Betraying Yourself: When You Ask Someone Else to Love You in Your Place

By Alana Davis

There is a silent betrayal that occurs every time you look outward, pleading for someone to fill the emptiness inside you, a space you refuse to inhabit yourself. When you ask someone to love you in your place, you abandon yourself, leaving the richness of your soul untended. This is the betrayal of your essence, the forsaking of your own heart, and one of the most profound forms of self-sabotage.

Both the wisdom of the Stoics and the raw truths of intimacy teach us this: the world cannot give you what you withhold from yourself. No lover, no partner, no fleeting moment of external validation can substitute for your inner wholeness.

The Stoic’s Truth: Master Yourself First

The Stoics spoke of self-mastery as the highest path to freedom. Marcus Aurelius wrote: “You have power over your mind—not outside events. Realise this, and you will find strength.”

When you rely on someone else to “love you in your place,” you bypass the responsibility of loving and accepting yourself. Instead, you make the other person a kind of deity, tasked with soothing your fears, filling your emptiness, and carrying your unlived truth. But what they offer will never be enough, because the void within you cannot be filled by what lies outside you.

To depend on someone else’s love for your worth is to hand over the reins of your inner life. You lose your grounding, your freedom, and your dignity. The Stoics understood this well: it is not events, nor the actions of others, that disturb us, but our reaction to them. Your lack of love for yourself is the root of the longing you feel, not the supposed inadequacy of your partner’s affections.

The Dance of Intimacy: What You Refuse to Feel, You Will Demand

In the dance of intimacy, the same truth applies. When you refuse to love yourself, you will demand that love from your partner. You will expect them to soothe the ache you cannot face, to validate the worth you refuse to claim, to give endlessly where you give yourself little.

This dynamic creates a subtle push and pull. Your partner senses the weight of your expectations, the pressure to be everything you cannot be for yourself, and they retreat. Or worse, they stay, and the relationship becomes strained under the burden of unspoken demands and unmet needs.

This is not love. This is self-abandonment disguised as partnership.

The Stoics and the wisdom of the heart agree: the only way to truly give and receive love is to cultivate your own inner garden first. Love yourself fiercely, with all the devotion you crave from another. Only then can you step into the sacred exchange of intimacy as a whole being, offering your love freely rather than grasping for it desperately.

The Path of True Love

To reclaim yourself and step into the fullness of love, you must walk the courageous path of self-inquiry, self-mastery, and embodiment. True love, both for yourself and others is not found by simply thinking about your feelings or analysing your pain. At Reviver, we teach a deeper way: we don’t just sit with what we feel in the mind. We practise entering the body, immersing ourselves in our own internal ecosystem, not as detached observers but as participants in the lived experience of our emotions and sensations.

Why the Body is Essential in the Path of True Love

The body holds everything, the joy, the trauma, the longing, the unmet needs, and the patterns that shape how we love and relate. While the mind tries to explain, rationalise, or even suppress these feelings, the body feels them fully. It keeps the score of our lived experiences, and only through reconnecting with it can we uncover the truths we often bury beneath layers of thought.

Here’s why entering the body is essential:

    1.    The Mind Observes; the Body Lives

    •    When you stay in your mind, you analyse your pain or your love from a distance. You become an observer of life, disconnected from the full, visceral experience of being alive.

    •    In contrast, when you enter the body, you engage with the sensations, breath, and energy that are your life. You become a participant in the process of healing and growth, embodying your truth rather than just thinking about it.

    2.    The Body Reveals the Unspoken

    •    The body doesn’t lie. It reveals what the mind may try to suppress or rationalise, grief held in a tight chest, fear in shallow breaths, or joy in a lightness of being. By entering the body, you can access the unspoken emotions and sensations that are the key to deep self-awareness and transformation.

    3.    Healing Happens Through Living, Not Watching

    •    Sitting with your feelings in the mind alone can often lead to analysis paralysis. You intellectualise your pain or your needs without fully feeling or integrating them.

    •    At Reviver, we teach you to move into the body, to soften into your sensations and live through them, whether that’s through breath work, movement, or stillness. This approach allows you to process and release emotions from a lived place, integrating them into your being rather than observing them from a distance.

    4.    Embodiment Creates True Connection

    •    When you practise being present in your body, you cultivate a deeper connection with yourself. From this place, your relationships change. You stop seeking validation from others because you are already in touch with your internal world. You stop demanding love because you are embodying it.

Reconnecting to the Source of Love

When you practise entering your body and reconnecting with your internal ecosystem, you no longer betray yourself by asking someone else to love you in your place. You become the source of love. You stop seeking externally what is already abundant within you.

In this embodied state, you step into the flow of true intimacy, not as a grasping, needy presence, but as a grounded, open vessel of love. From this place, you can meet your partner with fullness rather than lack, with curiosity rather than expectation, and with a deep willingness to give and receive love without conditions.

As both the Stoics and the wisdom of the body teach us: true mastery lies not in controlling life, but in fully living it. When you love yourself from this embodied place, you create a love so real, so whole, and so alive that it transforms not only your relationships but the very fabric of your existence. This is the path of true love.