To the woman who works HARD to succeed but feels broken in her relationship

 On paper, you’re thriving—career success, financial stability, the lifestyle you’ve worked so hard for. But behind closed doors, the fear of rejection, failure, and “not being enough” quietly sabotages your love life and self-worth. In this episode, Dr. Sarah unpacks the hidden trauma cycles that keep high achievers stuck in survival mode—hustling for validation at work and in relationships. Discover how to break free from fear-driven patterns, rewire your nervous system, and finally create love and success that feels aligned and sustainable. 

Transcript

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Hello, my friends. If you don't know who I am, I am Dr. Sarah specializing in relationship health and helping amazing people and toxic relationships and build self-confidence. So let's get to it because today we are going to be talking about the irony of how someone who is incredibly successful life looks perfect on paper. It's really struggling behind closed doors, especially when it comes to their love life and their sense of self-worth and self-esteem. And this is my bread and butter. I see clients struggling with this day in day out, and this episode was really inspired. By a particular client that I'm working with at the moment, and she is a phenomenal person. She works in private equity firms, she does investment banking, working with really, really, uh, huge industries. And her job is very demanding, and she is thriving. She is ruthless in how much she has succeeded, but her nervous system is shut. She feels like her life is crumbling and that is something that has been an ongoing experience for a long time, and she has constantly been in survival mode. She has constantly been fighting and pushing to succeed that drive that hard hustle energy that has been so strong that. She's not known any other way, but at the same time, she knows that it's not sustainable. So I don't know if this resonates with you, but if it does, please listen up because this is going to be a really valuable conversation. And ultimately just, just to tell you a little bit more about this particular client, she lived in a state of conflict with herself. Because she knew that her hustle, her drive, that push energy was needed for a career because she works in a very cutthroat industry. So she knew that, but at the same time, she couldn't quite figure out. Why things weren't as good as she hoped they would be. She'd worked so hard to try and create this amazing life for herself where she would be happy, where she would be able to see friends and spend time with loved ones and have a family of her own. And she worked so hard to stabilize herself so that she could have a family of her own and to be able to take time off work and be able to enjoy her, you know, her partner, her kids. But all of these things just felt very intangible and that she couldn't attain them, and that's because she was caught up in the rat race. Now here's the thing, and this is just me being totally transparent. There are people out there who are incredibly successful at their work and they have amazing careers. And they have great family lives. They also have a great home life, and they are able to feel truly happy and truly aligned. So it is absolutely not. I can only have one or the other. It is absolutely not a sacrifice situation. And by the way, if you believe that it's a sacrifice situation, I got news for you. Uh, you are really losing yourself and you are really doing yourself a disservice because actually you can have it all, but it has to come from a place where you are aligned. And going back to this particular client who I'm talking about. Unfortunately, she wasn't aligned. There was a lot of internal conflict. She was having this dialogue with herself. One part of her really wanted to rest to feel accepted to. Soften up, but then this other part of her just couldn't let herself do that. Now, I know I talk about relationships a lot, so why am I heavily focused in on her work? Well, the truth is the way that we approach one part of our life often reflects how we approach many parts of our lives. And she was somebody who came from this space where. She was driven to achieve. She was driven to succeed. She was driven to be good enough, and that was very much evident in her work, but she was filled with the strive because she was so frightened of what the alternative would be. Actually the reason why she was working so hard wasn't because she enjoyed her work and it wasn't because that was the thing that was going to be ideal for her, and that was her deepest passion. But the reason why she was driving so hard was because she was frightened. She was terrified of failure. She was terrified of. What other people would think of her if she didn't thrive? If she didn't succeed, if she didn't get the accolades or the status or the paycheck, she was terrified. Of her not being good enough, and ultimately her not being accepted, not being valued, her being rejected, her being pushed aside and belittled and kind of pitied. That was what she was frightened of. And so even though on paper it looked like she was doing really well, she was succeeding, she was doing all the right things. Actually, it wasn't the right thing for her internally. Because she was just battling with herself. She wasn't working towards succeeding, but she was actually running away from failure. That's the thing that was most excruciating. And when it came to relationships, her love life looked pretty ugly. It was scarce, but when she did enter a relationship, it was pretty ugly. So. How did, how do these fears translate? Well, okay, let's step back. In terms of work, she had these major fears around failure, but ultimately when we channeled down that fear of failure was really reflecting her fear of not being good enough, and she was really frightened that if she was not good enough. She would be rejected. She would be criticized, and ultimately people would not want her. They would not value her, and she would be left behind. She would be sidelined. And when it came to relationships, the same fears existed, but in very different ways. So whenever she was dating somebody, and if it was long enough to get to this point, so after a few months. She would start to get really frightened that she would be failing at the relationship. And the way that this actually looked was she was really caught up in this dilemma with herself of working really