Does life feel relentless, always demanding more from you? Especially as we sprint toward the holidays, that familiar feeling of over-giving, over-achieving, and quiet resentment can hit hard.
I recently had a powerful conversation with my friend and colleague, Carrie Levine, a Certified Nurse Midwife and Functional Medicine specialist. We were talking about boundaries, and she revealed something I often see in my work:
Your body is keeping score of every boundary you skip.
Carrie sees successful, high-achieving women—often midlife—coming into her clinic with chronic fatigue, hormone imbalances, and fertility issues. She shared the case of a 36-year-old trying to conceive while managing a toddler, a career, and household demands.
As Carrie looked at the woman’s lab results (especially her terrible adrenals), she knew the solution wasn’t another pill or supplement. It was, pure and simple, rest.
As she told the client, her first choice of medicine would be to literally “pull her out of work for 3 months and tell her to go home and rest.” Although that sounds impossible for most of us, the point stands: there’s only so long our bodies can put up with all our pushing and striving.
Your years of self-sacrifice snowball.
The Subconscious Lie of Self-Sacrifice
This is the intersection where my intuitive work meets Carrie’s medical expertise:
Why do we push ourselves far beyond what we know deep down is okay, healthy, and sustainable?
Why do we keep running on fumes?
Over and over with clients – especially women, especially moms – I find a core subconscious belief that often runs the show: “I have to sacrifice myself in order to receive love.”
We are taught the “Mom Code” — that you just give and give and give, no matter what.
But when you operate from this belief, three toxic things happen:
1. You feel resentment: I always say our emotions are like tantruming toddlers. If you ignore them, they scream louder. They weren’t heard or honored. So that resentment—that poison—gets bottled up in your body.
2. You actually rob the other person of something valuable: When you don’t have good boundaries with a loved one (a partner, a sibling or parent, or an adult child), you are essentially saying: “I don’t trust you.” You are robbing them of the lesson they need to learn to grow. And in the long run, that’s not actually kind … even if it comes from a place of love.
3. You trample on your self-worth: The root of the root of the root is the feeling “I am not worthy.” Boundaries start here: with valuing yourself.
Your Sovereign Self Needs Support
The question then becomes: How do we hold the line without feeling mean or selfish?
Establishing a boundary is the only self-improvement others won’t congratulate you for. It’s inconvenient for them. They’re not going to love it. I mean, why aren’t you sacrificing yourself like they’re used to?!
So it has to be an inside job first. You have to be ready for the pushback and the guilt that may come up when you set and enforce your boundaries. You have to know, with every cell, that you deserve love, you deserve peace, you deserve respect. And you have to stay calm even if others freak out when you dare to set a boundary, when you dare to say something like “I actually can’t take that on, but I’m sure you can handle it.”
Carrie and I broke down a few exact moment-by-moment steps you can take to regulate your nervous system and stay centered when your boundaries are challenged. We share three simple, free, in-the-moment tools you can use when you feel triggered—like the 4-7-8 breath, the Hand on Heart technique, and the Butterfly Hug.
You don’t have to wait for a fire or a health crisis to get your attention.
Watch the full 45-minute conversation here to learn exactly how to use those 3 tools (and why the Butterfly Hug is so effective!) :
If you’re ready to dismantle the subconscious beliefs that make you feel obligated to self-sacrifice, I would love to chat. This is the deep, compassionate, yet fast-acting work we do in my group coaching container, Emerge.
We’ll work on your worth, your energetic boundaries, and your power—so you can find flow, purpose, and peace without burning out.
