Building a Relationship With Yourself Before Everyone Else

“I don’t actually know myself that well. Not the version of me that exists underneath everyone else’s needs.”

That’s a hard thing to admit, and it’s something I hear from almost every woman who sits across from me. Not “I don’t like myself” — something quieter and more unsettling than that. I don’t know what I actually want anymore. I don’t know what I need. I’ve been so busy being what everyone else needs me to be that I lost track of the relationship that was supposed to come first.

The reality is, we treat relationships with ourselves as the one that can wait. The partner gets attention. The kids get attention. The job, the friends, the family that calls when they need something — all of it gets tended to first, because it’s loud, because it’s immediate, because saying no to a person in front of you feels harder than saying no to yourself. You are always available to yourself, so you become the one thing that never gets scheduled.

I want to be honest about something. This isn’t really about bubble baths or an hour alone, even though that’s how self-care usually gets marketed. It’s about something underneath that — do you actually know what you think, separate from what everyone around you needs you to think? Do you know what you want for dinner before you ask what everyone else wants? Do you know how you feel before you check how everyone else is feeling first?

If the answer is no, or you’re not sure, that’s not a character flaw. It’s what happens when you’ve spent years being fluent in everyone else’s needs and never got the same practice with your own.

When was the last time you asked yourself what you needed, and actually waited for the answer instead of moving straight to what everyone else needed?

Building a relationship with yourself looks a lot like building any other relationship. It takes attention. It takes actually noticing — not deciding in advance what you’ll find, just noticing. It takes time that isn’t productive, time that doesn’t accomplish anything except letting you hear yourself again. It takes tolerating the discomfort of putting yourself first sometimes, even when everything in you wants to reflexively check on everyone else instead.

This isn’t selfish. I know it can feel that way, especially if you’ve spent your whole life being told the opposite. But you cannot offer people a version of you that you don’t have a relationship with yourself. Everyone around you is receiving whatever is left over from a woman who hasn’t checked in with herself in years. That’s not sustainable for you, and it’s not actually what the people who love you want either.

You are allowed to be the first relationship you invest in. Not the last one. Not the one you get to eventually, once everyone else is taken care of.

If you don’t know where to start, that’s a completely reasonable place to begin from — with someone who can help you get reacquainted with yourself instead of doing it alone. You can read more about what working together looks like here.

Schedule a free 15-minute consultation — sometimes the relationship starts with one honest conversation.