Ep #189: The Either/Or Lie: Choosing Yourself Without Losing Everyone

If you've been feeling pulled between honoring your own needs and keeping everyone else happy, this episode is for you.

In this deeply personal conversation, I share what I've been learning as I navigate major life changes, shifting relationships, stronger boundaries, and the uncomfortable reality that growth often makes other people uncomfortable. I open up about patterns of codependency, people-pleasing, and trying to control outcomes so that everyone around me feels okay — even when it comes at the expense of my own peace.

Together, we'll explore why choosing yourself doesn't have to mean losing everyone you love, how the brain creates false either-or choices, and why personal growth often requires us to tolerate discomfort while staying rooted in truth, integrity, and self-awareness.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• How codependency can quietly shape our relationships

• Why people-pleasing often comes from a desire to control outcomes

• The truth about boundaries and why others may resist them

• How to navigate identity shifts in midlife

• Simple practices that help build strength during difficult seasons

Terri Cole's website: https://www.terricole.com/codependency-over-functioning/

If this conversation resonates with you, I'd love to hear from you. Email me at hello@mikkigardner.com and let me know what you're discovering about yourself as you navigate your own next chapter.

If you'd like to schedule a Clarity Call: https://calendly.com/coachwithmikki/clarity_call

Listen to the Full Episode:

Download the Episode Transcript Here

Full Episode Transcript:

What if the reason your life suddenly feels so misaligned in midlife isn't because something is going wrong, but because something inside of you is finally waking up? Well, welcome to Led From Within. I'm Mikki Gardner, and this is a podcast for women who are done outsourcing their authority and are ready to claim a life aligned with who they are today. Because midlife doesn't need to be a crisis. It can be a return to yourself, to clarity, to courage, and to inner authority.

So let's begin.

Welcome back to the podcast. Today we are talking about something I think is relevant so much in midlife, which is how do we choose ourselves without losing everyone around us? I think this is a question that comes up more and more in the DMs that I get and the emails from listeners and are around, well, how do I choose myself, right?

What does that even look like when everybody depends on me? What does it look like when I'm the one who keeps everything together? And if I'm going to choose myself, it feels like then everything is going to fall apart. And that's just terrifying. I mean, that's terrifying for me.

Just saying it right now. The idea of just saying, like, okay, I'm only going to choose me is not only not the point, it's unrealistic, and it's what our brain does to kind of trick us into staying just in the status quo. We'll get into, um, more into that in a minute.

But I want to talk about this sort of either or lie that it has to be you choosing you or everybody else, because I'm actually going through this right now in my relationships. And so this is not a how to conversation today. This is more a with you conversation, because I'm literally in it. I'm in the season of, um, deciding what are the roles, what are the identities, what are the relationships, who are the people that I want in my life, and then what do I need to let go of to become the next version of me?

Because I've been doing this work for a while, but it is really coming to a head. And so I thought it would be really useful to have this conversation, but I just really want to normalize the fact that I am in it. I am very much in it. And so, again, this isn't going to be a how to, but this is gonna be a conversation that I hope you have with me.

So there's a pattern that I think I have to name first and foremost, because a lot of the intense changes and reckoning that I have been coming to came from the ending of a eight year relationship with an alcoholic. And that's an important part to name because I hid the alcoholism from everyone around us as much as I could. I mean, it's hard to, but. And it's been in the last couple months, as I've been opening up to having conversations with family, with friends, that I've started to see just how much I was trying to control the narrative and what everyone saw.

And recently I was talking with close family members and they were saying how much a recent incident had impacted them and how they were done being part of family events because of, uh, the impact this person was having. And it really hit me, I mean, it hit me to the core because I realized here I've been trying to control everything and everyone so that nobody gets upset, that nobody's unhappy, so that like everyone else is okay. And I realized in that moment I wasn't doing that at all. What I was doing was letting a really toxic relationship impact everybody I love. And I didn't see it until I was out of it and I didn't see it until I was out of it.

And I think that's something that often happens. There's that adage that hindsight is 2020 and it's true, right? We can see more clearly when we get some distance between us.

