re broken.
On What Choosing Yourself Actually Looks Like
Dani is thirty-eight, a VP of product at a mid-size tech company. Dani is an illustrative example, not a real client. A few months ago, a close friend told her, gently but directly, “I don’t think I actually know you anymore.” Dani didn’t argue. Sitting in her car after that conversation, she realized she didn’t know herself either. She knew her performance review. She didn’t know what she wanted for dinner.
At lunch with the same friend a few weeks later, she mentions as an aside, “I usually don’t get to eat until I’m home,” and keeps talking. Her friend stops her. “Wait. You don’t eat all day?” Dani laughs, then doesn’t. It’s the first time she’s heard the sentence the way someone else hears it.
Choosing yourself often starts that small. Not with a dramatic conversation or a life-changing pivot, but with something like: I’m going to eat lunch today. Or: I’m going to say what I actually want for dinner, instead of deferring to whoever asked. Small acts of self-attention add up. They’re how you practice being a person with preferences before you’re fluent at it.
“An important part of caring for yourself is knowing what you like.”
Jonice Webb, Running on Empty: Overcome Your Childhood Emotional Neglect (2013)
“Once you’re secure and solid yourself, you can help others much more effectively.”
Jonice Webb, Running on Empty: Overcome Your Childhood Emotional Neglect (2013)
“Even as your heart takes you through many messes, the purpose is to bring you back home to yourself in a solid, powerful way.”
Deirdre Fay, MSW, Becoming Safely Embodied: A Guide to Organize Your Mind, Body and Heart to Feel Secure in the World (2021)
“Boundaries are the limits that help you to define yourself, and without them, it becomes harder to feel where you begin and end.”
Arielle Schwartz, PhD, The Post-Traumatic Growth Guidebook: Evidence-Based Strategies to Recover from Trauma and Build Resilience (2020)
“I refuse to let myself be divided from myself.”
Adrienne Rich, Poet, Your Native Land, Your Life (1986), p. 12
“I had to learn to speak for myself.”
Maxine Hong Kingston, Author and Professor, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (1976), ch. 5
“If you don’t need to do everything in order to establish your worth, you can really begin to delegate, ask for help, and let others shine.”
Robert Kegan & Lisa Laskow Lahey, Immunity to Change
“The secret to having it all is not doing it all yourself.”
Tiffany Dufu, Author and Activist, Drop the Ball: Achieving More by Doing Less (2017)
“Reducing your forward momentum is the first step to freeing yourself from the beliefs, habits, feelings, and busyness that may be limiting you.”
Peter Bregman, 18 Minutes
“If we want to change how we feel, we must become aware of our inner experience and learn to befriend what is going on inside of us.”
Bessel van der Kolk, MD, Psychiatrist, The Body Keeps the Score (2014)
None of these quotes ask you to become a different person. They ask you to notice the person who’s already there, and to give her a vote.
Self-Respect as a Foundation
Self-respect isn’t the same as self-esteem. Self-esteem is often tied to performance. It rises when things go well and drops when they don’t. Self-respect is steadier: it’s the baseline belief that you matter, that your experience counts, and that your needs deserve a place in the room. These quotes are about that deeper foundation.
“how you love yourself is / how you teach others / to love you”
Rupi Kaur, poet, Milk and Honey
“I place love before work because I know that without a sound foundation of self-love, I risk undermining my value and the value of all I accomplish through work.”
bell hooks, Feminist Cultural Critic and Author, Communion: The Female Search for Love (2002)
“Given our early obsessions with seducing and pleasing others to affirm our worth, we lose ourselves in the search to be accepted, included, desired.”
bell hooks, Feminist Cultural Critic and Author, Communion: The Female Search for Love (2002)
“Just as you longed to feel that you belonged and that you were acceptable when you were a child, work toward believing that every aspect of yourself belongs and is acceptable.”
Beverly Engel, It Wasn’t Your Fault: Freeing Yourself from the Shame of Childhood Abuse with the Power of Self-Compassion (2015)
“There is no longer a list of ways she needs to fix herself.”
Ingrid Clayton, Fawning: Why the Need to Please Makes Us Lose Ourselves, and How to Find Our Way Back (2025)
“She finally knows she is smart. She is fierce. She is worthy.”
Ingrid Clayton, Fawning: Why the Need to Please Makes Us Lose Ourselves, and How to Find Our Way Back (2025)
“One is free from depression when self-esteem is based on the authenticity of one’s own feelings and not on the possession of certain qualities.”
