Nicole Fayek

You’re the one everyone counts on, and lately no one’s asked who’s there for you. Your day starts with the scroll, then breakfast, then work, where you smooth things over and keep quiet rather than say what you actually think.

You make plans out of the anxiety of eating lunch alone rather than the want to. You drive home already dreading the one conversation you have on repeat with the one person in your life who takes and takes, and you let them win again because standing up for yourself feels like starting a fire you’re not sure you can put out.

You’ve told yourself it’s not that bad, that this is just how you are, that you don’t have time. Meanwhile you can’t remember the last time you celebrated something good in your own life without checking first whether it would upset someone else.

In session, I won’t just nod along. If you tell me the problem is that someone else needs to change first, I’ll get curious about that and push back a little, because most of what’s keeping you stuck isn’t the other person’s behaviour, it’s a belief you’ve been carrying that their comfort is your job. One question I come back to often is: if that were true, what would it actually mean for you? I’ve been the peacekeeper myself, the fixer, the one who put her own feelings on the back burner to keep everyone else comfortable, until I realized I was the only one who could change how I show up in my own relationships, including the one with myself. That’s the shift I help my clients make too, not by teaching you to stop caring, but by helping you stop absorbing responsibility for things that were never yours to carry.

A lot of the women I work with are also parents, and the same pattern that shows up with a difficult sibling or partner tends to show up in parenting too, the guilt, the overfunctioning, the sense that rest has to be earned. I also work with couples and families navigating exactly this kind of relational strain, where one person has been keeping the peace at their own expense for so long that the relationship itself has started to feel unequal. I currently see clients virtually or by phone, and I’m accepting new clients now.

If you’re ready to move away from the overwhelm and the fear driving your decisions and toward something that actually feels like peace, book a free 15-minute consultation call.