Sometimes, during a consultation, a woman tells me about her life, and I begin to sense what our conversation will turn to next.
She has not mentioned guilt. She has not said that refusing people is difficult. She is simply describing an ordinary day.
In the morning, she needs to help her parents. Then there are things to sort out at work. After work, she has to buy groceries, call her sister, pick up a child, and listen to a friend. Somewhere among all these tasks, a thought flickers: it would be nice to rest a little. But once again, rest never happens.
When I ask, “At what point in this day was there room for you?”, the woman usually smiles. Sometimes uncertainly, sometimes with guilt. And sometimes she falls silent for a long time.
At what point in this day was there room for you?
The question catches her by surprise.
“I just don’t know how to say no”
I hear this phrase quite often.
But over the years, I have increasingly come to think that the refusal itself is not the real issue.
What is much harder is coping with the inner tension that appears after the thought: “What will happen if I say no now?”
Many people know this feeling. Anxious thoughts immediately appear: What if they are offended? What if our relationship changes? What if they decide they can no longer count on me? Nothing bad has happened yet, but inside, uneasiness has already set in. In that moment, agreeing can feel much easier than sitting with the anxiety.
It matters: often, the difficulty is not the word “no” itself, but the anxiety that follows it.
Being accommodating gradually becomes a way of life
No one wakes up one morning and decides to live for everyone else.
It happens gradually.
At first, giving in seems natural. Then staying quiet feels easier than explaining that you have no energy today. Over time, you get used to putting your own wishes off until later.
Years pass, and a woman may barely notice how many times a day she says “yes” when, deep down, she wants to answer differently.
There is one moment that always moves me.
When I ask during a consultation, “What did you want?”, some women cannot answer straight away. They genuinely have not asked themselves that question for a long time.
What did you want?
Sometimes exhaustion does not begin with work
We tend to connect exhaustion with workload. But there is another kind of tiredness. It arrives quietly when, for too long, we have had to keep putting ourselves last.
Each individual agreement seems insignificant. But years pass, and one day a woman realises that these little things have added up to too much.
From the outside, her life may look fine. There is family, work, a home, and familiar responsibilities. Everything is as it is supposed to be. Yet inside, a feeling appears more and more often, described by women in almost the same words: “It feels as though there is not enough of me in my own life.”
It feels as though there is not enough of me in my own life.
When I hear this phrase, I often feel it describes a woman’s experience more precisely than a long explanation could.
Can we learn to do things differently?
I am not particularly drawn to advice such as, “Just start saying no.”
If someone has spent many years feeling that their worth depends on how accommodating they are to others, they cannot change that in a single day.
Change rarely happens all at once. Usually, a woman first begins to notice herself. She pays more attention to her own tiredness, stops dismissing her wishes, and gradually realises that her life deserves space, too. I believe this is where a genuine return to oneself begins.
In closing
Over the years, I have noticed a pattern.
Women rarely regret the times they eventually said no.
Much more often, they look back with pain on the moments when they agreed again, even though deep down they had known for a long time that they wanted something else.
Perhaps self-respect begins with small decisions like these. Not with a fight or an attempt to become stronger, but with giving ourselves permission to choose our own lives as thoughtfully as we have learned to choose for the people we love.