In alcoholic homes, kids can end up putting the alcoholic first, with lots of cleaning up, mitigating, looking after, nagging, controlling, etc. The kid comes last in all sorts of practical, neglectful ways.
In adulthood, recovery obviously is going to involve an adjustment.
But the problem is not really that I've always put others first, meaning that I now need to put myself first.
In an ego state, I never really put others first: whether I'm preoccupied and driven to fix, change, and control others, to caretake, to exonerate, to work a thousand hours a day, to sacrifice myself for my employer or colleagues, I'm really putting my (ego) self first. I'm not putting my Self first, I'm putting my self first. I'm putting my shame, guilt, and fear, my unholy trinity, first. That is what is driving the bus.
Reversing this by putting my lower self first as a corrective measure simply replicates the problem but with the superficial appearance of recovery. Unless I admit that the problem—including in cases of mothering, martyrdom, management, and manipulation (the four Ms)—is not self-sacrifice and self-denial and self-abandonment but self, self, self, I cannot progress. In fact, the outcome is worse than not progressing: because I think I have arrived at wellness, I will stop looking for the solution. I have now trapped myself in self. At least when I was engaged in the four Ms I was aware at some level I was acting out. To start taking myself on dates, having bubble baths, saying 'no' a lot, and setting boundaries is to spiritually bypass the problem and practise a pseudo-spiritual form of self.
What's the answer?
Recognise that the self-sacrifice, self-denial, and self-abandonment is not a loss, occlusion, or obliteration of self but an amplification of self, in fact a life built entirely on self, but with the superficial glow of the selfless. I have to stare at this until I really understand. Then, and only then, will I be willing to turn away, and then, what I turn away to is not chocolate-box self-care but Self-care: attention to my relationship to the Higher Power and real dissolution of self through constructive service of God in the world.