Jasmine Jones on Rebuilding Identity After Years of Living for Everyone Else

Jasmine Jones did not arrive at identity coaching because of one dramatic rupture. Her understanding developed more gradually, through the ordinary transitions that can quietly rearrange a person’s sense of self before they realize how much has changed.

Becoming a mother was one of those transitions. Before children, Jones could make decisions around her own schedule, rest when she needed to, or spend time alone without much planning. Pregnancy changed the calculation immediately because every choice now included someone else. Once her child was born, even leaving the house required another layer of preparation and attention.

None of that felt unusual. The difficulty came later, when caring for children, meeting expectations at work, supporting colleagues, and trying to perform well in each role became so constant that Jones stopped asking what she needed.

That pattern now sits near the center of her work through J Venice, where she helps women examine how much of their identity has become organized around serving everyone around them.

When Responsibility Becomes Self-Abandonment

Jones describes self-abandonment as something that can hide inside behavior most people would consider responsible. A mother makes sure the children have what they need. An employee tries not to disappoint a boss. An entrepreneur gives the business more hours because the company is still fragile and needs attention.

The problem develops when those responsibilities become the only voices influencing a person’s decisions.

Jones experienced that pressure physically. Stress coincided with inflammation, weight changes, and hair breakage. She altered her diet and changed how she cared for her hair, but eventually realized that another part of the problem was the constant pressure to meet expectations everywhere at once.

Entrepreneurship can deepen the same conflict. Jones compares building a company to raising another child because a young business continually asks for attention. New ideas arrive unexpectedly, customers need responses, and unfinished work remains visible at the end of the day. For parents, time spent on the company can easily become evidence in an internal case against themselves.

Instead of simply asking whether the business needs another hour, they begin wondering whether that hour should have gone to their children.

Jones encourages women to notice when that guilt has become automatic. Time spent on oneself does not need to compete with being a committed parent or entrepreneur. In her view, a parent who takes an hour to walk, watch a movie alone, shop, exercise, or simply sit quietly may return to family life with more patience and presence than someone who continually denies those needs.

People Pleasing Can Reshape Identity

People pleasing often grows out of the same desire to remain useful and accepted. Jones sees it in women who depend heavily on approval from parents, bosses, partners, or professional peers before trusting their own decisions.

Her own version appeared through ambition. She wanted her parents to be proud of what she accomplished, and for years that approval remained part of how she evaluated her choices. Only later did she begin sharing accomplishments with them because she wanted to include them in her life, rather than because she needed permission to keep moving forward.

The distinction matters because approval seeking can quietly steer a person into choices they never consciously made. A woman may accept more work because she fears disappointing someone. She may attend every school event because missing one feels like evidence that she is a bad mother. Over time, those individual decisions can produce burnout while leaving her unsure which expectations were ever truly her own.

Jones often recommends journaling as a way to separate those voices.

She does not treat journaling as polished writing or a productivity exercise. The point is to record whatever is actually present before someone else’s interpretation enters the process. Anger, fear, resentment, exhaustion, or confusion can appear on the page without needing to be made respectable. Once the thought exists outside the mind, Jones believes it becomes easier to examine whether it is accurate and decide what deserves a response.

For people who find being alone with their thoughts uncomfortable, she also uses group journaling environments, including workshops she calls Tea and Pearls. The shared setting gives participants company without requiring them to surrender the private reflection that makes journaling useful.

Jones has watched relatively small acts of reflection lead to larger changes. One former colleague had spent years believing completing a degree was beyond her reach. Jones encouraged her to stop treating graduation as one enormous task and focus instead on taking the first class. The woman eventually finished the degree, moved into new professional opportunities, traveled for training, and developed a life that extended far beyond the boundaries she had once assumed were fixed.

Jones returns to that principle often. Reconnecting with identity rarely begins with reinventing an entire life. It begins with enough quiet to recognize what has been ignored, followed by one decision that belongs to the person making it.