The Cost of Denying Your Own Needs—When Emotional Exhaustion Tells a Deeper Story
Episode Notes
If you’ve ever felt emotionally exhausted—even while doing all the “right” things—this episode is for you.
I’m sharing a personal story and unpacking something I see in so many women I work with: the quiet, often unnoticed pattern of denying your own needs in the name of being kind, helpful, or faithful.
We’ll talk about how these patterns take root, how faith communities can unknowingly reinforce them, and why that emotional exhaustion you’re feeling might be trying to tell you something important.
In this episode, I explore:
* How codependency hides behind helping & overfunctioning
* How the fawn response might be showing up in your life
* The impact of church messages that tell us to "die to ourselves" without teaching us how to live
* What healthy dependence looks like
* Why your locus of control—internal vs. external—matters more than you think
Resources:
- The Best of You by Dr. Alison Cook
- Codependent No More: How to Stop Controlling Others and Start Caring for Yourself by Melody Beattie
- Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving: A Guide and Map for Recovering from Childhood Trauma by Pete Walker
- Jeremiah 17:9
- Jeremiah 31:33
- John 12:24-25 MSG
- John 1:11-13 MSG
If you liked this, you’ll love:
- Episode 5: What is Codependency and Why Does it Matter?
- Episode 14: The Fawn Response & The Hidden Root of People Pleasing
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Music by Andy Luiten/Sound editing by Kelly Kramarik
© 2024 Alison Cook. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Please do not copy or share the contents of this webpage without permission from the author. While Dr. Cook is a counselor, the content of this podcast and any of the products provided by Dr. Cook are not specific counseling advice nor are they a substitute for individual counseling. The content and products provided on this podcast are for informational purposes only.
Transcript:
Alison Cook: Hey everyone, and welcome back to this week's episode of The Best of You Podcast, where we're going to slow down together for a moment and listen to the quiet of our own hearts beneath all the noise outside of us. I'm so glad you're here.
Today's episode is for all of you who feel spiritually strong, but emotionally weary. You trust God, you pray, you try to care deeply for the needs of others, and yet something inside feels stretched thin, frayed at the edges, quietly hurting. If that sounds familiar, you may be carrying more than your soul was made to hold all alone.
Today's words are drawn from the pages of the first solo book I wrote. It's called The Best of You, and the book came out of my own life and my own journey of feeling strong in my faith, but emotionally fragile at times.
The book was the heartbeat behind this podcast and behind the work that I've been called
to do, and when I recently asked you through a poll on social media what topics you wanted me to cover on the podcast, the topic of codependency was one of the most commonly requested. So that's where we're headed.
Here's how we'll spend our time. First, we'll name and explore what codependency actually is and how it quietly takes root. Then, I'll share a personal story that shaped my own understanding of invisibility and self-protection and reflect on how faith and church messages sometimes reinforce these patterns.
Finally, we'll look at the invitation of Jesus not to disappear, but to come alive to your truest self. At the end of the episode, I'll share with you some questions for your own reflection and journaling. So if you're weary from trying to hold it all together, if you're longing for something deeper than the surface answers you've been given, this space is for you. Let's take a breath or a sip of coffee or tea together, and dive in.
Every week I talk with women who are moms, who are bosses, who are artists, doctors, teachers, women who are anchored in their faith, and yet feel untethered inside. They ask questions like these: Why do I feel so overwhelmed even though I'm trying so hard to be a good person? Why do I keep running on empty? Isn't my faith supposed to be enough?
Maybe you've asked these questions too. The truth is, you can be spiritually strong and emotionally stuck. You can trust God and still feel lonely, or like you're running on empty.
You can have a deep faith and still feel anxious or invisible in your own life, because somewhere deep inside, you learned that taking up space is dangerous.
I still remember the first time I felt that instinct to shrink back. I was in sixth grade. I was cast as the Queen of Hearts in our school play. I was so over the moon excited about this play. I had the red dress, the collar that stood tall, and I even got those red press-on nails for dramatic flare.
When the curtain rose and the spotlights were on, something inside of me collapsed. Who was I to be so bold? Who was I to take up space? Who was I to try to play this Queen of Hearts? I watched as the other girls seemed to shine as they stepped right into their roles and I started telling myself, why can't I be more like they are?
