The discomfort you feel when you even consider this question is useful data. It tells you something about the stakes. It may also be telling you something about how thoroughly the expectation has been internalized. Choosing yourself over your family sounds selfish when you say it out loud, and that sound is worth paying attention to, not because it means you are wrong, but because it tells you where the weight is.
Family obligations are real. Most people do not dispute that. What is less clear is where those obligations end, and whether choosing yourself ever falls outside the boundary of what is acceptable. The answer depends, in part, on what you mean by "yourself," what you mean by "family," and what the obligation actually requires. Those three things are rarely as obvious as they seem at first.
Three thinkers on the Consilium roster would each answer the original question differently, and none of them would let you off easily. They do not agree with each other. That disagreement is not a problem. It is the most honest thing they can offer you.
De Beauvoir: the role was never the whole of you
Simone de Beauvoir would begin with a challenge to the frame. "Choosing yourself over your family" implies that the self and the family are in opposition. She would ask how that opposition was constructed, and who benefits from the construction. Her existentialist philosophy insisted that people are not born into a fixed identity. They are born into a situation and they choose, continuously, what to make of it. The role of devoted child, parent, or sibling is a situation. It is not a verdict. At some point, she would say, choosing yourself is not betrayal. It is the act of taking your own existence seriously.
One's life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, indignation, and compassion.
What this means for your question is that de Beauvoir would resist the idea that choosing yourself is inherently a betrayal of others. That quote is not a license for pure self-interest. It is a reminder that genuine engagement with your own life and genuine care for others are not actually opposites. The question she would push you toward is not "am I allowed to choose myself?" but "which choice am I actually making, and am I willing to own it fully?"
Confucius: duties are real, and they have limits
Confucius would push back on de Beauvoir, but carefully. He believed deeply that human beings are made through their relationships, not apart from them. Filial piety, the respect and care owed to family, was one of the central virtues in his system. But Confucius was also a precise thinker, and he understood that duties are specific. They apply in specific directions and for specific reasons. He did not teach blind obedience. He taught that the superior person fulfills their obligations honestly, and honesty includes recognizing when an obligation has been discharged or when fulfilling it would require doing something wrong.
To see what is right and not to do it is want of courage.
This cuts in two directions. If choosing yourself is right in your specific situation, Confucius would say that failing to do so is not virtue. It is cowardice dressed as duty. But he would also insist on precision. What exactly are you being asked to give up? What is the relationship, and what does it actually require of you? Vague obligation and genuine duty are not the same thing. He would want you to know the difference before you claim one is the other.
hooks: love does not require your erasure
bell hooks spent her career distinguishing love from the performances that substitute for it. She defined love as a combination of care, commitment, trust, honesty, and the will to nurture growth, in yourself and in others. By that definition, a family relationship that requires one person to consistently disappear is not love. It is a power arrangement using love as its justification. She would not be interested in whether choosing yourself is acceptable in the abstract.
The function of art is to do more than tell it like it is: it's to imagine what is possible.
She would ask what specific thing you are being asked to give up, and whether a relationship that requires that sacrifice is actually practicing love. hooks would also point out that choosing yourself is not the same as abandoning others. It is possible to be present for the people you love without erasing yourself in the process. What looks like a choice between self and family may actually be a choice between two different models of what a family relationship can be, and one of those models is worth imagining.
Where they disagree
De Beauvoir would say: the opposition between self and family is a construction, and you are allowed to deconstruct it. The role you were handed is not the whole of what you are, and treating it as though it is represents a refusal of your own freedom.
Confucius would say: the obligations are real, but specific, and precision matters. What exactly are you being asked to give, and to whom? Answer that before you decide. Precision is not avoidance. It is the beginning of honest judgment.
hooks would say: the question of rights is less interesting than the question of love. What is actually happening in the relationship, and does it meet the standard that love requires? If it does not, the framing shifts entirely.
The tension is real. Confucius takes the duty seriously in a way the others do not. De Beauvoir and hooks both suggest the framing may be wrong from the start. But Confucius would also say that a duty performed dishonestly is not really a duty at all, which puts him closer to the other two than it might first appear.
The question you came here to avoid
The reason this question is hard is that it requires you to evaluate your own needs as real, which is something many people were taught not to do. The discomfort is not evidence that choosing yourself is wrong. It is evidence that you care about the relationship and that the stakes are genuine. That caring is worth acknowledging before you do anything else with it.
So here is the question underneath the question you came here with. Not whether choosing yourself is allowed, and not whether the obligation is real. Those are the easier questions. The harder one: what specifically are you being asked to give up, and what do you actually believe you owe?