And so what's really been revealed for me about this eight years of a relationship that should have ended very quickly but didn't, it's not about the other person, it's not about his side at all. What I'm starting to notice and really reflect on and what's being revealed is what I've seen inside myself. And I think maybe this is where we can start to have the conversation with one another. Because when we are open and willing to do the work to gain self awareness, to take those honest inventories about our life, which we've talked about on a lot of episodes, often what's revealed is around what we see in ourselves. And I want to pause here for a minute because this is not taking the blame.

It is not about taking responsibility of someone else's actions. It is simply about being really honest with ourselves so that we can choose what's working and what's not. And that's what I've had to do, is to start really looking at what is working and what isn't working. What is the kind of relationship that I want to have and what isn't. How have I been acting and showing up and what does that get me Right.

And what do I want to do? One of the things that I've noticed is I spent probably the last, if I'm being honest with you, two years in that relationship trying to slowly exit, first moving out, but then still agreeing to see one another. Right?

Like getting more and more distance, moving to Florida. Right. Like I, uh. It was as if when I look back now, I'm trying to do this slow, quiet exit and disappear so that no one would notice. It's ridiculous.

Like it's ridiculous when I think about it now. Right. But what I noticed is that when I was honest, the only person that I disappeared to was myself. I had disappeared completely.

And this brings up another pattern that I really have to name because it has been continual work for me over the last few years, which I think, which is why I can see it so clearly now. But it's the pattern of codependency for me. I'm starting to see how codependency shows up in all of my relationships. Not just a romantic one where I show up as the fixer, the smoother, the one that kind of makes it okay for everybody else, but it's always at the expense of myself.

So I want to talk about really quickly codependency, because I think it's important that we name it kind of correctly. So a mental health definition is codependency is an emotional or behavioral condition where one person excessively relies on a partner or a loved one for validation, for self worth, and for. For identity. Right. It creates a deeply imbalanced, dysfunctional dynamic where one person is compulsively in that caretaking giver role, often enabling really destructive behaviors by someone else at their own expense.

You know, this could look like difficulty setting boundaries, extreme people pleasing, low self esteem, controlling behavior, denial. Right? Like denial of reality. So that's the mental health perspective.

One of my favorite teachers on codependency, and I will put the link in the show notes, is Terry Cole. She is a relationship expert and psychotherapist. She is brilliant and she defines codependency as being overly invested in the feelings, the outcomes, the circumstances, and the lives of others at the detriment of our own internal peace. And she emphasizes that at the root of it, it's a desire to control the outcomes for others. Right.

To manufacture this kind of false sense of security. And she also talks a lot about high functioning codependency, which is a term that she coined, which describes highly capable people raising my hand, who mask their codependency through efficiency, over giving and chronic Auto fixing, right? Those auto behaviors look like compulsively jumping into action, offering unsolicited advice, doing more than your fair share. But essentially what lays underneath is where our worth, our self esteem, our self worth is tied to our utility, right?

It's feeling as though we're responsible for everything. And that proves that we're needed. It proves that we're worthy. And it becomes very. One of the key markers is really disordered boundaries, finding it incredibly difficult to say no or to allow others to experience the natural consequences of their own choices.

And this one, every single time I hear her, uh, talk about it hits me hard because this is where, if I'm being honest, I have a tendency, right, to want to fix so that others aren't uncomfortable because I am not comfortable with their discomfort.

So those are a couple of, like, just, uh, maybe you can see yourself in some of those examples. We all have our own version sometimes. So it's important that, like, as I start to really look at all of these things, things that I start to name them, that I start to understand them. Because healing happens when we're. We have awareness and we can name it and we can start to shift differently.

Doesn't mean we get rid of it or we'll never be like that again. No. Um, I mean, we all have our ways, but it's not to react from it. It's to be able to respond and choose how do I want to move forward, right?

And as I really look at who I've been, who I am becoming, what I want in my next relationships, what I want for the next chapter of my life in the season, you know, uh, for me, integrity, honesty, truth, joy, passion, all of these things cannot exist with codependency. It can't exist with me slowly trying to disappear every time something doesn't go right. And it cannot exist with me trying to control other people so that they are comfortable.

And I think this is what I've really noticed lately, because there are some choices that I've been making in my own personal life that have really made other people uncomfortable. They go against who I, quote, unquote, am or who people have known me to be. And so when I start to have different boundaries, when I start to have different identities, when I no longer serve the roles that I've been serving, other people don't like it. I mean, it's just the way that it is, right?