Just like that, I began to disappear, to crumble inside myself. I missed my cue. I stumbled through the scene, and afterward, I was mortified, filled with shame. I laughed it off and praised my friends and told them how great they were, but inside, a new rule took root inside my soul–don't be too much. Stay small and you'll stay safe.
I'm guessing that you might remember a moment like that in your own story. Maybe in your case, it wasn't a school play. Maybe it was a classroom, a sports team, maybe a family dinner table, maybe it was with your peers. A place where you wanted to speak up or step forward, but some part of you whispered, “don't, you're not enough” or even worse, “you are too much”.
For a moment, let yourself go back to that space, not to stay there, but to honor what you felt in that moment. What was the fear that prompted you to silence your voice in that situation?
What decision did you make about yourself at that moment? What quiet rule did you begin to live by?
These inner rules don't come out of nowhere. They're formed at the intersection of where we've been hurt and where we've learned to survive. Over time, they shape how we relate to others and to ourselves. For many of us, this leads to a hidden pattern we don't often name, but it's called codependency.
Codependency is more than unhealthy relationships. It's a way of being in the world, a way of organizing your life around everyone else's needs, while staying disconnected from your own. It looks like always being the helper, always being the peacekeeper, always being the one everyone else depends on, until one day you realize no one really knows the real you.
Maybe even you don't know the real you. The term codependency was first used in the context of addiction recovery. It described the behavior of loved ones who became so entangled in trying to help meet the addicted person's perceived needs, that they lost their own sense of identity, and even unwittingly began to enable the other person.
Later authors like Melody Beattie helped popularize the concept more broadly. In her groundbreaking book, Codependent No More, Beattie suggested that codependency reaches much more broadly than crafting your identity around someone else's addiction. It's a pattern that can show up in any relationship, where you chronically ignore your own needs in order to care for others.
Often this looks like avoiding conflict at all costs, needing external validation from other people to feel okay, saying yes to others when your heart is saying no, and losing your voice in order to keep the peace.
You start to hide your needs so no one views you as a burden. You begin to enable other people or make excuses for other people's dysfunctional behavior. You might tell white lies to avoid any form of conflict. You might rely excessively on others in order to make even the simplest of decisions. You might discount your own needs, your own wants, your own instincts, your own inner wisdom.
Codependency is often linked to a survival strategy known as fawning. Therapist Pete Walker introduced this term in his book on complex trauma. Many of us are familiar with the idea of fight or flight or even freeze; these are nervous system responses to threats in our environment.
You go into fight mode when you go on the attack or confront someone else, and you go into flight mode when you flee or try to avoid a conflict. Both of these are nervous system responses to threats in our environment. You go into freeze mode when it's almost as if both of those reactions are happening simultaneously. You freeze, which means you feel like you can't respond–a deer in the headlights moment.
The fawn response is a fourth category that's newer to the vocabulary. But I think it's a really powerful descriptor of the way many of us learned to cope or to survive, especially as it relates to codependent patterns.
I think about an experience I had as a young girl growing up in the mountains of Wyoming. We would bump into all kinds of wildlife on family hikes, but one time we actually bumped into a baby fawn. It was laying in the grass, all curled up, blending into the environment around it. We could have easily missed seeing it.
Here's the thing about a baby fawn. They don't fight. They don't come after you. Neither do they flee. They don't run away. Instead, they get smaller. They get even tinier. They attempt to disappear and camouflage into their environment. It's an extremely adaptive survival response.
As psychologists studied the impact of our childhood wounds on adult behavior, they detected this additional conditioned response, this fawn response that doesn't look like fight, flight, or freeze. Instead, it looks like playing small, blending in, muting your voice, shrinking down.
On the outside, it can look like kindness, generosity, and flexibility, but on the inside, it's driven by fear. “If I can hide and stay small, maybe I'll stay safe”. This message is particularly important for women to understand. Now, guys, if you're listening, I hope you'll stick with me because many of you struggle with this too.
But I'm gonna speak directly to the women, because we've been given a whole other set of messages that reinforce this idea that we should play small. As women, we've inherited a legacy of being taught to stay small. Many of our mothers and grandmothers grew up in generations as women who faced extremely limited options.
For example, some of our great-grandmothers weren't allowed to vote, and many of our mothers and grandmothers weren't allowed to apply for their own credit cards without their spouse's signature or approval. In fact, women weren't officially allowed to compete in US marathons until the early 1970s.
