When Helping Hurts: Healing the Hidden Cost of Overgiving

There’s a tenderness in women who care deeply. The ones who hold it all together, who anticipate everyone’s needs before their own, who make life easier for everyone else — even when it costs them their peace.

For many of us, that’s how we learned to love. But at some point, love turned into labor.

When I sat down with healer and energy coach Lyn Delmastro-Thomson, we talked about the quiet grief that lives inside women who never stop giving. Her story began with watching her mother — a lifelong caregiver — slowly give herself away in the name of devotion. Lyn put it plainly: “She never learned how to take care of herself.”

That sentence landed heavy. Because how many of us were taught the same? That our worth is measured by how useful we are, how available we stay, how selfless we can be.

But the body always keeps score. The body remembers what the mind tries to rationalize. And eventually, it starts to whisper — I can’t keep doing this.

That whisper is the first stage of Presence. It’s the moment you stop overriding the exhaustion, the resentment, the tightness in your chest when another request lands in your inbox. Presence isn’t just mindfulness; it’s radical honesty with yourself. It’s saying, something in me is tired of living like this, and actually listening.

Lyn and I talked about how often we ignore that whisper until it becomes a scream — illness, burnout, emotional collapse. She called it the “dance” of relationships: one partner leads, one follows, but when the rhythm becomes one-sided, it stops being a dance and turns into servitude.

That’s when Agency begins — the sacred pause. The moment between request and response where you breathe and ask, Do I actually want to do this? It sounds so small, but it’s everything. It’s the breath that breaks the automatic yes.

We laughed about how uncomfortable that pause can be at first. The silence feels foreign when you’ve built your identity around being helpful, kind, accommodating. But that moment — “Let me think about it,” “Can I get back to you?” — is where you start reclaiming your time, your energy, and your body’s trust.

Lyn shared how her husband helped her notice where she was still over-giving, even with her own mother. For years, she thought daily phone calls were normal, expected. Until someone asked, “Do you actually want to?” That question cracked something open. Because sometimes freedom begins with permission to do less.

As we spoke, I could feel the shift — that subtle movement from duty to discernment. That’s Empowerment. It’s not a roar; it’s an exhale. It’s the peace that comes when your giving is a choice, not a reflex.

Empowerment doesn’t mean you stop caring. It means you start caring from fullness instead of fatigue. You set boundaries that sound like love — because they are. You stop rescuing people who never asked to be saved and start allowing them to rise beside you.

Lyn called boundaries “portals back to ourselves,” and I felt that in my bones. Because every “no” to what drains you becomes a “yes” to your own aliveness.

And that’s the real cost of carrying it all — not just the exhaustion, but the erosion of self that happens when you forget you’re allowed to matter, too.

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If you’ve been the one holding it all, I see you. You’re not too much. You’ve just been carrying too much that isn’t yours.

It’s time to set it down.

You don’t need another mindset shift. You need embodiment — the kind that brings you back into your body’s wisdom, into relationships that feel like peace, into the kind of power that doesn’t require proving.

That’s where our work begins.

Let’s talk — not about fixing, but about freeing. Book your free call.