4 Signs You’ve “Lost Yourself”

Here are 4 of the signs you’ve “lost” yourself inside your relationship:

Sign #1: You lose touch with your friends and family.

Remember how much fun you used to having meeting up with friends for a drink after work, or maybe going to dinner or shopping with your mom, your sister or your friends on the weekend?

But now you hardly have any time for this, let alone time for the things you used to enjoy doing just you and your friends and loved ones.

It seems that your life is filled with work (both around the house and/or outside of the house), chores, kids, to-do lists, driving around town doing errands and trying to keep everyone at home happy.

Sign #2: You stop paying attention to how you look and feel.

There was probably a time when you felt really GREAT about how you looked and took a lot of pride in presenting your “best self” to the world.

But now you’ve stopped exercising or eating well as you used to.

You just don’t seem to have the time, or energy, to care.

You don’t sleep well and the only criteria you have these days for your wardrobe is COMFORT.

And most of this deep down is because you don’t feel all that great about yourself because of how your relationship is making you feel.

Sign #3: You feel like your life is passing you by.

You used to feel so ALIVE and enthusiastic about life! Not these days. These days life feels very… hard, somehow. You’ve given so much emotionally to your man or your family that you’re losing the ability to know what YOU want or what YOU feel.

You used to have so many dreams and hopes about the future and about your life together. Now the thought of facing a future of more of the same kinds of problems with your relationship makes you feel DEFLATED.

You are no longer sure about the reason for that vague sense of discontent that seems to fill your life, either. It could be the strained relationship with your man.

Or it could be something else.

Since you’re unable to know what’s really going on deep in your heart, you become unable to be deeply honest with your man. You’re so drained by worrying about the relationship and giving so much emotionally, that you never get to the CORE of what’s really going on and what you need.

Tell me if this sounds familiar to you…

You may tell him something like,

“You’ve been working too much lately and you’re never home,” instead of saying what you’re REALLY experiencing deep-down, which is…

“I’m stressed out and feeling lonely and disconnected from you, and it scares me.”

The deeper level of honesty behind what you’re experiencing is that you’re feeling abandoned and frightened, but when you’re unable to truly tap into your feelings because you have lost touch with them, you will blame and criticize instead of just being completely open about what the real problem is.

Sign #4: You’re making excuses for everything and everyone.

Another tell-tale sign that you’ve lost yourself is realizing that you may have been making excuses for problems that are coming up in your life or in the relationship.

Maybe your husband has been saying rude and condescending things to you lately, or lashing out in anger, and you excuse it in your mind by telling yourself that he’s “stressed” or “having a bad day.”

But you know that you can only excuse things for so long before you run out of excuses and have to face reality.

Or maybe you’re making excuses for other problems in your life, like if you’re gaining weight.

You know you’re not as fit as you could be, but instead of being honest with yourself about this you tell yourself that you “don’t have time” to exercise and eat right… even though this was a priority BEFORE you met your man, even when you had as much going on in your life (or more) than you have right now.

The inability to be radically honest with yourself and making excuses is symptomatic of one thing: that you’re not in touch with who you really are at the core, and what it is you really need in order to feel happy and fulfilled.

You’re giving TOO MUCH to the relationship, and you’re neglecting yourself in the process.

You’re out of touch with your own needs…

You’re out of touch with what makes you really happy…

You’re out of touch with that strong, powerful woman you once used to be (but who is still in there, just waiting for you to acknowledge her)…

And here’s the worst effect of all: By losing yourself in the relationship you’re out of touch with your own NATURAL ABILITY to bring your man closer to you.