What if some of the qualities you’re most proud of—your loyalty, generosity, flexibility, ambition, and faith—are actually the places where you’ve learned to abandon yourself?
In this solo episode of the Redefining Wealth Podcast, Patrice Washington continues the Redefining Love 2.0 season with an honest look at seven forms of self-abandonment that can easily disguise themselves as positive qualities.
Because self-abandonment doesn’t always look like settling or shrinking. Sometimes it looks responsible. Compassionate. Generous. Loyal. Even spiritual. And learning to love yourself differently begins with recognizing when a strength has crossed the line into self-betrayal.
In This Episode, You’ll Learn:
- Why understanding someone doesn’t require unlimited accommodation
- How being the person who “handles everything” can create resentment
- The difference between generosity and constantly paying the difference
- Why governing decisions protect you from abandoning yourself in the moment
- How loyalty can keep you waiting for a boulder when you already felt the pebble
- Why ambition doesn’t require maximizing every ounce of your potential
- How faith can become avoidance when you already know what you need to do
1. You Call It Understanding
Compassion gives us context—but it doesn’t require us to ignore our own experience.
You can understand why someone behaves the way they do and still acknowledge that their behavior doesn’t work for you. You can believe someone is a good person and still decide the relationship, opportunity, or dynamic is no longer a fit.
As Patrice reminds us, understanding someone should never require you to argue against your own knowing.
2. You Call It Responsibility
For high-capacity women, being able to handle everything can quickly become an expectation that you will handle everything.
Patrice challenges listeners to stop asking, “Can I do this?” and start asking, “Whose responsibility is this?”
When you continuously over-function, you can unintentionally create space for everyone else to under-function. This is where the PEOPLE pillar becomes especially important: healthy relationships require shared responsibility, not one person constantly filling every gap.
3. You Call It Generosity
Generosity is giving freely and cheerfully.
Self-abandonment is constantly paying the difference—with your money, time, emotional labor, energy, body, peace, or calendar—and becoming resentful afterward.
Every yes has an economy. If you give three hours to something that deserved 30 minutes, those extra hours have to come from somewhere else—perhaps your FIT, FAITH, or SPACE pillar.
If you cannot give it freely, it may be time to tell yourself the truth.
4. You Call It Flexibility
Being adaptable doesn’t mean being endlessly available.
Patrice explains why governing decisions matter: some choices need to be made from your clearest, most grounded self so you don’t renegotiate your standards every time someone new arrives or someone becomes disappointed by your no.
The real test of a boundary isn’t when nobody wants anything from you.
It’s whether your clarity can survive someone else’s disappointment.
5. You Call It Loyalty
Sometimes you already know something has ended—you’re simply waiting for it to become painful enough to justify leaving.
But a relationship doesn’t have to become toxic to be incompatible. A friendship doesn’t need a dramatic betrayal for you to acknowledge that you’ve grown apart. A job doesn’t need to destroy your health before you’re allowed to want something different.
You don’t need a villain to validate your knowing.
Stop waiting for the pebble to become a boulder before giving yourself permission to move.
6. You Call It Ambition
Self-abandonment doesn’t always look like doing too little.
Sometimes it looks like never deciding that you have enough.
Another goal. Another client. Another certification. Another revenue stream. Another opportunity.
Patrice challenges high achievers to stop exploiting their own capacity simply because the world applauds their ambition. The WORK pillar isn’t about maximizing every gift—it’s about using the right gifts in service of the life and vision you’re actually called to live.
Just because you could doesn’t mean you should.
7. You Call It Faith
There are seasons when we genuinely need to pray, seek wisdom, and wait for clarity.
And then there are seasons when the answer has already come—we simply don’t like what it will require.
Sometimes faith means trusting yourself enough to act on what God has already revealed. It means releasing control, disappointing someone, ending a season, or saying no without knowing exactly what will replace your yes.
What if you’re not waiting on God? What if God is waiting on you?
Choosing a Love That Includes You
These qualities themselves aren’t the problem.
Responsibility, generosity, flexibility, loyalty, ambition, understanding, and faith can all be beautiful strengths. The invitation is to notice when those strengths cross the line into self-abandonment.
As we continue Redefining Love 2.0, Patrice leaves us with one powerful question:
Am I doing this from love, or am I doing this at the expense of myself?
Because sacrifice and self-abandonment are not the same thing.
About This Season: Redefining Love 2.0
This season of Redefining Wealth is dedicated to redefining what love really means — beyond romance and into how we love ourselves, others, God, and the lives we’re creating.
We’re exploring what it looks like to love without leaving yourself behind — through relationships, self-trust, reciprocity, obedience, and the Six Pillars of Wealth. Subscribe and journey with us as we learn to love without self-abandonment and honor who we are becoming.
Start With Clarity
🧭 Take the 2-Minute Pillar Quiz to discover which pillar needs your attention in this season:
https://patricewashington.com/quiz
📱 Join the FREE Redefining Wealth App (community, book club, and weekly LIVE sessions with Patrice):
https://patricewashington.com/redefining-wealth-app/
💛 Explore Pillar Mastery
https://pillarmastery.com
🎓 Join the Waitlist to The Institute for Redefining Wealth:
https://redefiningwealth.institute/
🎟️ Join us at Redefining Wealth LIVE
www.redefiningwealthlive.com
📘 Download the Six Pillars Cheat Sheet: https://patricewashington.com/6pillars
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