“No matter how much loving, kind and helpful I am to my family they always treat me with disrespect, ignore me for all the important discussions and treat me like a maid. I also feel that people give me less than I deserve. I have been working on my self worth but at times it hurts a lot.”
— Anonymous
First of all, I hear your frustration, isolation, sadness and hurt. It’s a bit difficult to understand your specific context, but that being said, I definitely feel the unfairness of your situation and I’m sending you my love, compassion and understanding.
I like to think of ourselves as a collection of healed and unhealed parts. And from what I’ve noticed,
unfair situations tend to impact our unhealed parts first, and it’s our unhealed parts that then respond to these unfair circumstances.
And if these unhealed parts are still unrecovered from past unfair situations, these unhealed parts of ourselves might still feel helpless and they might respond and cope destructively in this situation of feeling stuck, yet again, with more unfair circumstances.
I think it’s important in this case to access your current self to lead here, by asking the unhealed parts of yourself: “What do we need that we’re not receiving? What part of ourself is longing for an outlet so that we can be expressed and known? Do we have any passions or any interests on the back burner that are being neglected, bc there’s no time left for us?”
When the things that are meaningful to us—the stuff that inspires us and the stuff that lights us up—are shoved to the back burner, after enough time, they begin to simmer, and then smolder.
They want to get out and exist in the world as things we birth—as extensions of ourselves. And when we don’t let these parts of ourselves out, it can get very uncomfortable walking around with what's most meaningful to us smoldering inside, especially while other people keep demanding that we meet their needs instead.
When I read your words, I’m hearing a longing for connection based on who you are, not just what you provide. I’m hearing a need for a purpose that lights you up, something other than only caring for your family and household responsibilities.
I’m hearing that you need connections where you’re being heard and gotten for who you are within yourself, not only for who you are as a nurturer in your family.
To me, we are gifts in this life. And it’s our purpose to discover our gifts—what’s most meaningful to us—and to share our gifts.
And many times, our families cannot provide the kinds of outlets that we need in order to share our gifts. We have to go out into our communities to share these parts of ourselves. And if we don’t have any community, we have to create community.
Even a virtual community can provide a ton of fulfillment. My life has greatly improved the moment I began allowing all my smoldering ideas to get out of my body and onto this page to be shared.
So please ask yourself: Is there something I’m carrying around inside me that’s meaningful to me and would light me up if I were to figure out how to share it?
Maybe it’s starting a book club, volunteering somewhere, creating a fundraising event. Maybe it’s joining a weekly yoga class, or a healing circle. Maybe it’s creating a collection of paintings and sharing them at a community gallery, or writing a book and sharing the chapters online…
Explore what inspires you within yourself and trust yourself that these things matter. You do have gifts within you, ready to be given.
As for your family, maybe they don’t need to be involved. Maybe, after you figure out something that inspires you that you’d like to follow through with, you can share your idea with your family from a space of excitement, as something new that you’re going to pursue.
Let them know that you’re hoping to share it with them too. And that you might also need some extra help with some of the household responsibilities to give you a little extra time here and there.
If they don’t respond the way you’d like them to, that is frustrating, yes, but not a reason to give up. See if you can still carve a bit of time just for you, to invest your time into something that lights you up.
Lastly, your words reminded me of something from my own past. As a teen, I had a stepmother who was obsessed with me doing chores. Ridiculous amounts of chores. Some people collect stamps. This woman seemed to be collecting my elbow grease lol. Who knows. But she’d check my work with a white towel before I was allowed to leave the house. And at some point, when I finally got the courage to stick up for myself, she told me I turn people off.
I turn people off?!
This was horrifying to me. I wanted people to be turned on by me, to love me, to want to connect with me, to be excited about who I was. So what did I do after she told me I turned people off?
I stopped expressing my needs. And resented others. And that’s when my smoldering began.
It took awhile for me to understand what she meant. Of course I turned her off! The very act of me expressing myself meant that she would have to turn off her agenda and consider mine. Which might have felt like a loss of power for her. Especially if she was operating from her own hurt unhealed parts.
So if others are not happy with your need to express yourself, it’s coming from their own unhealed parts. Yes, that is a toxic way to be. But instead of letting them know, “You are so toxic!” which only invites more toxicity, we can have compassion for them without betraying ourselves.
In the case of our loved ones, we can reassure them we are still there for them, that we’re not abandoning them. We can even encourage them to pursue their own interests in life too.
But most importantly, your fulfillment matters and your fulfillment is your responsibility.
Yes, it can feel like we’re expected to be gears in whatever system we find ourselves in, with no time left over to create systems for the parts of ourselves that are wanting and needing to create something different.
But we can only change the way these systems operate by creating new systems that work for us.
I’m not sure if this reframe will be helpful, but I hope so! And thank you for sharing yourself and for giving me an opportunity to offer a reframe.
And now, I’d like to open up the conversation in the comments to anyone else who’d like to contribute by adding their own reframe…