I once watched a woman in a restaurant methodically divide her sandwich in half, give the larger portion to her partner, then proceed to ask if he wanted her pickle too. He took it without a word of thanks, scrolling through his phone while she watched him eat. She looked so pleased by his contentment, as if his mere acceptance of her food was nourishment enough. It struck me as a perfect visual metaphor for what I see in my office nearly every week: people constantly slicing off pieces of themselves, wondering why they keep shrinking. 🥪
Emily.J was one such client. I remember her sitting in my office, twisted like a pretzel in her chair, physically manifesting the contortions she’d been doing to accommodate everyone in her life. “I just want to be loving,” she told me during our first session, “but somehow I keep ending up feeling… empty.”
The Self-Love Paradox 💭
What struck me about Emily was her genuinely beautiful intention. She believed deeply in the power of love and connection. The problem wasn’t her capacity for love—it was that she had unknowingly created a massive imbalance in her emotional byte economy.
Emotional bytes are fundamental units containing our physical sensations, emotional charges, needs, and narratives. Emily’s bytes were predominantly organized around meeting others’ needs while systematically ignoring her own. Every time she overrode her boundaries for someone else, her inner voice would encode this as “I am loving” rather than “I am being depleted.”
The research is clear: this pattern isn’t random. It typically emerges from childhood experiences where love was conditional or inconsistent. Emily had formed what I call a “love means sacrifice” emotional frame—an invisible interpretive lens through which she viewed all relationships.
When I asked Emily to describe how she knew someone loved her, she paused, genuinely stumped.
“They… need me?” she finally offered.
The Narcissism Magnet 🧲
Here’s what happens when you consistently prioritize others’ needs: you become a beacon for people who are happy to take without giving. Studies consistently show that people with poor boundaries don’t just randomly encounter narcissistic partners—they unconsciously select them.
Emily’s relationship history read like a textbook case. Her emotional scripts—automatic behavioral patterns emerging from her frames—had her repeatedly choosing partners who exhibited classic dismissive attachment styles. These partners provided just enough intermittent reinforcement to keep her hooked while consistently failing to meet her core needs for reciprocity and validation.
What Emily called “coming from love” was actually a highly sophisticated defense mechanism. Her emotional processing system had been programmed to interpret self-sacrifice as virtue and boundary-setting as selfishness.
“But isn’t self-love just another word for selfishness?” Emily asked during our third session.
No. It absolutely is not.
The Integration Challenge 🔄
The tricky part about working with clients like Emily isn’t convincing them they deserve better—it’s helping them develop the meta-emotional intelligence to recognize the invisible structures shaping their experiences. Emily’s needs hierarchy had become dangerously inverted, with relational needs consistently trumping her psychological needs for autonomy and competence.
We spent months working on emotional granularity—developing a more nuanced perception of her feelings rather than lumping everything under “being loving” or “being selfish.” This allowed her to transform overwhelming emotional “bubbles” into manageable “fizz.”
The breakthrough came when Emily recognized that genuine love—for herself or others—wasn’t about constant sacrifice or perpetual accommodation. It was about creating sacred spaces defining where emotional responsibility ends and begins. Real love has boundaries. Real love doesn’t require shrinking. Real love is reciprocal.
Six months into our work, Emily came in looking different—physically untwisted, sitting squarely in her chair.
“I broke up with him,” she said simply. “And I didn’t apologize for it.”
That’s when I knew she was going to be okay. ✨
The Bottom Line 💡
Self-love isn’t selfish—it’s the foundation upon which healthy love for others is built. You can’t truly love from an empty well. And sometimes, the most loving thing you can do—for yourself and ultimately for others—is to stop accommodating the people who consistently drain you dry.
Core Insight: Your boundaries aren’t walls—they’re the doors that let the right people in. 🚪
Sophia Rivera, who has exactly zero pickle slices left to give away
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8751322/
https://uknowledge.uky.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1058&context=kaleidoscope
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11673081/
https://www.simplypsychology.org/narcissistic-relationships-signs-impact-and-how-to-cope.html
https://www.apa.org/news/podcasts/speaking-of-psychology/narcissism