Do you advocate for yourself?

I’ve been having a lot of conversations this week about people pleasing and the necessary act of then advocating for yourself when you realise you need to stop bending to the every whim of those around you. It’s all very well noticing that you’re a people pleaser but what do you do with that information to improve things?

Sobriety changed my relationship with myself profoundly and I write about a lot of those shifts regularly. Obviously there were physical changes and mental clarity, but one of the biggest shifts for me has been becoming far more aware of what actually feels right for me and what doesn’t. I can no longer deny myself the truth of situations that don’t feel right to me. I don’t think I realised for a long time how much alcohol allowed me to override my own reactions to things and to shut up and put up with things. I wasn’t oblivious to life but I was certainly a little soft focus and not paying attention to the burnout or the gut instinct about some things.

Maybe it was the glass of wine or two at the end of the evening after a difficult interaction or it could have been the drink that took the edge off resentment from not expressing my expectations to others more clearly. It could have been about feeling overstimulation, frustration or even emotional exhaustion. Another big one for me was the loneliness that I often felt when my eldest daughter was a baby and I was a single Mum stuck at home. Alcohol was the thing that helped me switch my brain off and that had the downside of never fully processing why I felt the way I did in the first place.

When I look back now, I can see there were periods of my life where I was tolerating some things and even some people that were just not that good for me. In hindsight it’s easier to spot those situations. The thing is, instead of fully listening to those feelings, I normalised them and minimised them. I told myself I was overthinking or overreacting. Then at the end of the day, alcohol became the relief from that discomfort rather than me really examining the source of it.

I think that’s one of the reasons sobriety can feel so emotionally exposing because suddenly there’s no buffer at all sitting between you and your actual experience of your life. You notice so much more… you notice how certain people make you feel, you pick up on your intuition so much more easily and that’s a good thing in the long run, but can feel disconcerting at first.

You can be more observant of how you react around particular situations or how often you say yes when internally you mean “hell no!”. You also notice how much internal and emotional energy goes into keeping the peace, managing other people’s emotions or trying not to disappoint anybody. It has to be said that all of it was exhausting with alcohol… and without alcohol that has to be faced head on.

For me, sobriety sharpened that awareness enormously. I started recognising how often I’d ignored and pushed through my own needs in order to be accommodating and easy to be around. How I’d minimised my intuition around some people and quashed those recurring gut instincts that something wasn’t right. I am someone who likes to be liked and that meant I was always shape shifting to those around me. I’d become very good at overriding exhaustion, very good at carrying on or telling myself I could cope. And very often I could cope, that was part of the problem because I was really high functioning but I was also disconnecting from myself in the process with alcohol. It solved the problem because it gave me the temporary relief without needing to confront what wasn’t working for me.

The rawness of early sobriety…

What changed in sobriety was that I could no longer escape my own reactions in the same way so if something felt wrong, I felt it. If I was overwhelmed, I noticed it much sooner. If a relationship or friendship dynamic consistently left me depleted, overthinking, unsafe or anxious, it became much harder to simply smooth over my feelings and carry on as normal. I became much more aware of my nervous system and the signals it had probably been sending me for years. I felt it if someone felt disingenuous, or if my spidey senses were tingling. Before I would have gaslit myself and drunk on those feelings… but it takes some getting used to so be gentle with yourself in this process.

I actually felt like I’d lost myself somewhere along the way in the last decade or two of drinking. Probably since my mid twenties if I’m honest. I was constantly overriding my own boundaries and making myself agreeable and adaptable.... not wanting to cause a fuss. Not wanting to be ‘difficult’ or confrontational. In fact sometimes I was even running from confrontation. There’s a real difference in side stepping aggressive people for your own peace and running scared from them. I was doing the latter because I had the shortcut of drinking rather than dealing properly with things. I think alcohol can sometimes become part of the coping mechanism for that life because it acts like the reward at the end of the day for tolerating things that don’t truly align with you. The release after over-giving, ignoring your gut instinct or overcompensating.

When you remove alcohol, part of the emotional work that evolves over time is to address the friction and what you’re going to do about it. Like I said at the start of this article, it’s all very well realising you’ve been people pleasing or that you’ve lost yourself over the years but what are you going to do about it to truly advocate for yourself?

