Are You Invisible?

Ellen was brought up to be invisible. She was taught to be very tuned into others' feelings and needs, but to never have any of her own. Her family made it clear to her that her job was to give to them but to never expect anything in return. As a result, Ellen learned to be totally tuned out to her own feelings and needs. It was as if she, as a person, didn't really exist, other than to be there for others.

When Ellen's feelings and needs did surface, she would tell herself that they weren't important, that she was strong and could handle not having her feelings cared for and or her needs recognized. She convinced herself that if she just cared enough about others, others would eventually care about her. It never happened.

The inner stress of never attending to her own feelings and needs and always feeling so invisible to others as a result finally took a toll on Ellen's health. Ellen is now dealing with cancer and finally has to attend to herself.

Many of us have learned to be invisible - to ourselves and to others. What are some of the ways you create invisibility?

  • Do you remain silent, not speaking up for yourself, when feeling discounted or unseen by others?

  • Do you ignore your own feelings and needs in deference to others?

  • Do you go along with what others want, even if you really want something else?

  • Do you accept blame for things that you know are not really your responsibility?

  • Do you put aside your own opinions and accept the opinions of others to be accepted?

  • Do you accept disrespectful behavior from others, finding ways to excuse the behavior?

  • Do you pretend everything is okay when you are really feeling lonely or sad?

  • Are you conflict avoidant, preferring peace at any cost rather than rock the boat?

  • Are you carrying too much of the load at home or at work, without complaint?

  • Do you pretend to like a food, a movie, a topic of conversation, or sex, rather than run the risk of disapproval or rejection?

  • Do you allow yourself to be violated in any way - physically, emotionally, verbally, sexually - to avoid rejection?

  • Do you allow others' anger or bullying to control you into doing what they want?

  • Do you do everything yourself, never asking others for help?

How often do you end up feeling unappreciated, unseen, not valued? How much of this is a reflection of how you treat yourself?

If your own feelings and needs are invisible to yourself, they will end up being invisible to others. It is not realistic to constantly put yourself aside and then expect others to value and respect you. Anytime you tolerate uncaring or disrespectful behavior in others to avoid conflict, you are training others to see you as invisible, to not care about your feelings and needs.

If you have been allowing yourself to be invisible for a long time, it is a real challenge to start to care about yourself. You need to be willing to go through a difficult period of feeling others' anger and resentment. After all, you trained them for years to not have to care about you or see you, and now you are changing the rules. They won't like it, but they will eventually respect you for it. You will also discover in the process of caring about yourself who really cares about you and who has just been using you. Those people who really care about you will eventually applaud your self-care, while those who were just using you will go away or be constantly angry with you for changing.

It takes great courage to shift from invisibility to being seen and valued. It takes great courage to be willing to lose others rather than continue to lose yourself. Yet, like with Ellen, your very life may depend upon it. Hopefully, you will not wait until you are ill or feel alone and cast aside by others to start to become visible to yourself.

It must start with yourself - with learning to tune into, acknowledge, value, and take loving action for yourself regarding your own feelings and needs. It means moving into personal responsibility for your own feelings and needs rather than taking care of everyone else in the hopes they will eventually take care of you. If you are ever going to feel cared for and loved, it has to start with you caring about and being loving to yourself!

About The Author

Margaret Paul, Ph.D. is the best-selling author and co-author of eight books, including "Do I Have To Give Up Me To Be Loved By You?" She is the co-creator of the powerful Inner Bonding healing process. Learn Inner Bonding now!

Visit her web site for a FREE Inner Bonding course: http://www.innerbonding.com or mailto:margaret@innerbonding.com. Phone sessions available.

More Resources

Unable to open RSS Feed $XMLfilename with error HTTP ERROR: 404, exiting

More Coaching Information:

