Meet Shenetta Iese

Shenetta Iese is an emotional healing & empowerment coach specializing in relationship discernment and self-advocacy for women navigating high-responsibility roles. Her work was born from lived experience recognizing how easily women are conditioned to sacrifice themselves in relationships, motherhood, achievement, and survival. Stop Abandoning Yourself™ began as a personal interruption and became a structured coaching framework for women ready to reclaim themselves without apology.

My Story

I didn't build this work from theory. I built it from awareness. I spent years believing that loving harder, communicating better, and being more patient would eventually create security. What changed was me. I realized I wasn't fighting for love. I was abandoning myself to keep it. But that awareness didn't stop with romantic relationships. I began to see the same pattern in friendships — tolerating betrayal, silence, or imbalance because I believed maintaining the friendship mattered more than honoring myself within it. I also saw how easily self-abandonment hides inside responsibility. When I became a mother, I felt the powerful pull to give everything. But I realized: when a woman abandons herself in motherhood, the regret of that disappearance becomes hers alone to carry. So while I gave birth to my daughter, I also gave myself permission to continue becoming. I completed my bachelor's degree while nursing her — not because achievement defines my worth, but because I wanted my daughter to see that I was not only her mother, I was also a woman building a life. Work taught me another version of the same lesson. For a long time, I allowed salary, titles, and external validation to measure my value. Over time I shifted: instead of allowing work to create me, I began using work as a place to expand myself. The same awareness extended into another area many women are taught to silence: pleasure. I had to learn that pleasure belongs to me too — that my desires, boundaries, and voice deserve space. These realizations were reinforced through years of working with families impacted by substance use, the criminal justice system, trauma, and instability. Again and again, I saw the same quiet pattern: people abandoning themselves in order to keep love, approval, or belonging. I recognized that pattern because I had lived it. That awareness became the Stop Abandoning Yourself™ framework.

Philosophy Summary

My work centers on helping women stop abandoning themselves and step into H.E.R. — Heroically Everything Real: emotionally aware, boundaried without guilt, and aligned instead of overextended. H.E.R. is not perfection. She is integration.

Professional Grounding

Shenetta Iese is a Licensed Master Social Worker (LMSW), CASAC, and ICP Certified Sex Therapist. Her professional training informs her understanding of relational dynamics and behavior patterns, while her coaching work remains forward-focused, structured, and action-based. Coaching sessions emphasize clarity, accountability, and behavioral change.