Alice Miller, The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self (1981), p. 39
“Radical self-love is indeed our inherent natural state, but social, political, and economic systems of oppression have distanced us from that knowing.”
Sonya Renee Taylor, Founder of The Body Is Not an Apology, The Body Is Not an Apology: The Power of Radical Self-Love (2018)
“The voice of doubt, shame, and guilt blaring in our heads is not our voice. It is a voice we have been given by a society steeped in shame.”
Sonya Renee Taylor, Founder of The Body Is Not an Apology, The Body Is Not an Apology: The Power of Radical Self-Love (2018)
For more on how early relationships shape the way you care for yourself, the guide to people-pleasing and the fawn response and the collection of quotes about boundaries are good companion reads.
On the Long Practice of Putting Others First
Before you can fully choose yourself, it can help to name, and sometimes grieve, what was asked of you before you ever got to ask yourself anything. For many driven women, putting others first wasn’t random. It was trained. It was rewarded. It was often a reasonable adaptation to a childhood where safety or love felt contingent on being useful, invisible, or impressive.
These quotes sit with that history. They aren’t about blame. They’re about recognition.
“When people have learned to prioritize the needs of others, as adults, they continue repeating this pattern, especially if they are afraid of being rejected by others.”
Dolores Mosquera, MA, The Discovery of the Self: Enhancing Reflective Thinking, Emotional Regulation, and Self-Care in Borderline Personality Disorder
“Internalized children accept many self-defeating things to get on with life, including giving consideration to what others want first, not asking for help, not wanting anything for yourself, and not speaking up for yourself.”
Lindsay C. Gibson, Clinical Psychologist and Author, Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents Workbook (2015)
“When you’re a victim of abuse and you’re taught to be quiet about it, you end up always wanting to please people because you have learned that speaking up will result in punishment. You don’t have a concept of how to say no.”
Oprah Winfrey, Media Leader, Philanthropist, Producer, and Author, What Happened to You? Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing (2021), ch. 2
“Many people suffer all their lives from this oppressive feeling of guilt, the sense of not having lived up to their parents’ expectations.”
Alice Miller, The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self (1981), p. 85
“No argument can overcome these guilt feelings, for they have their beginnings in life’s earliest period, and from that they derive their intensity and obduracy.”
Alice Miller, The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self (1981), p. 85
“We must grieve the awful fact that safety and belonging was scarce or non-existent in our own families. We need to mourn the myriad heartbreaks of our frustrated attempts to win approval and affection from our parents.”
Pete Walker, LMFT, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving: A Guide and Map for Recovering from Childhood Trauma (2013)
“Lacking adequate parental support or connection, many emotionally deprived children are eager to leave childhood behind. They perceive that the best solution is to grow up quickly and become self-sufficient.”
Lindsay C. Gibson, PsyD, Clinical Psychologist, Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents (2015)
“My life was narrated for me by others. Their voices were forceful, emphatic, absolute. It had never occurred to me that my voice might be as strong as theirs.”
Tara Westover, Memoirist and Historian, Educated (2018), ch. 20
“It’s the flattening of life into one never-ending to-do list, and the feeling that you’ve optimized yourself into a work robot that happens to have bodily functions, which you do your very best to ignore.”
Anne Helen Petersen, Cultural critic and author, Can’t Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation (2020)
“I decided that a family’s wholeness or brokenness has little to do with its structure. A broken family is a family in which any member must break herself into pieces to fit in.”
Glennon Doyle, Memoirist and Activist, Untamed (2020)
“When you’ve been steeped in shame for your entire life, it’s hard to accept that much of what you were taught about yourself is wrong.”
Sharon Martin, DSW, LCSW, Cutting Ties with Your Parents: A Workbook to Help Adult Children Make Peace with Their Decision, Heal Emotional Wounds, and Move Forward with Their Lives (2024)
“i thought my brown immigrant body should always work harder than everyone else in the room because that’s what made me valuable”
Rupi Kaur, poet, Home Body
“I had run daily marathons of activity to keep myself one step ahead of my fear and my shame-saturated depression. As an adult, I reduced this to half-marathons but I was still a busyholic, despite my relaxed persona.”
Pete Walker, Psychotherapist and author, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving (2013), ch. 12
“Exhaustion means going to the point where you can’t go any further; burnout means reaching that point and pushing yourself to keep going, whether for days or weeks or years.”
Anne Helen Petersen, Cultural critic and author, Can’t Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation (2020)
“When we become accustomed to disassociating from events we can’t handle, it becomes the default setting for the way we do life, full stop.”
