We’ve all heard about how important it is to be authentic in a relationship, and that the healthiest partnerships are those in which people feel free to be themselves. That said, many people convince themselves that they’re in happy, supportive relationships because they’ve disconnected from their own needs and feelings.
This is known as “ghosting oneself” and is more common than most realize. If any of the signs listed here ring true to you, you may have been doing this too. Here’s how to recognize that you’re ghosting yourself and start showing up for yourself in relationships instead.
1. Ignoring or downplaying your own feelings.
You might feel that you’re overreacting to red flags in your relationship and therefore choose to downplay or ignore behaviors that you really aren’t okay with. Similarly, if your partner does something to upset you, you may convince yourself that it isn’t a big deal or that it’s easier to stay quiet to keep the peace rather than risk a potential argument.
But this behavior stops you from honoring and respecting your own emotional responses, and can lay the foundations for toxic relationship dynamics.
Ask yourself why you’re ignoring your feelings (and those marinara flags) instead of honoring them, and you might find some deep-seated trauma that convinced you that your own thoughts and feelings aren’t important enough to be paid attention to. From there, you can aim to let go of that negative perspective and work on honoring your feelings from now on, possibly with the help of professional support.
2. Centering your partner’s needs and wants instead of balancing them with your own.
You might cancel plans you’ve already made with friends or family when your partner tells you that they’re available, or adjust your cooking plans to accommodate their preferences, even if it isn’t what you’ve been craving. You consistently put their needs and wants ahead of your own, and don’t speak up when you feel that your own desires aren’t being met.
While it’s great to let your partner know that you care about them, it’s even more important to maintain your autonomy, as well as your own friendships and other social connections.
Having been in a relationship with someone who tried to isolate me from my social circle, I know how vital it is to maintain that support web. It may cause some tension when you push back and establish your own needs and wants — both socially and at home — but if you want a healthy, well-balanced relationship that doesn’t revolve around you sacrificing your happiness for another, you’ll need to start doing that asap.
3. People-pleasing instead of behaving with self-respect.
Have you ever found yourself in a situation where your partner has said or done something that you found appalling, but you stayed quiet instead of risking a confrontation? Maybe they said something disparaging about your friend or family member, and instead of defending that person, you changed the subject and later kicked yourself for not behaving with more self-respect. You might have even damaged that relationship because your silence implied agreement.
If keeping your relationship going requires you to never stand up for what you think or feel, lest you get berated by your partner for embarrassing them or being unsupportive, then you’re ghosting yourself for their benefit rather than being true to who you are. Start speaking up instead of making yourself smaller, and you’ll feel a lot more self-respect rather than self-loathing or regret.
4. Placing more emphasis on saving the relationship than determining whether it’s healthy and good for you.
If you feel that you’re happier and more fulfilled in a relationship than you are when single, you might tolerate poor behavior and unhealthy habits because you’re afraid of being alone. This might also include walking on eggshells so as not to set your partner off about one thing or another, or laughing off situations that make you feel sad, angry, jealous, or disrespected so your partner doesn’t see you as “difficult”.
Basically, you keep diminishing yourself so that you’re easier to love in their eyes, and never consider whether this relationship is actually good or healthy for you: the entire focus is on keeping it alive, rather than determining whether it should remain so.
Should this scenario feel familiar to you, it’s important to consider why you’re staying. Why do you feel that this relationship is so important that you’re willing to throw yourself under the bus repeatedly to keep it alive?
Are you afraid that you’ll never meet anyone else? Or that this is the best that you can do? Ghosting yourself out of a fear of being alone isn’t doing you any good, nor will the situation improve any time soon. Stopping this behavior might result in a breakup, true — but that might be the healthiest option for you right now.
5. Pursuing their interests and goals and abandoning your own.
Maybe you’ve abandoned hobbies or pursuits that have been important to you for years because your partner isn’t interested in them. Instead, you’ve taken up the things that they like to do, even if you’re not sincerely interested, and you seek approval and validation from them for doing so. Meanwhile, you miss doing the things you loved for so long, but you feel ashamed to pursue them because your partner isn’t supportive of them, or might even mock them outright.
This is detrimental to your well-being on countless levels. We all have interests and hobbies that mean a great deal to us, and it’s as important to have our own pursuits as it is to share interests with our romantic partners.
If your partner isn’t supportive of your interests and makes you feel bad for partaking in them rather than doing what they would prefer you to do, it’s important to express how you feel and set healthy boundaries about this.
Otherwise, you might spend decades in a one-sided relationship doing things you dislike, only to look back with regret years from now and wish you had dedicated more time to the things you loved instead.
6. Adapting yourself to their preferences rather than behaving authentically.
You might love it when your hair is a different color or length, but you keep it the way it is because your partner likes it better that way. Or you’d like to change your clothing style, but since your partner dislikes or disapproves of the aesthetic you love, you tamp that desire down and choose things that they’ll appreciate and compliment instead. Essentially, every choice that would allow you to step into your authenticity is set aside for the sake of their approval.
If your best friend told you that this is how they behave in their relationship, what would your counsel be? Would you tell them that this is a healthy partnership? Or would you suggest that they live in a way that makes them happy rather than engaging in this self-abandonment and pandering to another’s whims?
If it’s the latter, consider taking your own advice and making decisions that are true to your own preferences. Life is too short for anyone to mask eternally for the sake of another’s wants.
7. Convincing yourself that you’re happy when you know you aren’t.
Are your social media feeds full of happy photos of you and your partner doing sweet, loving things together? Do you constantly talk about how happy you are to everyone you know, only to find yourself sobbing in the shower or dealing with crippling panic attacks? These are telltale signs that you really aren’t happy in your relationship, but you’re trying to convince yourself that you are.
A lot of people play along in their partnerships as best they can, denying their true feelings for the sake of maintaining harmony, and then fall apart when nobody is looking. Ghosting yourself like this can only cause harm in the long run, so you’ll need to figure out why you’re staying in a situation that’s actively harming you. From there, you can make the decisions necessary to extricate yourself and start having more supportive, authentic relationships instead.
Final thoughts…
Try to be kind towards yourself rather than cruel or condemning if you’ve realized that you’ve been ghosting yourself in your relationships. If you grew up in an environment where self-sacrifice and pretense were the order of the day, it’s difficult to break free from that type of conditioning.
Only with self-awareness, loving kindness towards yourself, patience, and perseverance can you start showing up for yourself in this regard. It’s not easy to do, but the healthy, supportive relationships you’ll cultivate will be well worth the effort.