Related Articles

Taking The Coach Approach
When you use what you go through to grow through, you take the coach approach. I am suggesting that you hire your own counsel.
Viewpoints - Communication Destruction Or....
Viewpoints! Everyone has them and they are personal. However, when you believe that only your view is correct, you shut out other people and do not listen to the facts they are giving.
7 Effective Ways To Boost Your Self Esteem
1. Get a life purpose statement.
How to Forgive Another for Past Hurts
No one gets through life without being hurt by another person. We all have experienced the pain of a thoughtless remark, gossip, or lie.
5 Minute Morning Balance Ritual
"3 Questions, 5 Minutes a Day: Make leaps towards greater balance in one single week with the Shicka Boom 5 Minute Morning Balance Ritual"By Laura Lallone, Certified Life CoachThis article is dedicated to a woman that I've never met and probably never will. Tall with dark, dark hair, she was perfectly manicured in a tailored suit with high-heeled pumps.
Attitude is Contagious - Would Anybody Want Yours?
Are you using the Life Potential you have been given? Or are you just existing?We have all inherited standards, traits, habits, perceptions, and expectations based on what our parents, teachers, and peers taught us. We have allowed these to grow as a result of whatever we then learned as adults, and they continue to grow with whatever we feed our minds.
3 Keys to Making Small Talk Easy to Do
Small talk used to be really hard work for me. I never knew what to say and I always worried about saying the wrong thing.
Eureka! I've Found It!
OK, so it wasn't quite that big of a deal. But I did find the "T" that mysteriously escaped from the word "not" in one of my articles a few months ago.
The American Dream - Are We Really Free?
The promises of THE AMERICAN DREAM (to have it all and enjoy it all, based on materialistic values system) has been holding us captive and threatening to take our power and freedom away- without our awareness, like a thief in the night.Consciously or unconsciously we make daily decisions to either be a master of our own ship or destiny, if you will, or be a slave to our own circumstances and to other people*s expectations and belief systems that don*t serve our highest good and purpose.
Action NOT Reaction
Do you feel you are in charge of your life do you really believe that you control your destiny? Or you are of those people who feel manipulated all the time, they are doing things and they don't know, why? Do you have the sense that you are a wooden puppet that someone else pulls the strings?I have an answer for you.Psychologists have proven that human decisions are based on emotions, and once an emotional decision is made they use their logical part of the brain to justify that decision.
What is the Success Lesson in this Story?
One of my clients gave me permission to tell you his story.Jim called me 9 months ago and asked for help.
God, Grant Me Patience.....And, I Want It Now!!
Are you facing a difficult time in your life? Do you feel like a fish out of water? If today was a fish, would you want to throw it back in the river? If this is your situation, make no negative destructive decisions. Be Patient.
Building a Strong Coaching Practice
As a person who has been around the coaching profession for a number of years, I wish I could say that my practice is full right now. But the fact is that I've been pursuing TV gigs in the last few years and haven't put much emphasis on building my individual coaching practice.
You Can Get There From Here
But first you've got to raise your standards.I know at some point you had big dreams.
Receiving Thanks and Praise - The View from the Other Side
We demand more from those who provide to us and because we are frequently in roles which deliver goods and services ourselves, we are on the receiving end too - of complaints, frustrations and generally poor behaviour.Why is it that when we are on the receiving end, we miss the fact that we ourselves, when we hang up our service-provider-hat at the end of our shift, often end up as 'customers behaving badly' too?Why do we take our own frustrations out on others, the way it has been taken out on us? Why do we sometimes become the Hyde from our normal Jekyll?So, when someone goes the 'extra mile' to say 'Thank you', or appreciate the actions you have taken? What do you take from that and how do you react? You feel good, I guess.
Resolving Conflicts Effectively
Every relationship has conflicts. In some relationships, conflict is a serious problem; in others, differences seem to be resolved without creating a major incident.
Mailey's Introspections [Monday, December 6th 2005]
As I work with clients as their introspective Inner Peace/Relationship coach, an issue that has come to my awareness is the tendency we have as human beings to stray away from the present moment. Some people tend to live mostly in the past, some live in the future, while still others ricochet from future to past and back to the future again.
Five Steps to Vocational Passion: A Disciplined Plan for Major Mid-life Changes
There's a famous song lyric that asks: "Is that all there is?" Every seven seconds, an American turns 50 years old. So there's a good chance that song is running through some of their heads.
We Are Exactly Where We Choose to Be
The idea for this month's newsletter came from an unlikely encounter: I recently had lunch with a new friend named Rick Rockwell. You may remember him as the bachelor from the first-ever reality TV show, "Who Wants to Marry a Multimillionaire?"During our meeting, Rick described some of the knowledge he gained from doing the show, along with a few of past his experiences in business, ethics, and of course, primetime romance.
Recreating Yourself
So it's time for a change. You've taken that hard look in the mirror and you've decided that who you are is not who you want to be.