Are You Addicted to Being Chosen? (Yes.) 🧠

How Self-Abandonment Turns “Love” Into a Nervous System Survival Strategy (10min Read)

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TL;DR Summary

• You don’t feel chosen when your nervous system learns that connection requires self-erasure

• Over-functioning, people-pleasing, and “being easy” are survival strategies, not love

• Being chosen doesn’t calm you if the relationship costs you yourself

• You’re often attached to the payoff (potential, reassurance, certainty), not the person

• Feeling chosen is a nervous-system state that comes from self-trust, not external validation

• A 3 Step practical process to stop auditioning for love and start choosing yourself

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Why You Never Feel Chosen

If your self-worth depends on someone else’s attention, love, or affection, you will never feel chosen.

How could you?

You don’t even choose yourself.

What a line to start a blog with… Am I right?!

Before you get defensive, lemme be clear about something: This isn’t about wanting love.

It’s about needing external validation to regulate your nervous system and calling that romance.

There’s a difference.

One feels warm. The other feels urgent.

One expands you. The other keeps you performing.

And most people spend their entire lives confusing the second one for the first.

Today, we’re going to break down:

• Why “being chosen” never actually calms you

• How self-abandonment gets mistaken for maturity

• Why over-giving feels noble but keeps you anxious

And we’re not stopping at insight, people, come on, you know that’s not how I roll.

You’ll also learn exactly how to interrupt this pattern in real time!

Not through affirmations or cutting everyone off, but through small, repeatable actions that teach your nervous system something new:

“I’m on my own side. I choose myself.”

Because the moment you stop auditioning for love at your own expense?

Being chosen stops feeling like oxygen and starts feeling like alignment.

Let’s dive in.

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The Quiet Ways You Abandon Yourself

Most people don’t sell themselves out in dramatic ways.

They do it subtly. Politely. With a smile, even.

You do it when you:

• Stay quiet to keep the peace

• downplay your needs, so you’re “easy to love”

• Say yes while your body is screaming no

• Accept breadcrumbs and rename it “patience”

• Over-explain so they don’t leave

Every time you do this, you’re teaching your nervous system one core rule:

“I don’t choose me unless someone else chooses me first.”

That’s the program.

And once that’s installed, you don’t want to be chosen.

You need to be.

Yikes… I’ve been there.

Why Being Chosen Never Calms You

Here’s the wild part. I bet you have been “chosen” before, at least for a moment.

Maybe they text more, commit a little, or say the words.

And yet… You don’t relax, do you?

You want more reassurance. More proof. More certainty. More intensity.

Anyone else thinking, “W-T-F… I got what I wanted, why do I still feel this way??”

I know I’ve asked this question before.

I wish I could tell you that the truth behind this wasn’t brutal, but it is, so I’ll say it gently.

You weren’t chosen. You were tolerated at the cost of yourself.

Your nervous system doesn’t register safety when love is earned by erasing yourself.

It registers conditional survival.

Which means even when you “get” them, you’re already bracing to lose them.

That’s not intimacy.

That’s anxiety with hope sprinkled on top, people.

You’re Not Attached to Them. You’re Attached to the Payoff.

Ready to get even more uncomfortable? :)

You’re not bonded to who they are.

You’re bonded to the imagined future where:

• They finally realize what they have

• They step up

• They commit

• They see your worth

You’re loyal to the potential, not the pattern.

You’re sold on what could be, not what is.

Which is why you’ll tolerate inconsistency, emotional unavailability and crumbs dressed up as “growth.”

Because walking away would mean admitting something devastating to the part of you that learned love early:

Effort doesn’t create desire. It only hides the absence of it.

And if you’ve built your identity around “if I do enough, I’ll be chosen,”
that truth feels like free fall.

Ok, take a couple of deep breaths. I know this is a lot.

I wish I could say it’s gonna get easier from here, but we’re just getting started because…

Over-Functioning Is Not Love. It’s Labor.

Read that again.

Lemme guess, you don’t just show up in relationships…

You over-function in them.

You:

• Prove your value

• Show extreme loyalty early

• Manage their stress, their chaos, their wounds

• Become “low maintenance,” “easy,” “understanding”

• Swallow disappointment and call it maturity

Which, on the outside, makes you look like the dream partner.

On the inside, though?

Your nervous system is negotiating: “If I do enough, I’ll earn safety.”

That’s not love, dude. That’s emotional capitalism.

And no amount of bleeding turns into security.

The Brutal Truth No One Wants to Say Out Loud

This has never worked.

It will never work.

You cannot:

• Earn safety with someone who hasn’t chosen you

• Outperform someone else’s avoidance

• Love someone into capacity

• Sacrifice enough to become irreplaceable

And the more you try? The less chosen you feel.

Because your body is clocking the risk the whole time: “If I have to earn this, I could lose it at any moment.”

That’s not romance. That’s a threat-response loop.

What “I choose you” really sounds like is: “Please don’t leave me.”

Ok, Cody, I get it.

What can I actually do outside of just nodding along to this blog?

So, glad you asked, imaginary reader in my mind!

You know I got you. Here’s a 3-step process you can use to start choosing yourself TODAY!

3 Steps to Rewiring Your Self-Abandonment Wound

It’s time to move out of nodding and into rewiring, baby!!

And be sure to read the bonus step twice; it’s how to actually get to the root cause of this self-abandonment wound using Internal Family Systems.

Step 1: Catch Self-Abandonment in Real Time

Ask yourself this question throughout the day, especially when in relationships:

“What am I about to do that costs me, ME just to keep the connection?”

That’s it. No fixing yet.

If the answer is:

• Not speaking up

• Over-giving

• People-pleasing

• Betraying a boundary

Congratulations.

You didn’t fail. You found the wound.

Awareness interrupts the pattern before willpower ever could.

Speaking of willpower, let’s move to step 2.