In this week’s episode of The Baggage Reclaim Sessions, I discuss the significance of self-advocacy and its impact over the past year. I explore what it really means to advocate for ourselves – not in a defensive way, but as a way of being. Drawing from my experiences in 2024, including advocating for my daughter’s healthcare and navigating my own medical journey, I dig into why we often struggle to speak up for ourselves and how our socialisation as people pleasers affects this. I share how advocating for ourselves sometimes means being “difficult,” causing inconvenience, or having those awkward but necessary conversations – and why that’s not just okay, but essential for our wellbeing and relationships.

Whether it’s about health, neurodivergence, bandwidth, or simply expressing our needs and boundaries, I explain why self-advocacy, though sometimes exhausting, is a crucial skill we need to develop.

IN THIS EPISODE…

• Self-advocacy really means representing yourself through expressing needs, desires, expectations, feelings, and opinions – particularly when silence would harm your wellbeing or relationships or cause people to gain the wrong impression about what is and isn’t okay with you. Self-advocacy is about voicing what isn’t obvious, even when we think it should be.
• While many of us conflate advocating for ourselves with being rude, difficult or confrontational, sometimes being “inconvenient” or causing discomfort is necessary and healthy. The idea that everything must happen smoothly or that the slightest whiff of inconvenience means we’re doing something wrong is part of what holds us back from essential self-advocacy.
• Our struggles with self-advocacy often stem from growing up in what I call the “Age of Obedience“. – We were taught to be excessively compliant and became disconnected from our authentic needs, feelings, and boundaries. This conditioning created the perfect environment for people pleasing and makes advocating for ourselves feel unnatural or wrong.
• Even when we think our needs or boundaries should be obvious to others, or that people should intuitively know how to behave, or when they’ve hurt us, we still need to advocate for ourselves. Hoping others will automatically understand or waiting for them to “do the right thing” usually leads to our needs being overlooked or boundaries being crossed.
• Advocating for ourselves often starts at home with ourselves. Sometimes we’re the ones we need to convince that we deserve our own love, care, trust and respect. We might need to be our own “manager” and acknowledge that it’s okay to express tiredness, set boundaries, or say something isn’t working for us.

LINKS MENTIONED AND RECOMMENDED RESOURCES

• Secrets, Lies, and Coming Out
• “Is There Something About Me?”
• Gray Area Drinking and Our Relationship with Alcohol
• Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents
• Shifting Our Understanding of Attachment
• The Joy of Saying No book
• Podcast Ep. 242: But Will You Actually Get Into Trouble? and the Age of Obedience
• Podcast Ep. 199: Yes Isn’t A ‘Clean’ Word If It’s Not Authentic
• The Reset Button and Just Move On and Fuggedaboudit
• Podcast Ep. 227: Let’s Stop Pressing The Reset Button
• I Broke Up With My Mother (part one)
• Podcast Ep. 204: Let’s Talk About Family Estrangement
• Podcast Ep. 100: Are You Exceeding Your Bandwidth? (You Are Not The Energizer Bunny)
• Podcast Ep. 205: Four steps to help you have an assertive response when you recognise that you don’t want to do something
• Why It’s Time To Stop Hiding Your Needs

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