But what happens inside of me in that moment is what I've noticed is where in the past I have really been just reacting from is not being willing to sort of push through that.

Our brain has this either or trap built into it. And, uh, our brains are really always going to default to keeping us safe over what is true, often our truth, that part of us, in our soul, that that lit up part actually isn't convenient. And it doesn't feel safe because it's not something that we've done, been used to because we've been playing the role to keep everybody else comfortable. And so when we step into our truth, it unsettles everyone around us.

And this is where that sort of either or, it's either I choose me or everybody else comes into play. And it's important to understand that because our brains are just simply wired that way. And we have to be willing to push past that, to ask ourselves, well, do we really just want to stay in this either or is it really me or them?

Is that it? Is that the only option?

And this is what I find myself asking a lot is can I withstand other people's discomfort? Can I withstand my own discomfort long enough to start to ask them different questions? Can I hold their disappointment, their judgment and their unease, yet still walk forward in the direction of my truth?

Do I have to completely leave everything and everyone in order to feel differently about myself? To shift, to grow, to expand?

And listen, I'm just going to stop there for a second because there are people in our lives that cannot tolerate our, uh, growth, that will not be able to tolerate you changing. And that is on them, not you.

What we are responsible for is the way that we go about it. And when we are coming from a place of love, from truth and from groundedness, responsiveness and not reaction, we can let other people have their disappointment. We can let them have their judgments, we can let them have their unease, and we can let them have all of their opinions of us. And they can live with those opinions. But that doesn't mean that they, uh, get access to us.

Some relationships will end because they were meant to, not because anything went wrong, but because when we grow, we often have to sort of shed the things that are holding us back.

And that's something I saw in this relationship. I had to end it once and for all, put it to bed, put a strong boundary in place for me to be able to shed all of the identities, all of the roles, all of the patterns, all of the expectations that I had been suffering under. And it was only when I got really, really quiet was I able to ask myself, what do I know is true for me?

And am I Willing to withstand other people's discomfort long enough to explore it doesn't mean I have to know where I'm headed. But am I willing to explore? Am I willing to be curious?

Am I willing to be open?

And the one thing that I know to be true as I walk through this journey, as I'm experiencing just a lot of turmoil and uncomfortable conversations and nervousness and anxiousness and all of the things, is that for me, I've lived five decades one way. Everyone has known me for five decades as this version. So when I shift, when my identity shifts, when I change, when I show up differently, it rocks the boat. Not just for me, for everybody.

I always tell clients, when you set a boundary, right, the one thing you can guarantee is that the other people are going to push back because they're used to no boundaries, right? And when there's no boundaries, it's great for them, not for you. So when you set up a boundary, they're going to be like, uh, nope, let's test that, right?

Let's knock that down. Your job is only to hold the boundary, to shift, to be dynamic, to be flexible, and to move.

Same thing with the identity, right? That's what I'm noticing is my identity shifts as I explore, as I try to learn and grow and expand. Band it's going to rock the boat for everybody. But that doesn't mean I'm wrong. It doesn't mean I'm wrong, and it doesn't mean that you're wrong, that you're changing.

You get to change, but you don't get to change quietly, because when you actually start to change, people will notice and they will react. And you're there to remind yourself. And I'm here to remind you right now. You changing, expanding and growing for the better is better for everyone. But it doesn't mean that they're going to like it.

But just because they don't like it doesn't mean a you're wrong and doesn't mean they won't get on board later.

And so we have to do it in a way that is loving and kind and respectful, but also doesn't diminish you. It's allowing other people to have their experience with. Without making their experience your responsibility.

And that's what I'm noticing. I can allow everyone around me to have their opinions and their experience of what's happening, but that doesn't mean that I'm responsible for changing it. I'm responsible for showing up in my truth with honesty, with integrity, with kindness, and with Love.

Kindness doesn't mean passiveness. Clarity is kind. Clear is kind. Telling the truth and allowing people to have their experience without trying to change them is kind.

And so kindness takes a lot of strength and a lot of courage. And it's important that we're willing to walk through that dynamic for ourselves and for others and to allow ourselves to explore, to get creative, to figure out what works and what doesn't work. Right. It's trial and error, but not allowing yourself to be wronged or to try to continue to use those old, like, for me, patterns of trying to make everybody comfortable around me.

