I'm currently trying to heal from “long” Covid, and one of my biggest challenges is that I can't let myself recover.

I keep getting up to do shit, trying to be a loving supportive husband and father. And every time I do something, I delay my recovery. I can feel it. I get sicker again. I add another few days to the final due date when I'll finally get better.

And I’m not really helping. I just stress my wife out when she sees me struggling around and getting in the way.

I finally realized this is part of the people-pleasing mechanism, what we call self-sacrifice. The worse we feel, the more we try to help others.

The truth about self-sacrifice is that we don't like to be helped. We don't like to be seen as weak. We use it as a tool to keep people away from us.

We think everybody else needs us but we don't need them. And we are loathe to show any kind of dependence or reliance on other people because that triggers off all our fears and traumas. I think that most people pleasers are Avoidant types, so we feel trapped and threatened by situations where we rely on others.

So if you're like me and you can't rest when you get sick or injured, you gotta start asking yourself, why? Especially when you allow everybody else to rest and support their recovery.

Why the double standard?

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