How to Recognize If You’ve Lost Yourself In Your Marriage: How and Why This Happens

Have you ever felt like you’ve lost yourself? Like you’re so focused on living up to the expectations everyone has for you that you’re just being pushed in every direction?

A lot of women come to that place in life where they feel ‘lost’ and it’s usually accompanied by feeling restless, unsatisfied and just not at peace. This is not a feeling that happens overnight, but is often a process that takes place over a long period of time.

But how does this happen? 

We Were Taught To Please

Starting as a young girl, we naturally want to please our parents and we’re often taught that we should aim to live up to the expectations they have for us. We do this by trying to manage their feelings - making them happy and not angry or upset. As if we can ‘make’ anyone feel anything. When we’ve lived up to their expectations, we feel good as we can now wear the badge of being  ‘a good girl’ and ‘a good daughter’.

Then when we get married, unfortunately for some of us, we subconsciously do the same. We show up in our marriage as someone who tries to please her husband by now taking ownership of his feelings and aiming to live up to his expectations at all costs.  Even when it’s not in alignment with who we are.

Even though, for some women, it starts from a good place of wanting to take care of her family and ensuring everyone is happy, the situation can quickly become devastating.

Because what happens when the husband is not happy? The wife then takes on the responsibility for the husband’s feelings. She will even go as far as adjusting herself - constantly changing her actions and words or shrinking herself to manage HIS feelings. 

And it’s all downhill from there.

The Start Of The Death Sentence

Once you start living your life for someone else's feelings - you’re sentencing yourself to death.

Sounds harsh - but it’s true.

You see, feelings are an inside job - feelings come from ‘thought in the moment’.  Well, it’s impossible to get into another person’s mind and control their thinking in order to manage their feelings. As such, you can NEVER make someone feel happy, grateful or really anything at all.

So ultimately, what you end up doing, is killing off the pieces of yourself that you believe your spouse doesn’t like in a doomed attempt to make him happy.

If a woman continues on this suicide mission and doesn’t set healthy boundaries, she can easily go through life believing that if people are happy with her then she is good (good wife, mother, daughter, etc) successful, worthy, and validated. On the flip side, if people are not happy with her, she can easily feel the opposite - like she’s in a rat race and no matter what she does it’s never good enough. This thinking of ‘I’m not good enough’ is self oppression.

When The Marriage Breaks Down…

So many women, when they find their marriage is breaking down come to me and say “I tried so hard. I did everything he wanted. I did whatever I could but no matter what I did, I couldn't make it work.” They feel like a failure and they feel worthless.

The marital breakdown is sometimes what opens their eyes to what has been going on all along. 

They realize that they were constantly getting pushed around and trying to make others happy, even at their own expense. They realize that they’ve never known how to trust themselves, have healthy boundaries or rely on their own intuition.

They come to the truth: 

We were created to please Allah and live an authentic purposeful life. We weren't created for people pleasing.

So What Can You Do If You Feel Like You’ve Lost Yourself?

Here are a few things you can do to navigate the feelings of losing yourself.

1. Recognize the difference between your identity and your roles. Identity is first your relationship with Allah and self.

2. Look at how you show up in your roles. If you find that you are living to people please, take a step back and reflect on how and why you are doing this.

a. Do you really know the expectations that others have of you? Have these expectations been clearly laid out or are they your own assumptions?

b. If you’ve identified the expectations, what is the source of these expectations that you believe you need to live up to? Is it culture, society, family, or Quran and Sunnah?  

c. Can anyone (but Allah) really put expectations on how you should be in the first place? You are not a programmable robot, and so too we have to also accept people for who they are. We don’t need people to change in order for us to be at peace.

3. Think of how you can shift from people pleasing to ‘Allah pleasing’. What would that look like for you?

4. Identify where you are trying to take ownership of others' feelings (like your husband?). Are you trying to prevent someone from feeling anger, frustration, disappointment, sadness etc? Remember we don’t have control over another’s feelings. We can’t even manage to control our own thoughts/feelings. 

5. Think of where you need healthy boundaries in place for yourself.  Make a note of how you intend to implement those boundaries in order to not fall into emotional abuse or be taken advantage of.  

Did you find this article helpful? Let me know in the comments below!