My job right now is to let everybody, uh, be uncomfortable while I figure out what's true for me. And I can love them in the process. I can hold them close without letting them impact what's going on with me or me on them.

And that's the dynamic, right? That's that healthy relationship dynamic that I'm trying to build because I've never had it before, and it's awkward and it's weird, and I'm, you know, in a family where we just don't talk about things, that's been the norm. But now having to have those awkward conversations, it's weird. It's just weird. But it doesn't mean that it's wrong and that we can't all grow and learn and actually love each other more deeply for it.

So what are some of the practices that are getting me through it right now?

Because, again, I, uh. This is not a how to, but some of the things that I've noticed is that I've really been stepping into not trying to solve a problem. My life is not a problem. Me shifting and growing and learning and trying different things is not a problem. I get to go through that without allowing it to be seen as a problem that I have to fix.

I've been really leaning on those fundamentals that I have in place in my life that keep me grounded. My spiritual work, journaling, meditation, emotional awareness, sleep, nourishment, hydration, movement, sort of those basics. I'd been relying on them more and more and more to give myself the space to go through a hard season. Right?

The fundamentals that we put in place matter most in the hardest seasons. Because when I take care of me, I build strength. And the more strength I build, the more willing I am to walk through the difficult seasons.

And I think that's what I'm seeing now is all of the work that I've been doing for the last couple years is allowing me to walk through this season differently, with more strength, with more groundedness. I feel less in control, but more grounded than I ever have. I don't know where things are going. I don't know what's next, But I'm grounded in knowing that I'm showing up for myself every day. And that is, like, the greatest gift that I think we can give ourselves.

So where do we end this conversation? I mean, I think the one thing I want you to know is that you don't have to have it all figured out to move forward. And it's not an either or question. It's not choosing yourself or choosing them. There's a different path.

If you're willing to look for it.

The brain is going to go either or. Just know that. Be prepared for it.

And when you're in the either or, it's like, we don't have to know all the steps. We just have to find one step step, right? The either or lie is your nervous system trying to keep you safe. And so we have to be willing to ask, uh, a question, right?

Be with our nervous system, be with ourselves, to ground ourselves through breath, through quiet, through movement, long enough to ask, what do I know is true when I get quiet with myself and am I willing to walk with that?

You know, it's like asking yourself, where in my life am I shrinking so that other people are comfortable or that they stay comfortable? What roles have I been playing that were never mine? They were just given to me. And what is one practice that I can lean on this week when things get hard?

Just one.

One thing I talk a lot about, we got it from my son's golf coach, is to take an emotional lap, right? When things get hard, when we get really frustrated, which often happens, I mean, in so many areas, we just say, I'm going to go take an emotional lap. It could be a lap around the. Around the house or the apartment. It could be a lap around the block.

If you're able to move your body, it's actually really good for us to do that.

So giving yourself the space from a problem, from a conversation, from whatever source of stress that there is, if you can give yourself the space to have a little emotional lap, we can start to gain a little bit of space, right? To be able to choose how do I want to move forward here, not reacting. Not reacting from that either or, but really responding from what do I know to be true and what is one step that I can take towards it today?

I hope that this was helpful. I hope that you're able to Maybe see yourself in it. And if you do and you have questions, my email is in the show notes. Please feel free to reach out.

If you want someone to walk through this journey, there's other ways in the show notes to do that as well. I'm here for you, but I just want you to know it is not you versus them. It is not either you or. Or them.

You get to choose yourself without losing everyone and everything you love. Because those two things, uh, are not mutually exclusive.

You can choose yourself in relationship with other people. It's tricky. It requires work, it requires effort, and it requires honest reflection, integrity and self awareness. And you, my friend, have that in spades. I know you do.

You have everything you need inside of you. You get to choose how you move forward in the next season. And I hope you start with building some of those foundations and those fundamentals to help ground you in strength and courage to move forward into the best part of your life yet. I'll see you on the next episode.

Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. I hope that it spoke to you and you found something useful to take away from it. If you did, I would be so grateful if you would take 2 seconds to subscribe to the show, which will help you because you won't miss another episode. And it would help me because you would never miss another episode. And if you are in the giving spirit and would take 30 seconds to rate and review this episode, it would do wonders for the show and for me.

Thanks so much for being here and I can't wait to talk to you again next week.