When You are The Emotional Glue Holding the Shit Show Together
It will impact your health
Welcome to the world, baby girl. Your role, sweetheart, is to look cute, be sweet and oh, take care of the men in your life. Let’s get you started on a course in emotion repression too. Sugar and spice-and be sure to banish anything that is not nice.
And I’m sorry, but you will be predisposed to lupus, fibromyalgia, rheumatoid arthritis and other delightful autoimmune issues. It’s the nasty side effects of performing your societal expectations in a world where women are the emotional shock absorbers for all the pain in their world. But a gal’s gotta do what a gal’s gotta do.
By the say, get used to saying the F word a lot. Not THAT word, silly, the OTHER F word. As in, “I am fine!”
Even if you are suffering. Learn to smile and use that “I’m fine” magic phrase of self-denial. That’s right, honey. Sorry ‘bout the headache. Here’s some migraine medicine so you can get back to those dishes while balancing the baby on your hip. By the way, hope you’re feeling sexy too. Hubby’s making noises about how he’s not getting enough, wink, wink.
Can you imagine if this is how we greeted a new baby girl? Oh, wait. It is. It’s baked into our patriarchal culture. And this is serious shit.
This is no feminist, male-bashing rant here. If you were born with a uterus, this is reality.
I’m reading Dr. Gabor Mate’s latest book, “The Myth of Normal-Trauma, Illness & Healing in a Toxic Culture” and it is breathtaking. I just finished reading chapter 23-Society’s Shock Absorbers: Why Women Have It Worse.
If you’re in earshot of me while I’ve been reading this, you would hear a lot of “Oh sheeeee-IT’s”. The revelations aren’t new to me, but they are still shocking. I see myself on every page.
Self-sacrificing, anger suppression, and a focus on social acceptability. Women are the designated emotional caregivers and like the mailman of yesteryear, neither snow nor rain will keep them from their appointed rounds.
As a result, women suffer a disproportionately high rate of anxiety and depression. (This is something I have struggled with off and on for years.)
As I continue to do a post-mortem on my failed 32-year marriage, I see writ large how my role contributed to the breakdown in my relationship with my was-band.
Religion makes it even worse. A good wife is first and foremost, a help-meet for her husband. That’s King James Speak for lay down and die to your own needs. The cherry on top, we end up mothering our husbands-offering them emotional sustenance at our own expense. We absorb their angst and try to fix things for them.
This doesn’t work. On any level. Or for the man either. It wears down the women and creates resentment in the man. We are all screwed.
This translate into so many other relationships too-family and the workplace.
I believe the role I played for so many years contributed to the development of breast cancer. It’s more than belief, actually. Stress and trauma contribute to dis-ease. (If you haven’t looked up the Adverse Childhood Experiences and their impact on later health, I urge you to do so. It provides another valuable piece of the healing jigsaw puzzle.)
Not blaming anyone here, that does no good.
But we’ve got to recognize these things if we are going to heal ourselves individually as well as corporately. We must choose a better path.
I feel deep grief that I modeled this behavior for my daughter but am grateful that I see more bravery and moxie in her than I ever possessed in my 20s. She’s not afraid to tell someone to fuck off and she plays by her own rules. And a child shall lead them, eh?
Healing is multi-faceted. My dear sisters, if you are struggling with autoimmune issues or God forbid, a cancer diagnosis, like I had, I urge you to look beyond the physical symptoms.
Healing is possible.
Thanks so much for reading. You can find me around the internet at www.theresawinn.com, on Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram. If you’d like to support my writing in a small way, feel free to buy me a coffee.