hard to see that. Uh, the other person liked her to see that he was interested to see that he was messaging her, that he was paying her enough attention that he'd be, uh, surprising her with different gifts or trips away or whatever it might be, and she was eager to get all of that. And she used those signs as a form of validation or like a metric of, oh yeah, he's really into me because, you know, he got me this gift. Or, you know, he planned this weekend, or he planned this trip away, or he planned this dinner out, or, you know, he spoke to my friends and figured out what I liked and I can see that he's really interested in me. So she would be focused in on all of these different signs to see whether or not she was good enough. In that relationship, and unfortunately, she was caught up in a dilemma because if she didn't have those things, she would then start questioning her enoughness and she would start then. Believing that she needed to do more. She needed to be more patient, or she needed to hint a bit more, or she needed to be more proactive, or she needed to hustle in the relationship like she hustled and work. She needed to hustle and graft and do all of these things that she was hoping that they would do for her. And. She would invest and pour more and more of herself in the hope that she would get that return in the hope that she would get that form of validation. And really what she was doing there was she wasn't necessarily saying what it's that she needed or wanted in a relationship. She wasn't having that open conversation about what she really did desire. But what she was doing was she was. In some way tiptoeing around that, in the hope that this person could read her mind and that this person would give her the validation and the reassurance that she was looking for and that she was enough. But she was doing this from a fear of her not being enough. So the root fear was the same in her career, but also in her relationship, that actually she was so frightened of being a failure to this person, of not being enough to this person, not being liked enough by this person, that she would work harder and harder and harder in order to be liked. So she was pouring more of herself in, in the hope. That she would be loved or at least liked more, that she'd be more desired, as opposed to really figuring out, is this relationship even the right one for me? And that's the issue. When we're operating from a space of fear, we are constantly looking for. Escaping that fear. So she was escaping the fear of not being enough by working harder as opposed to stepping back and seeing is this really a relationship that I want to approach? And so ultimately there are two avenues that we can go down when it comes to a relationship career or anything else to in fact, in life. And the two approaches are we are either trying to run away and trying to escape that thing that we're frightened of. So for example, we're trying to escape the fear of not being good enough to somebody. We're trying to escape the fear of being rejected, of being criticized, of being neglected, of being abandoned. We're trying to escape all of those things. That's one option. And so we might work harder and harder to gain love. Or at least work harder and harder to avoid that criticism, rejection, or. We can go down a different path, the healthier path, the path of let's work towards having a relationship that we really want. Let's work towards having the love that aligns with me or building the life that I would like and that you would like. And how is it that we can do that together? That is the thing that I'm wanting to work towards, and that's a very different story because if we are focused in on what it is that we want to work towards, then we can move forward with more clarity. We can see whether or not this relationship is really for me or this career is really for me. We can then see what is it that lines up better with me. And we can then make a clearer judgment as opposed to being caught up in the rat race of trying to escape fears and trying to escape rejection, trying to escape abandonment, and never actually feeling held, never actually feeling like we're enough. So if you are caught up in this trauma cycle of trying to escape rejection and trying to escape abandonment, trying to escape the fear of not being enough. Then this is a cycle that absolutely needs to be broken, and you would be doing yourself a disservice. You would be doing yourself a disservice for now and for your future self if the cycle still was maintained because. You are forever gonna be running away from yourself. And guess what? You've lived with yourself permanently. So this is something that really needs to happen at a deep level. And one of the methods that we do this, and something that I often support my clients with is how is it that we break that cycle of escaping from the fear because. That cycle, that trauma cycle is very much in existence in our nervous system. If your body has been used to living in a heightened state of stress or if your body and your nervous system has been so used to living in a fight or flight mode. And you're even in fight or flight when it comes to a relationship, you notice yourself walking on eggshells a lot. You notice yourself questioning, does this person really like me for who I am? If you notice yourself having to put on a mask or edit yourself so that you would avoid rejection or avoid a abandonment, or avoid the fear of not being good enough to this person, if you are constantly curating yourself to get approval. Then that shows all of these trauma cycles are living in your nervous system, and this is something that is deeply rooted. But thank goodness, thank God for neuroplasticity. So we can change this, we can rewire this, and it really does start with you. It starts with how it is that we are able to untangle and break these old trauma cycles so that we can then start creating a new healthy pattern where you are not constantly escaping the thing that you're frightened of. But you are actually moving towards the thing that you are really wanting to build. And ultimately, life is about progress. It's not about escaping the fear because you'll always be in survival mode, but it's actually about thriving, and that's the space that we need to be in. And so if any of this. Resonates with you. Please get in touch because I would love to be able to hear more about your story and see how it is that we can move towards your own healing. Until next time, take care.