Chronic Self-sacrifice: Learn To Value Yourself

Chronic self-sacrifice can make you lose yourself. You are human and it is normal to want to invest your time and energy in other people and things. However, you have to understand that, even if you mean well, chronic self-sacrifice will wear you out.

If you think you would definitely sacrifice your beliefs and personal values ​​to what other people want or say, think again. Don’t take it lightly to abandon your ideas and deny yourself for the sake of other people.

What is Chronic Self-Sacrifice?

Sacrificing yourself for others and giving yourself completely to a cause can mean two things, namely:

• The need to overcome a conflict of values. Your own and the person or persons you are sacrificing yourself for.
• Accept to renounce yourself. Relinquish your ideas, needs, or desires.

Sacrifice arises when you have to give up your well-being or stop giving your needs to others or something. Self-sacrifice goes beyond this. It’s about giving a part of yourself.

Since self-sacrifice consists of denying yourself certain needs or personal desires, it essentially means giving away an important part of yourself. It means giving up your dignity, and sometimes even your identity.

On the other hand, self-sacrifice means valuing something or someone much more than yourself, which speaks volumes about your solidarity and altruism.

While people tend to value altruism, it can be taken to extremes when people sacrifice themselves. Also when the person making the sacrifice loses part of his own well-being. Therefore, self-sacrifice can sometimes be disruptive or dysfunctional for those who give up everything.

When self-sacrifice becomes pathological altruism

The list of examples of self-sacrifice is endless. Some examples are the people who sacrifice themselves without thinking about a situation, the parents who live for their children, and the people who give themselves completely to their partner, giving up their own happiness and well-being.

In the short term, many of these behaviors are not problematic. They can even be considered normal and ordinary. The problem arises when a person sacrifices himself on a pathological level. These people run the risk of losing their essence.

Self-sacrifice is synonymous with undervaluing yourself. If this means a change of values ​​and the person thinks that he is worthless, then this can become a pathological situation.

Chronic self-sacrifice can turn into pathological altruism, where the person believes they are not worthy and stops paying attention to themselves.

This loss of essence can mean that they never satisfy their own needs and instead put other people’s opinions above all else. This can lead to negative thoughts.

In practice, this can put people in a state of complete disrespect for themselves. In addition, they may lose their values, not think rationally, and have poor self-esteem. In short, chronic self-sacrifice can take away the qualities that make people who they are.

How do you know if you’re giving too much?

Some signs can help you discover if you’re giving away too much of yourself, including the following:

• When you help someone, you realize that you don’t have enough time, energy, or resources to devote to yourself.

• When you put the needs of others before your own, you start to feel guilty.
• Sometimes you feel empty inside. This indicates that you are not meeting your own need for love, care and attention.
• You constantly feel the need to make some kind of sacrifice to keep people happy.
• Your self-sacrifice has become a chore, when it used to be something you did voluntarily.
• Often you find yourself saying yes when you know you should have said no.

Authors like Ayn Rand propose a strategy for counteracting the tendency to sacrifice yourself: supporting your personal and moral ambition. Basically this means convincing yourself that you have earned the right to feel worthy. Think highly of yourself and that no one is more important than you.

In short, take care of yourself so that you don’t lose yourself to chronic self-sacrifice. Practice the so-called controlled selfishness to avoid losing yourself!