Tamu Thomas, Somatic Coach and Author, Women Who Work Too Much: Break Free from Toxic Productivity and Find Your Joy (2024)
The women who struggle most with choosing themselves are often the ones who learned earliest that their needs were a burden. The message wasn’t always spoken. Sometimes it was built into the household: a parent who was ill, a family where money was tight and needs felt like luxuries, a culture where a girl’s value was tied to her service and her silence. Naming that context doesn’t excuse anyone. It makes the pattern make sense, and what makes sense can be worked with.
Both/And: Choosing Yourself Won’t Feel Clean, and It’s Still Worth Doing
Here’s what most collections about choosing yourself leave out: choosing yourself will sometimes feel exactly like abandoning other people. And it can still be the right thing. Both are true at the same time, and learning to hold them together is part of the work.
When Brynn sets that forty-five-minute timer and turns her phone face-down, someone might text her. A co-resident might need a favor. Her mother might call. When she doesn’t answer, when she keeps her commitment to the blank page and the good light, she might feel guilty. That guilt is real. It doesn’t mean she did something wrong.
Priya, forty-four, an internist and mother of three, realizes one spring that she hasn’t taken a full day off in four years. Priya is an illustrative example, not a real client. Not a vacation day, but a day when she isn’t monitoring her phone, her kids’ schedules, and her patients’ questions all at once. When she finally takes one, a single Saturday with her partner handling logistics, she spends the first three hours anxious and the last five reading a novel she’s wanted to read for years. She tells her sister it was “the most guilt-ridden good day I’ve ever had.”
That’s the Both/And. Guilt and rightness, at the same time. The discomfort isn’t a reason to stop. Often it’s a sign that something is actually changing.
“Loss still hurts even if you choose it.”
Sharon Martin, DSW, LCSW, Cutting Ties with Your Parents: A Workbook to Help Adult Children Make Peace with Their Decision, Heal Emotional Wounds, and Move Forward with Their Lives (2024)
“You can love someone and still choose to say goodbye to them. You can miss a person every day, and still be glad that they are no longer in your life.”
Tara Westover, Author and Historian, Educated: A Memoir (2018)
“Forgiveness does not mean access. We can give the other person the gift of forgiveness and ourselves the gift of safety and freedom at the very same time.”
Glennon Doyle, Memoirist and Activist, Untamed (2020)
“You can miss someone and not want them back in your life.”
Sharon Martin, DSW, LCSW, Cutting Ties with Your Parents: A Workbook to Help Adult Children Make Peace with Their Decision, Heal Emotional Wounds, and Move Forward with Their Lives (2024), p. 43
“Getting caught up in self-reproach, or beating yourself up for being a flawed human being, is always counterproductive.”
Sally Helgesen & Marshall Goldsmith, Authors and Leadership Coaches, How Women Rise (2018)
The Systemic Lens: Who Wasn’t Permitted to Choose Themselves in the First Place?
“Choose yourself” has become a slogan. It’s on mugs, social media graphics, and the covers of airport books. That’s worth questioning, not to dismiss the real psychological truth in the idea, but to ask who wasn’t permitted to choose themselves to begin with, and what made that so.
Many women are raised to put other people’s needs ahead of their own, as daughters, partners, mothers, and employees. That shaping shows up in who carries the household and emotional labor, in how women’s ambition gets read, and in how quickly the word “selfish” gets applied to a woman who takes up space.
For some women the pressure is layered. Cheryl L. Woods-Giscombé, PhD, RN, then an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Nursing, described what she called the Superwoman Schema in a 2010 focus-group study of African American women. Participants’ descriptions of the Superwoman role were grouped into five areas: “obligation to manifest strength, obligation to suppress emotions, resistance to being vulnerable or dependent, determination to succeed despite limited resources, and obligation to help others.” A simple instruction to “just choose yourself” doesn’t account for those pressures.
For women in economic precarity, choosing yourself can require time, money, childcare, and emotional bandwidth that aren’t available. That isn’t a motivation problem. It’s a structural one.
“Black women could hardly strive for weakness; they had to become strong, for their families and their communities needed their strength to survive.”
Angela Davis, Professor, Philosopher, and Activist, Women, Race & Class (1981), p. 232
“Even when a woman negotiates successfully for herself, she can pay a longer-term cost in goodwill and future advancement.”
Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead (2013)
“We Chinese girls had to learn to be quiet and invisible.”
