When Self-Sacrifice Feels Epically Meaningful
How to stop devoting yourself to unworkable situations
This post is for those of us who end up sacrificing ourselves in ways that make no sense to others or even ourselves. Even though we are paying an obvious cost, something feels so compelling about it that we keep doing it.
The only way to give up something that is bad for you is to really understand what it is giving you, and replace it with something better that still meets that need.
Sacrifice is one of the oldest, most potent sources of meaning humans have. And while humans generally no longer sacrifice humans or animals for religious reasons—many of us DO sacrifice our own humans selves and lives for the meaning it gives us.
Step 1: Validate what you are doing
To stop self-sacrifice requires recognizing:
meaning is a fundamental human need
if this is an issue for you, YOU probably have an outsize need for meaning, AND an outsize meaning-charge around self-sacrifice
In other words, you need the feeling of epic meaning in your life, and sacrifice does that for you.
Astro sidebar…
If you want to find this in your chart:
Jupiter (which rules Sagittarius & Pisces) needs epic meaning
Neptune gives sacrifice the intense feeling of deep meaningfulness
Together, they make you deeply unrealistic about what will genuinely meet your needs in this area. If you have them strongly configured, you are likely to end up in sacrificial quagmires that just feel so meaningful. And—everyone born between ~1970 and 1984 has Neptune in Sag so will have at least some flavor of this, with it being much stronger if it is aspecting or conjunct one of your personal planets or angles.
Step 2: Find a better source of epic meaning
Ideally you want to find something that is sustainable, healthy, and within your control.
Situations that are out of your control add the drama juice, unfortunately, which can feel like more meaning. But you need to find sources of meaning that do NOT make you feel crazy or lead to burnout.
There are probably many ways to do this, and what it looks like depends on how your chart is configured (or if you’re not astro-oriented—how your personality constructs meaning).
Here are the major ways I’m aware of:
spirituality, ritual, and magic - accessing the transcendent
creativity - making what is authentic to you to make, being a channel for your muse or daimon
contribution to something larger than yourself that you believe in
What these share is a context that allows devotion. Devotion is the combination of single-mindedness of purpose with a giving-over of yourself to a process that is larger than you.
Now obviously each of these can also go of the rails. People can turn anything into an addiction or obsession if they are accessing it from a wounded place or using it as a defense to their pain. So the final piece is…
Step 3: Resolve the wounds that make you desperate
Two things reliably create desperation:
attachment wounding or other early childhood trauma
walking around with chronically unmet needs
Attachment wounds create states that feel eternally painful. This is because the limbic system has no sense of time. Even if you know the feeling has passed before, when you are in it, it feels endless. Engulfing states of pain make people desperate for the (temporary) relief that enmeshment provides. The only solution for this is healing the attachment system.
Chronically unmet needs are usually the result of your childhood neglecting to give you these skills and/or teaching you very costly ways of meeting your needs rather than functional ways.
Healing all of this is beyond the scope of this article but I have covered it extensively over on Joy Ninja.
Healing these wounds will make your relationship with your sources of meaning less driven and intense and un-boundaried, and help you stop trying to make enmeshed or codependent relationships into your source of meaning.
My journey with epic self-sacrifice
I’m working through these themes right now after losing my #1 source of sacrificial meaning when my ex-husband-I-was-still-trying-to-save died six months ago. Lately I have been waking up feeling like What am I doing with my life? Does anything matter?
For me, a very work-oriented person, the best replacement for epic sacrifice I have come to is epic creative contribution. I need to work on projects that feel like I’m contributing something important to the world—something I believe in.
Just working to earn money was meaningful enough when that money was being sacrificed to try to save someone. But now that it’s just paying my own bills, that’s not meaningful enough. 😆 It probably sounds ridiculous to people who do not have this psychological need, but that’s just what is true for me.
Knowing this, when I start feeling that angsty-unhappy feeling of missing that feeling of meaning, I switch to working on the projects that feel the most meaningful, like AstroLiberation, and write posts like this, that try to help other people with the things I’ve struggled with.
The reason sharing astrology in specific feels meaningful to me is that the whole realization behind this post only came after understanding my own chart and how Neptune-and-Jupiter contacts create this outsized need. That astrological clarity, added to my NVC training around human needs, and suddenly I understand how to manage this pattern that has been behind me literally destroying my life and my sanity in the pursuit of the opportunity to sacrifice myself.
Obviously everyone wouldn’t need astrology to figure this out—but I did. There is something about the archetypal language of astrology that explains my life and being to myself that nothing else really has in such an effective way. It works for me, and I think it speaks to layers of reality that have been stripped from modern culture and life. And the learning curve at the beginning is really steep—so my epic purpose is to try to make it more accessible and useful to people who aren’t going to spend years immersing themselves in studying it.
Don’t get me wrong, I would still love for God to deliver My Perfect Person to me and for it all to work out epically—I mean, that desire is still in me. But the work I’ve done in the years since my marriage fell apart makes it optional now—the attachment and CPTSD work healed what was getting hooked emotionally, and astrology gave me a different outlet for my need for meaning.
I am so super grateful to have gotten to this place where I no longer feel in danger of jumping off a metaphorical cliff to chase someone who is fundamentally unavailable. I’m not walking around desperate for this kind of meaning—I have the awareness and space to think about it strategically and adjust my life to work better for me, rather than being driven by desperation to latch onto problematic sources of meaning.🤞🏻 Hopefully things stay that way.
If the need for epic meaning is something you struggle with too, I hope this gives you some ideas of how to work with it. 💚