She Said That's Okay. But It Wasn't.
What a moment with my 9-year-old showed me about the pattern so many women are still carrying quietly into their 30s, 40s, and 50s.
My daughter came home from school and told me someone had been mean to her. He apologized. And without missing a beat, she said: "That's okay."
I paused. I asked her whether it was actually okay. Did she want him to keep treating her that way?
"No," she said quietly.
And in that moment, I watched something I recognize deeply. Something I've seen in the women I work with, and something I've done myself more times than I can count. I watched her override her own truth to protect someone else's comfort.
She's nine. And she's already learned the script.
What Self-Abandonment Actually Looks Like
We tend to think of self-abandonment as something dramatic. Leaving a marriage. Walking away from a career. Completely losing yourself. But most of the time it's far quieter than that. It lives in the small, everyday moments that nobody notices. Including you.
It's saying "that's okay" when it isn't. It's softening your no so the other person doesn't feel uncomfortable. It's minimizing what just happened so the room stays light and everyone else stays at ease.
Psychologists describe this as a pattern rooted in what's called the fawn response. It's a survival strategy where we prioritize the emotional state of others over our own internal experience in order to feel safe and keep the peace. It's not a personality flaw. It's something the nervous system learned to do a long time ago.
And for a lot of us, it started right around age nine.
The Psychology Behind "That's Okay"
When my daughter said "that's okay," she wasn't lying exactly. She was doing something much more nuanced. She was choosing relational harmony over her own internal truth. Developmental psychologists have a name for this: socio-emotional conditioning. It begins remarkably early.
Children who feel uncertain about how the adults around them will respond to their "negative" emotions often learn to suppress or reframe those emotions very quickly. Over time, this becomes automatic. The nervous system starts to associate self-expression with risk, and agreeableness with safety. The brain is simply doing what brains do: finding the most efficient path to connection and approval.
The problem is that the pattern doesn't stay in childhood. It grows with us. And what once served as emotional protection starts to create real confusion in adulthood. Confusion about what you actually want. Difficulty making decisions. Feeling stuck in your career or your relationships without quite understanding why. A low-grade exhaustion that's hard to explain to anyone else because on paper, everything looks fine.
If you're the person everyone relies on, the one who keeps it all together at work and at home and somehow still feels invisible inside your own life, this is the pattern underneath it. It's not burnout. It's not a lack of discipline or motivation. It's years of quietly overriding yourself, so many times it just started to feel normal.
Two Words That Change Everything
After my daughter and I talked it through, I offered her something different. Instead of "that's okay" which sends the message that the behaviour was acceptable, she could try saying: "Thank you."
Two words. That's it.
"Thank you" receives the apology. It acknowledges the other person without erasing the boundary. It doesn't say the behaviour was fine. It holds both things at once: grace for the other person, and dignity for herself.
She got it immediately. Her face shifted. She sat up a little straighter.
That's what returning to yourself looks like. It doesn't have to be a grand gesture or a big confrontation. Sometimes it's just two words and a deep breath.
What This Has to Do With You
If something shifted reading this, it's because you recognize it. Maybe you've said "that's okay" to a partner, a boss, a colleague, a friend, when what you actually meant was: that hurt, and I don't want it to happen again.
Maybe you've spent years feeling vaguely stuck. Not knowing what you want. Pushing through because that's just what you do. You keep going, you keep showing up, and yet something underneath it all feels off. Like you've been running a race that was never really yours to begin with.
That feeling has a source. And it goes back much further than you probably think.
The good news is that what's learned can be unlearned. The nervous system is adaptable. These patterns can shift. But first, you have to be able to see the pattern clearly. And that's exactly where most people get stuck, because when you've been doing something your whole life, it doesn't feel like a pattern. It just feels like you.
Ready to See It?
Inside my free masterclass, I walk you through the three core patterns that keep women stuck, including which self-abandonment pattern might be quietly running your life right now. We look at why the confusion you feel isn't a personal failure, where it actually comes from, and what the first real step toward interrupting it looks like.
You've been trying to figure this out on your own for a long time. You don't have to keep doing that.