Maxine Hong Kingston, Author and Professor, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (1976), ch. 5
“And since women of color already have systemic battles at work to face, we can’t afford to let our mental state become our own worst enemy.”
Minda Harts, CEO of The Memo LLC, The Memo: What Women of Color Need to Know to Secure a Seat at the Table (2019)
“Selflessly doing for others can not only impede you from having the financial freedom you’ve dreamed of, it can actually contribute to your ultimately having less than you need to live adequately, let alone well.”
Lois P. Frankel, PhD, President of Corporate Coaching International, Nice Girls Don’t Get Rich (2005)
Naming this isn’t an excuse to stay stuck. It’s the difference between treating your difficulty as a personal failing and recognizing it as a pattern shaped by real conditions. When a driven woman who was taught to erase herself keeps forty-five minutes on a Sunday for herself, she’s doing something small and something significant at once. That it’s harder for some women than others isn’t a personal weakness. It’s an inheritance.
Quotes for the Life That’s Possible When You Do
This last group isn’t a promise that choosing yourself makes everything easier. It’s a horizon: a sense of what can open up when the pattern starts to shift.
Brynn is still at the coffee shop. The timer reads 12:44 remaining. She’s written three pages. She doesn’t know yet what they mean or what she’ll do with them. But she knows this: for forty-five minutes on a Sunday, she existed for no one else. And that felt, improbably, like the most responsible thing she’s done in months.
“My life, my time, my decisions became newly my own.”
Sue Monk Kidd, Author, The Dance of the Dissident Daughter (1996)
“Whomever you become, whatever you make yourself into, that is who you always were. It was always in you.”
Tara Westover, Memoirist & Historian, Educated: A Memoir (2018)
“I stepped into those woods and my life began.”
Madeline Miller, novelist and classicist, Circe (2018)
“All my life I have been moving forward, and now I am here. I have a mortal’s voice, let me have the rest.”
Madeline Miller, novelist and classicist, Circe
“When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder if I have made of my life something particular, and real.”
Mary Oliver, poet, Devotions (2017)
“Our task is to release the new spirit from the old stone, however painful that may be. Then and only then can we say, “I am alive. I will be free.””
Marion Woodman, Jungian analyst, The Ravaged Bridegroom: Masculinity in Women (1990)
“She has become more interested in the present and the future than in the past, more apt to approach the world with praise and awe than with fear.”
Judith Herman, MD, Psychiatrist, Trauma and Recovery (1992)
“Freedom lies in learning to embrace what happened. Freedom means we muster the courage to dismantle the prison, brick by brick.”
Edith Eva Eger, Clinical Psychologist, The Choice: Embrace the Possible (2017)
“they remember what their god whispered into their ribs: Wake up and ache for your life.”
Natalie Diaz, poet, Postcolonial Love Poem (2020)
“Alive, I am, a living, breathing Mary of myself.”
Mary Karr, Memoirist, Poet & Professor, Lit: A Memoir (2009)
“Awakening was really the act of remembering myself, remembering this deep Feminine Source.”
Sue Monk Kidd, Author, The Dance of the Dissident Daughter (1996)
“These warrings had cost me dearly in time lost, and, feeling myself again, I was unwilling to risk losing any more time than I already had. Life had become worth not losing.”
Kay Redfield Jamison, Clinical Psychologist & Professor, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (1995)
“She, who’d been so miserable and alone, / now thrown into the democracy / of the body’s pleasure, set free.”
Ellen Bass, poet, Like a Beggar (2014)
“In defiance, I threw myself into my old life. I did what I liked, the moment that I thought of it. I sang upon the beaches, rearranged my garden.”
Madeline Miller, novelist and classicist, Circe (2018)
“We own our worth and gifts just as we own our pain. We stop playing life and start living it.”
Ingrid Clayton, Fawning: Why the Need to Please Makes Us Lose Ourselves, and How to Find Our Way Back (2025)
If you’re somewhere in the middle of this, not quite in the permission group and not yet in the life that’s possible, that’s where most people are. The middle is where the practice happens. If it’s hard to picture what comes next, why trauma can make it hard to imagine a future may help explain why.
Of course choosing yourself feels strange. You’ve had years of practice at the opposite, and much of that practice was rewarded. You’re not doing it wrong if it feels awkward, guilty, or slow. You’re learning a new habit in a body that remembers the old one.
The blank page is still there. You have exactly as much time as Brynn had that morning: forty-five minutes that belong to you, if you decide to take them.