Sometimes we can be hard on our mothers and on the generations who came before us. But imagine growing up with some of these pervasive cultural messages. “Your voice doesn't count. You can't depend on yourself. Your talents don't matter”. And if you don't think these messages still affect women today, consider that women are diagnosed with depression and anxiety at significantly higher rates than men.
Let me be clear, this does not show that there's something wrong with women. This reveals the lingering legacy of misunderstanding and devaluing women. We women are tough, and we have been all along. We're in the trenches trying to improve our societies. We're nurturing children, supporting friends, strengthening our communities, and producing important work alongside our colleagues.
Yet we've also paid a price. So many women are taught to put others first before we are taught to cherish ourselves. Faith communities, even with their best intentions, can reinforce these patterns. We often hear messages like, “Sacrifice for others. Put others first. You can't trust your heart. Die to yourself”.
The subtle power of these messages is strong, but the problem is, what if the self you're dying to isn't the selfish part of all of us, but the true self God created in love? When you're taught that you can't trust yourself, you have no choice but to rely on other people to guide you. Furthermore, when you're taught to always put others first, you disregard your own needs.
Taken together, these commonly taught messages leave you with only two options to guide your decision making. Number one, only trust other people. You have to look to external sources to figure out what you need or want. Or number two, to only put others first, to always consider what other people need and want.
Notice how there is no place for you, for your own wisdom, in either of these options. You are focused on meeting other people's needs or looking to other people for permission or for approval. Your eyes are always on them. Nowhere in this equation is there a place for you to sort out who you are and what you want or need.
This isn't healthy spirituality. This is not what God intended. It is one thing to sacrifice in healthy ways for other people. It's another to betray yourself altogether. It's one thing to use the strength that you have gained to help a loved one who's in need. It's another to bypass your own healing work.
When you neglect your own self, your own healing, your own growth, you aren't living out of the fullness of who you are. There's a difference between dying to your ego and disappearing altogether, and this message is particularly important for women to understand. So many of us have been taught to die to a life that we haven't yet learned how to live.
Instead of encouraging you to stay small and sacrifice for others, I wanna give you a counterbalancing message. Here's the truth. Jesus didn't ask women to make themselves invisible. He didn't ask them to play small. In fact, he did the opposite. He spoke directly to women. He honored them and gave them a sense of agency. He empowered them. He sent them out with good news.
I wanna ask you this question today. What if following Jesus isn't only about sacrificing for others? What if it's about coming alive, fully and wholly–body, mind, heart, and soul–to your truest God-made self?
You may have grown up hearing that being kind means never having needs, never getting angry, never taking up space. But kindness without boundaries is not love. It's martyrdom, and
and that is not what God asks of us.
So what's the alternative? If codependency keeps us hidden and emotionally disconnected, what does healthy connection actually look like? What does it look like to be in relationship with others without losing yourself?
I wanna be clear about what it's not, because our culture can give us confusing messages. Healthy dependence isn't the same as hyper-individualism, or isolating yourself from others. Or I'll do me, I only answer to myself. That's not healthy dependence.
Healthy dependence means that you can trust others and trust yourself. You can share your needs and your opinions and your ideas and your dreams without shame. You can set a boundary with another person when it's the right thing to do. You can be in a relationship without disappearing into the other person.
Codependency says, I'll tell you what you wanna hear. It's easier that way. Healthy dependence says, I'd value the opportunity to talk this issue through with you so that we can both be heard.
Codependency says, I need your permission. I can't do it without your approval. Healthy dependence says, I don't need your permission, but I value your perspective.
Codependency says, I can't be alone if you don't give me the validation that I crave. Healthy dependence says, I need time alone to cool off and gather my thoughts before circling back to this conversation,
Codependency says, I can't live without you. Healthy dependence says, I'm better with you in my life.
The antidote to codependency is healthy interdependence. In codependency, we're often looking outward. What do they need? What do they think? How do they need to feel my love?
When we're interdependent with other people, we also look inward. What do I need? What do I think? Can I love this other person and still honor myself?
Healthy dependence isn't always a perfect balance, but it does require mutuality, respect, shared responsibility, and a back and forth and that includes your relationship with God.
God doesn't call you to erase yourself to connect with Him. God calls you to be grounded in his love, both for the sake of others and for the sake of yourself.
