This is one of the most common questions people bring into therapy and one of the hardest to answer cleanly: “How do I balance what other people expect of me with what I actually want, without sacrificing myself?”
It’s this feeling of wanting to pursue something that matters to you, but there’s this fear of disappointing the people you love. You want to speak honestly, but you’re worried about the damage it might do. You want to feel like yourself but every time you try, something pulls you back.
If this sounds familiar, you’re not broken. There’s nothing wrong with you.
But we’d like to gently challenge something first: the word balance.
Why Balance Might Be the Wrong Goal
Balance sounds reasonable. Walk the middle ground and keep the “peace” of where you are now. Give a little, take a little. Finding the sweet spot between your needs and everyone else’s.
But think about what balance actually requires.
If you’re always walking the middle ground, you’re never fully deciding for yourself and you’re never fully deciding for others either. You’re perpetually hovering somewhere between, never quite landing.
Balance has a lot of assumptions. If balance is walking the middle ground, then you can’t always be walking the middle ground. Basically, you’re not making a decision for other people and you’re not making a decision for yourself.
Balance, in other words, can become its own form of avoidance. A way of appearing to choose without ever truly choosing.
So if balance isn’t the goal, what is?
A Better Question to Ask
Instead of asking “How do I balance my needs and others’?,” try asking:
“How can I live with other people without feeling like I have to sacrifice myself?”
It’s a subtle shift, but it changes everything. It stops framing the relationship between you and others as a zero-sum negotiation, where someone always loses, and starts framing it as something to be lived with, rather than solved.
It also opens a more honest question underneath: “What does it feel like when I sacrifice myself? And why does it seem like the only option?”
The Guilt of Wanting What You Want
Many people who struggle with this aren’t selfish. They’re not even particularly conflict-averse. They’re simply people who have learned — through experience, through family, through culture — that their needs are the negotiable ones.
We hear it in different forms:
- “I want this, but if I pursue it, other people will be hurt.”
- “If I become myself, people will leave me.”
- “I don’t want to be selfish.”
The guilt here is real and it isn’t irrational. It usually developed for good reasons, in relationships where it genuinely wasn’t safe to take up too much space.
But guilt has a way of becoming its own authority. Over time, the fear of upsetting others can quietly override your ability to know what you want in the first place. You don’t just suppress your desires; you start to lose access to them entirely.
This is where therapy often begins. Not with the question of “what do I want,” but with the more foundational question of “am I even allowed to want?”
We are, Inescapably, Social Beings
Here’s the difficult truth underneath all of this: You cannot fully resolve this tension. Not because you’re doing it wrong, but because it is the nature of being human.
We are social animals and cannot exist without other people. Who we are, our sense of self, our values, even our capacity to feel authentic arises in relation to others.
If you were just alone in the world, all alone in the world, you wouldn’t be thinking about being fake or real. That question arises in the presence of another.
This means that the very thing that makes the question of authenticity possible, other people, is also the thing that complicates it. Living with others means you can’t say everything you want to say, or do everything you want to do, or be every version of yourself in every moment.
There will be limits and sacrifices. Not because you are failing to live authentically, but because you are living with other people, which has always meant something has to give.
The question isn’t how to eliminate that tension. It’s how to live within it without losing yourself.
Inauthenticity Is Not the Enemy
This might be the most counterintuitive thing we’ll say in this article: being inauthentic is not always a failure.
In everyday life, we move in and out of authenticity constantly –and that is normal. Sometimes you need to set aside what you’re feeling in order to function, to meet a deadline, to show up for someone else. Sometimes full emotional honesty isn’t the most useful or kind response in a given moment.
If the most “authentic” thing you feel in a moment is a harsh, unkind thought about someone, expressing that in the name of honesty doesn’t serve the relationship. It doesn’t serve you. Authenticity without discernment isn’t a virtue.
We ebb and flow between authenticity and inauthenticity. Authenticity allows us to express ourselves, to exercise our agency. But sometimes when we feel everything too deeply, we cannot do anything.
The goal, then, is not to be authentic at all times in all situations. The goal is to remain connected to yourself, to know what you feel, what you need, what you value, even when circumstances mean you can’t always act on it directly.
The Over-Romanticised Self
There’s another trap worth naming: the idealised version of what living authentically is supposed to feel like.
Many people come into therapy, or simply go through life, carrying a picture of what the real version of themselves would look like. Fully integrated and certain, feeling completely this is me in every moment, every relationship, every decision.
That picture is seductive…and it’s largely fictional.
When people come in wanting to find meaning in life, there’s some expectation of totality. They want to feel this full “ah, this is me” or “this is meaningful,” when sometimes that’s not what you will get.
People mistake that feeling okay is not good enough. We have this over-romanticised image of what an authentic self or fulfilling life would look like.
Letting go of that image is not settling but maturity. It’s the recognition that a life lived honestly, in relationship with others, will always contain ambivalence and that ambivalence is not proof that something has gone wrong.
A Template Worth Trying
Rather than searching for the perfect balance, try sitting with this sentence structure that’s something we’ve found useful in practice, drawn loosely from Aristotle’s idea of the golden mean:
“How can I [do what matters to me] without [what I fear it will cost me or others]?”
Fill it in with whatever is most alive for you right now.
- How can I pursue this career without losing my family’s respect?
- How can I set this boundary without destroying the relationship?
- How can I express what I feel without causing irreparable harm?
Notice what happens when you ask the question this way. Instead of a tug-of-war between self and other, it becomes an invitation to find a path that’s imperfect, context-specific, real rather than a perfect equilibrium that doesn’t exist.
You won’t always find a clean answer but you’ll be asking the right question. And often, that’s where genuine movement begins.
What Therapy Can Offer
This kind of question how do I live with others without sacrificing myself? isn’t something therapy solves in a session. It’s something therapy helps you live with more consciously.
The work involves understanding where your particular version of this tension comes from. What it felt like to need something and not be able to ask for it. What you learned, early on, about whether your desires were acceptable. And gradually not through dramatic revelation, but through lived experience developing the capacity to stay present with your own needs even in the presence of others.
Just because you’re struggling with this doesn’t mean you’re inauthentic. Maybe just by questioning it, you’re already trying to understand what authenticity means to you.
That’s not a small thing. That’s, in many ways, the whole work.
You Don’t Have to Choose Between Yourself and Others
The tension between self and other is not a problem to solve. It is a condition of being human one that shows up in every close relationship, every significant decision, every moment when who you are comes into contact with who someone else needs you to be.
The goal isn’t to win that tension in favour of yourself. It isn’t to dissolve yourself in favour of others. It’s to develop the inner resources to stay present with both to know what you feel, to understand what others need, and to make conscious choices, rather than reactive ones, in the space between.
That space, uncomfortable as it is, is where genuine relationship lives. And it’s where, slowly, a more honest version of yourself becomes possible.
If this resonates with something you’re working through, we’d welcome the conversation. Explore more on identity and the authentic self, or read about how existential therapy approaches questions of meaning and self.
About the Author
I am a BPS-accredited and SPS-accredited Counselling Psychologist with a Doctorate in Existential Psychology from the New School of Psychotherapy and Counselling in London, U.K. My care philosophy is not to diagnose, label, or categorise but rather to work with the individual in front of me in the here and now.
My clinical credentials certainly play a significant role in defining my professional identity. But to foster a deeper connection and authenticity, I invite you to discover my other “Selves”, the various facets of who I am.