Warmly,
Annie
Next steps in your recovery
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Frequently asked questions.
What’s the difference between choosing yourself and being selfish?
Selfishness means disregarding other people’s needs for your own benefit. Choosing yourself means recognizing that your needs and wellbeing are also real, alongside other people’s rather than instead of them. Women who worry most about being selfish when they take space are often the most giving people in their families and workplaces, which is part of why the word sticks.
Why does prioritizing myself feel like I’m betraying the people I love?
For many driven women, the unspoken agreement they grew up with was: if I put everyone else first, I’ll be loved and safe. Stepping outside that agreement, even in small ways, can set off a fear of loss. It can feel like betrayal because you’re leaving a role you learned to play to keep connection intact. Noticing that is often the first step. The agreement was never fair to you.
How do I start choosing myself when I don’t even know what I want?
Start with small, low-stakes preferences. Not “what do I want from my career,” but “do I want to eat lunch now?” or “would I rather read for twenty minutes or scroll?” When you’ve spent years tracking other people’s preferences, your own can go quiet. They usually haven’t disappeared. You’re out of practice, and practice is how they come back.
What happens in relationships when I start setting limits for the first time?
It depends on the relationship. In many relationships, limits lead to some friction and then a new balance, sometimes with more mutual respect. In relationships built on one person always being available, limits can be more disruptive, and some relationships may not adjust. That can be painful, and it’s also information about what the relationship was asking of you.
Is therapy or coaching the right place to work on this?
Either can help, and the right fit depends on what’s underneath the pattern. If it traces back to childhood relationships or relational trauma, therapy is often the better fit, because the work may need to reach the emotional and body-level layers where the pattern lives. If your main challenge is practical, such as limits at work or managing capacity, coaching may be enough. Only an assessment can tell you what you need.
Which quotes in this collection help most with guilt?
The ones that name where the guilt comes from. Alice Miller’s line about people who “suffer all their lives from this oppressive feeling of guilt, the sense of not having lived up to their parents’ expectations” speaks to its roots. Sonya Renee Taylor’s reminder that “the voice of doubt, shame, and guilt blaring in our heads is not our voice” offers some distance from it. Sharon Martin’s “Loss still hurts even if you choose it” makes room for the grief that can come with a good decision.
Can I work with Annie Wright directly?
Yes. Annie Wright, LMFT, offers individual therapy for driven women healing from relational trauma. She’s licensed in 15 U.S. jurisdictions, including Colorado for telehealth only, and registered to provide telehealth in Florida under Fla. Stat. 456.47. You can reach out through the connect page.
What if I’m not safe right now, or these quotes bring up thoughts of not wanting to be here?
Please don’t carry that alone. If you’re in immediate danger, call 911. In the United States, you can call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, or text HOME to 741741 for the Crisis Text Line. Outside the US, findahelpline.com lists local crisis services. Quotes can keep you company, but they aren’t a substitute for support.
References.
- American Psychological Association. “Conditions of Worth.” APA Dictionary of Psychology. https://dictionary.apa.org/conditions-of-worth.
- American Psychological Association. “Self-Compassion.” APA Dictionary of Psychology. https://dictionary.apa.org/self-compassion.
- Woods-Giscombé, Cheryl L. “Superwoman Schema: African American Women’s Views on Stress, Strength, and Health.” Qualitative Health Research 20, no. 5 (2010): 668-683. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3072704/.
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Annie Wright, LMFT
LMFT · Relational Trauma Specialist · Author, W.W. Norton 2027
Helping driven women finally feel as good as their résumé looks.
Annie Wright is an EMDR-certified licensed psychotherapist and relational trauma specialist with over 15,000 clinical hours, and she's been in practice since 2013. She draws on psychodynamic and somatic approaches alongside EMDR, and she is licensed in 15 U.S. jurisdictions and registered to provide telehealth in Florida (California, Colorado (telehealth only), Connecticut, the District of Columbia, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Texas, Utah, Virginia, and Washington). Annie works with driven and ambitious women from relational trauma backgrounds, and everything she writes about is field-tested across thousands of clinical sessions. She is the founder and former CEO of Evergreen Counseling, a multimillion-dollar trauma-informed therapy center she built, scaled, and successfully exited, and is currently writing her first book, The Everything Years: Navigating the Pressure and Promise of Your Thirties, with W.W. Norton (2027). A regular contributor to Psychology Today, her expert commentary has appeared in USA Today, Forbes, Business Insider, Inc., NBC, and The Information.
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