Now I know that for some of you, when we talk about honoring yourself, trusting yourself, listening to yourself, your theological radar might go up, and so let me share something I believe Scripture clearly teaches. When the Bible says that the heart is deceitful and wicked, Jeremiah the prophet was referring to our broken state, what some theologians call original sin.
There's something that every single one of us inherits as part of being human, and that is that we're imperfect, we can all go astray. But the very same prophet who declared this bad news about our deceitful state also foretold the good news about what would happen one day when Jesus would come.
In fact, Jeremiah prophesied the solution to this problem in the coming of God's Spirit: I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts through the power of God's Spirit. What had once only been available externally through the law is now available internally to every single one of us through the power of God's Spirit.
This teaching in Jeremiah is underscored by an idea in psychology related to the locus of control. When you have an internal locus of control, you tend to look to resources within yourself, including God's Spirit, to affect change, make decisions, and create impact. You have a sense that you can, to some degree, take charge of your life.
In contrast, when you lead toward an external locus of control, you tend to view what happens to you as outside of your control. You view external sources such as circumstances, fate, or other people as responsible for your wellbeing.
An internal locus of control relates to higher levels of confidence and improved mental health, while an external locus of control tends to correlate with increased feelings of anxiety, helplessness, and depression.
Some psychologists believe that an internal locus of control is one of the most important factors in creating healthy relationships throughout life. It's not that you don't also need trustworthy people in a healthy community around you–you do. But in order to engage those external resources in helpful ways, you have to be able to rely on your inner resources, including emotional cues from your nervous system, your critical thinking, and inner wisdom.
Not surprisingly, women are far more conditioned toward an external locus of control than men are. Women are taught to look outside of ourselves for solutions, and I would argue that this is particularly true in faith communities. But focusing exclusively on external resources isn't healthy.
In fact, research in the psychology of religion has shown that when you recognize that God is empowering you to take action, it's good for your mental health and your spiritual resilience. It's also what we see taught in scripture.
Jesus used a grain of wheat to describe the process of dying to yourself. In John 12:24-25, he says, “Listen carefully: Unless a grain of wheat is buried in the ground, dead to the world, it is never any more than a grain of wheat. But if it is buried, it sprouts and reproduces itself many times over. In the same way, anyone who holds on to life just as it is destroys that life. But if you let it go, reckless in your love, you’ll have it forever, real and eternal”.
That's The Message version. I want you to consider this. The grain of wheat represents your old ways of surviving–the pleasing, the producing, the perfecting, the codependent patterns of relating to other people.
Those ways may have worked for a time, but they no longer serve you nor anyone. You have to change. You have to die to those old ways. It's hard. It might even feel like a loss initially, after all these ways have served you in the past. But to become a truer version of yourself, you have to release these old ways.
It's the only way to grow. What if dying to yourself means letting go of those old ways of learning how to disappear, how to please, how to organize your life around the needs of others? What if it means coming alive to the person you really are, the person God made? This idea is echoed in other Bible passages.
Here's what the Apostle John said:
“But whoever did want him,
who believed he was who he claimed
and would do what he said,
He made to be their true selves,
their child-of-God selves.”
Here's what I believe. Dying to yourself means dying to the old survival patterns, the pleasing, the hiding, the shrinking, the playing small. It means coming alive to the true self, the wholeness of yourself, God-made, the one with the courage to stand up for what's right, the clarity to name your calling and your needs, and the compassion to love others without losing yourself.
This isn't easy. It can feel like a loss, like you're laying down a cloak that once kept you safe, but that cloak was never your true covering. Love is. Love calls you out of hiding. It frees you. It fills your soul and flows from within you out into the world around you. So as we close, I wanna ask you a few questions to consider.
Where in your life do you feel the pressure to be small?
What old messages from family, culture, or church still shape how you see your worth?
What is a new message God might be inviting you to consider instead?
What might it feel like to remove your own invisibility cloak for today?
You were never meant to disappear. You were made to be known, to be seen, to be loved as you are. If these ideas have stirred something in you, I'd love to invite you to pause, journal, or even take a walk with these thoughts.
If you're ready to go deeper into this journey, join me next week where we're gonna talk about how boundaries can flow from love. You are not too much, you are not alone, and you are already deeply loved.