Are you free in your relationships?
July 5, 2026
Let’s explore what it means to be free in your relationships and in your life.
Our 18 year old cat Midnight died. Midnight was my 22 year old daughter, Ashley’s cat. She has had him since she was 4. Losing him has been a pretty big deal to her and her heart.
She has been grieving a lot, allowing the waves of grief to come and go as grief does.
So many people reached out with condolences and she was met with kind words from friends and clients at work and she noticed something about herself when she was met with those kind condolences.
She felt kind of numb.
But when she got home, all the grief came rushing in.
Has that ever happened to you?
Have you held it all together in public just to fall apart the moment you walk through your own front door?
Yeah, me too.
That’s because you’ve been conditioned to contain yourself in public.
To withhold. To withdraw. To numb out.
You are conditioned not to make anyone uncomfortable.
Not to be too much.
To avoid vulnerability.
So you hold it together. At work. At school pickup. At family dinners. In your marriage. In your friendships.
You smile and say “I’m fine” when you are anything but.
While it may seem polite and appropriate.
There’s a cost to all that withholding.
It takes a lot of energy to not be your authentic self.
To contain your true emotions. Your grief. Your anger. Your joy. Your truth.
It’s exhausting holding it all in.
Because you are meant to be fully expressed.
Your exhaustion isn’t just about how much you’re doing.
It’s the exhaustion of editing yourself.
Day after day. Relationship after relationship.
I know that on some level, we are all doing it.
Suppressing ourselves in service of keeping the peace.
Unfortunately however, this is not what freedom looks like.
Too many women do not feel safe enough to be fully expressed in our closest relationships.
We don’t want to burden our spouses or we don’t trust that they can hold space for us. We don’t want our kids to see us upset. We don’t want to bother friends with our problems.
So we eat our emotions.
And here’s what that costs you and the people you love.
When you can’t be fully yourself, when you’re always editing, always managing, always containing, the people closest to you never actually get to know you.
Not really.
They get the version of you that’s safe.
The version that keeps the peace.
The version that holds it all together.
And somewhere in the distance between who you really are and who you’re pretending to be, connection fades away.
Slowly. Quietly. One unexpressed truth at a time.
This is what I see in the women I work with again and again.
Not just conflict.
Chronic disconnection.
From their partners. From their kids. From their friends.
And from themselves.
Because when you spend enough time containing yourself for everyone else, you start to lose track of what you actually feel.
What you actually think.
What you actually want.
The real you gets quieter and quieter.
Until one day you’re not even sure who she is anymore.
So this Independence Day — I want to ask you something:
Are you actually free?
In your kitchen. In your marriage. In your parenting. In your body. In your heart. In your mind.
Do you feel free to say what you really think?
To feel what you actually feel?
To disagree without it costing you something?
To be fully, completely, unapologetically yourself with the people you love most?
Because that kind of freedom?
That’s where real connection lives.
So I ask you:
Where in your relationships are you withholding your true self?
What is that costing you?
And what might become possible if you finally stopped?
in trust and gratitude,
Annmarie Chereso
Author, Speaker, Coach, & Meditation Teacher
PS: This is exactly what we’re going to explore together this August — in a very special gathering I can’t wait to tell you more about. Stay tuned. 🤍
PPS: If you want to start understanding what’s keeping you from showing up fully, I made this quiz for exactly this moment.
Three minutes. Free. And you might learn something powerful.