These are some of the questions I asked myself in early sobriety in order to reflect on this subject…

Why was I so drained?
Why did certain situations leave me needing escape afterwards?
Why did I feel dread around some obligations?
Why was I saying yes to things that my whole nervous system was resisting?
Why did I feel guilty the moment I tried to rest or to protect my own energy?

and finally…

Who wasn’t I feeling myself around or even safe to be myself around?

Those questions change a lot because once you start listening to yourself properly, it becomes much harder to keep abandoning yourself in the same way. Self awareness is always power.

As I was more present in sobriety I could then become more curious. I became more aware of how different environments affected me and what I liked and what I didn’t. I was more aware of the people I felt calm and safe around versus the people who left me emotionally dysregulated afterwards. This was a massive one for me… feeling calm and safe are my absolute musts in life these days. I value my peace so much. So then I had to have the guts to distance from those I felt a sense of unease around. I think we can all agree that with age comes the wisdom of knowing what is and what isn’t right for you, and who is and who isn’t right.

This is the truth of it… the problem with repeatedly sedating discomfort is that sometimes you also sedate discernment. You stop clearly seeing what is and isn’t working for you. Sometimes you even lose what it is you like or don’t like in that process so knowing what you need to speak up about can be quite a daunting task. The other thing I became so much more aware of was how much energy I’d spent over explaining myself, keeping the peace and trying to manage everybody else’s comfort whilst not honouring my own.

The irony wasn’t wasted on me either because these were all things I was supporting others with in clinic over the years and yet I was using alcohol to avoid. That’s one of my big benefits of sobriety, finally have the time, clarity and courage to put in effective boundaries and to listen to my intuition properly myself, and not just teaching others how to do it.

And to anyone worrying, I don’t think sobriety or boundary setting makes you harder or colder as a person. If anything, I think it personally made me more emotionally available because I was no longer constantly numbing, recovering, suppressing or operating from exhaustion. But alongside that increased emotional capacity came something else too… self respect.

And self respect changes behaviour in the long term because you stop placing yourself in situations that repeatedly hurt you. You become more honest about your limits and less willing to tolerate emotional inconsistency. Above all, you stop treating your own discomfort as irrelevant and you begin listening to it.

These days I advocate for myself. I leave situations earlier when I know I’ve had enough and I hold firmer boundaries around my time and emotional energy. I recognise overstimulation before I hit burnout and say no without guilt. It’s all about allowing myself to acknowledge when something genuinely doesn’t work for me instead of forcing myself to tolerate it indefinitely.

Often alcohol becomes so intertwined with emotional regulation, self soothing, people pleasing, masking, survival and escape that we need to dig deeper when we remove it. Once that coping mechanism is removed, you begin seeing your life much more clearly but you also then have to stand up for yourself and speak up. No numbing, just be honest.

That clarity can feel uncomfortable initially because you can no longer numb the friction between who you are and how you are living and so it does feel really difficult to do, but it’s so worth it. It’s actually one of the most freeing parts of sobriety for me. I’m not difficult but I am honest about how I’m feeling and as a result I experience so much less resentment over things.

You need to be really honest with yourself and address where you may feel overstimulated. Where you may be feeling lonely and how to change that. Is it that you’re masking constantly and you need to gently and systematically remove the mask in certain situations that feel safe to you? Is it time to speak up about any resentment or to step away from needing external validation?

But long term, I think it becomes one of the most freeing parts of sobriety. If you need any support with this then you can always have a session.

About Louisa

Louisa Evans is a UK-based practitioner with a background in Cognitive Behavioural Hypnotherapy and a Master’s degree in Psychology. She specialises in helping people change their relationship with alcohol, rebuild self-trust and create lasting change using evidence-based psychological tools, CBT and hypnosis.

Her work is informed by psychology, cognitive behavioural approaches and hypnotherapy, with a focus on making complex ideas accessible and practical. Alongside her one-to-one work, Louisa is the creator of online courses, a podcast and educational resources designed to help people understand themselves better and make meaningful, sustainable changes in their lives.

She is a Graduate Member of the British Psychological Society (BPS), a Senior Member and Registered Supervisor with the ACCPH, and a registered member of the General Hypnotherapy Register (GHR). Through her clinical work, writing and teaching, she has supported thousands of people to build confidence, strengthen resilience and create lasting change.

You can find out more at www.louisaevans.com.