Doing Things For Others
Helping other people has a way of turning on you. When someone hasn't done a thing for themselves and the result goes badly, the blame slides over to you. You become the ready-made scapegoat. Keep it up long enough and people stop noticing you did anything at all.
There's also a version where it keeps the peace. Call it the middle child's habit. You hate watching people argue, so you work out the compromise nobody else will. Your attention goes to figuring out what will satisfy everyone around you, and almost none of it goes to what you actually want out of the situation.
Constant deferring tends to chip away at your sense of yourself rather than build it up. Do you still know what's genuinely good for you? Picture ordering at a restaurant. You wait, you let everyone else go first, and when it's finally your turn you pick something and then spend the meal wishing you'd chosen differently. That regret becomes evidence, in your own mind, that you can't be trusted with your own choices. The food stops tasting like much of anything.
None of this means helping is worthless. When you make someone's day a bit lighter and it costs you next to nothing, that's worth doing. Give a little. The trick is to also say what you'd like when it happens to be something you wanted anyway, and to put that into the decision instead of swallowing it.
Some people can't stand to rock the boat. Any bad feeling, yours or anyone else's, feels like too much, and you get rattled just watching another person get upset. Peace at any price can seem like a bargain. Think about how much harm has gone on while bystanders watched and said nothing. There are moments that ask you to speak up, for yourself or for someone else.
Inside a family it often feels simpler to cave so everyone can get out the door. The catch shows up later. The family members who always got their way never had to learn how to compromise or share. Out in the world they discover that strangers don't automatically want what they want, and that other people will push back and state their own case. A person raised to be the center of things can end up pushed away by everyone outside the house.
Give yourself away too freely and you find you've been left out of your own life.