Self Love Is Never Selfish Ft. Eram Saeed

This one is a deep, deep conversation. I sit down with Eram Saeed, a transformation coach who has spent years helping women feel empowered in their own skin. But this is no surface level chat about positive thinking. Eram opens up about fleeing two abusive marriages, facing financial ruin, and almost ending her own life at a traffic light in Austin. What stayed with me is how she rebuilt everything by learning to put herself first, not out of selfishness, but because she finally saw her own worth as a reflection of the Artist who made her. If you have ever felt stuck, small, or like your voice has been taken away, this one is for you.

Her mother knew a girl with a degree would never settle

Eram was born in Quetta into a proud army family. Her father was a civil engineer in the army corps, a straight arrow officer who decided his children would never go to boarding school. They moved constantly, from Gilgit to Pindi to Okara, unpacking one day only to be packing again the next. It made her resilient, flexible, and unafraid of change. But it could not shield her from the one thing her family wanted for her: a young marriage.

As a teenager Eram was gifted in biology. Her college teacher begged her mother to let her pursue genetic engineering, a field nobody had even heard of in the nineties. Her mother, a very strong but traditional woman, refused. As Eram tells me, “She told my father, ‘If this girl gets a degree, she will never settle down.’” Those words became a prophecy that both trapped and freed her. She dropped science out of rebellion, chose subjects she could pass without studying, and was married at 21 to a man from America. She thought it might be her ticket to an MBA at UT Austin. That degree never came. What came instead was a marriage that, in her words, “dismantled my personality within the first two weeks.”

The red light moment nobody should have to face

Abuse is not always fists. Especially emotional abuse hides in plain sight, wrapped in “log kya kahenge, what will people say” and the belief that a good woman sustains the marriage at any cost. Eram shares one moment that shattered the denial. She was in her car with her daughter Natasha, just a toddler strapped in the back seat. She stopped at a red light on a notoriously dangerous intersection in Austin where a lot of fatal accidents happened. “I don’t know where this thought came from,” she says. “For the love of my daughter, I thought, what is the point of her growing up to be this disappointed in life? It’s better to end it right now.” Her foot began to release the brake. She moved perhaps an inch. Then another thought came: what if I die but she lives, and she grows up knowing this is what her mother did? She slammed the brake back. She sat there shaking, unable to move even after the light turned green.

That is what living in denial of abuse does. It drains so much mental energy that you do not recognise yourself anymore. Eram had been pretending for four years. Nobody in her family knew what she was going through because telling someone would make it real. The breaking point came when her three year old repeated the words she heard during a fight. “I had been telling myself I would make this marriage work for the sake of my child,” Eram says. “And the truth was, I was a coward. If she sees her mother put up with this kind of abuse, she is going to put up with abuse. Her programming will be complete.” That day, she filed for divorce as a birthday gift to herself on her 30th birthday.

Stepping into darkness without a single answer

Walking out of that marriage took a courage that Eram says did not come from her own strength. She had no job, no income, her parents were in Pakistan, and she had a child to raise. She says, “I could not see the next step. But I kept walking.” She put herself through esthetician school, then a friend nudged her to apply for a job at Chase. She did not even know how to spell mortgage. Within a year she became the highest producing loan officer for her branch. From zero income to a $20,000 commission check in one month. “I remember holding that check thinking, there must be a mistake,” she laughs. “Imposter syndrome stayed for a long time.”

She remarried, and that marriage also turned abusive. After the second divorce in 2009, the financial crisis hit and her income dried up again. That is when her real spiritual education began. She spent years investing close to a million dollars in her own self development, learning from some of the top consciousness teachers in the world, including Chris Atwood, who has mentored her for over a decade. She also studied the life of the Prophet peace be upon him and fell in love with Islam all over again, not through fear but through friendship. “I call Allah my best friend now, my buddy,” she says. “That connection came when I was on my knees, broken, with nothing left except tawakkul.”

Why putting yourself first is the opposite of selfish

For fifteen years, Eram’s entire life was responsibility. Raising two daughters as a single mother, building businesses, surviving. She became an overprotective helicopter mom. When her daughter Natasha began to rebel and need her freedom, Eram realized she was suffocating her. She got her daughter therapy and mentorship, then did something radical. She told both her daughters that this time, they did not make the top five of her priority list. “Not because I don’t love you anymore, or I wouldn’t die for you if needed,” she clarifies. “But right now my priorities are the things I want to do. I wanted to travel, have fun, be carefree.” Her daughters joked about it. And what happened? She became a better mother. A better friend to them. “When you become true to yourself, you become happier. And that happiness serves the world.”

This is the piece so many of us miss. We think that looking after ourselves is an anti-woman thing to do. But when you actually understand yourself, when you pursue what you feel you are meant to do, your self awareness deepens. You achieve your highest potential, and that does not just serve you. It adds value to the world.

What she learned about pakistani women

Three years ago, after a series of losses including her mother’s death, Eram experienced a nervous breakdown. She moved back to Pakistan to be with her brothers. It was here, while making videos during Covid, that she accidentally went viral. The backlash was intense, but so were the messages. Women wrote to her saying they were suicidal and her videos brought them back. She realized Pakistani women are unbelievably resilient, but they constantly shortchange themselves. “They don’t understand their worth,” she says. “They stay in a victim mentality because we are raised not to trust ourselves. We keep acting like little girls who need permission for everything.”

The number one request she gets? “Please tell me how to fix my husband.” Or the in laws. She is firm: you cannot change another human being who does not want to change. The work always begins within. In her courses she is a strict teacher, all about accountability and doing the homework correctly because real change does not happen without active participation. When women shift inside, their circumstances begin to shift automatically.

Fall in love with the masterpiece you already are

Eram left me with a reminder that I think every one of us needs. “If you could only see how amazing and magnificent you are, you would be shocked. You are not an ordinary creation. You are a painting of that Artist. Every painting is a masterpiece.”

Self love is not the loud, empty kind we see online. It is the quiet knowledge that you were made intentionally, with gifts that are meant to be expressed. It is the courage to sit in discomfort, to take the next step in the dark, trusting that the One who has been taking care of you since your first breath is still on your side. Eram says it plainly: “God has already been loving you from the moment you were born. So fall in love with yourself first. That is not selfish. That is khudi. It is your duty.”

I hope this conversation is the reminder you needed. Whatever step you are scared to take, you don’t have to see the whole staircase. Just take the one that is in front of you. And be kind to yourself while you do it.