Most women are the caretakers of the world. Not sure about that? Let’s take a look at the top twenty professions for women in the United States. For starters, they include nurses, teachers, secretaries, waitresses, and social workers—almost all of which are helping or service professions, in marked contrast with the top twenty male professions. That isn’t even taking into account the mothers and the caregivers (of the elderly and sick) of the world.
Women nurture. We care with our hearts. We feel and help. We do for others, often automatically. Society not only approves of this but pressures and pushes us in this direction. If you don’t believe me, I challenge you to go into a Toys-R-Us store and look at the aisles and aisles of pink caretaking equipment that little girls have to choose from. We women are taught to be nurturers and that’s powerful and positive in many ways.
I want to tell you about the other side of caring, the harmful side. It’s called detrimental caretaking, and we women fall into the trap of it too often and too easily.
Detrimental Caretaking
When it comes to people, some caretaking is a necessary and natural part of life (with children and the elderly, for example). It’s what comes with being a caring, compassionate, responsible person. Caretaking comes from a great place of loving and giving. It’s nothing to be ashamed of.
We become detrimental caretakers, however, when we: Take care as a result of unhealthy belief systems; make decisions based on fear, pressure, and an inability to speak up for ourselves or because we can’t set boundaries; cover and do for people who can and should make decisions and take actions for themselves; and take care of all these things first and at the expense—to the detriment—of ourselves.
We give of ourselves until it hurts. Harming yourself is never a good idea, and it’s rarely useful for anyone else, either.
Detrimental caretaking occurs in different degrees and can happen in one or all areas of life—home, work, love, and so on. Detrimental caretaking means you give in (make sacrifices) for the people and circumstances around you. It can feel like something or someone other than you is running your life. It’s important to identify detrimental caretaking tendencies in order to understand the power they may have over you.
Detrimental caretaking hurts everyone. It prevents people from feeling the consequences of their behavior; inhibits people, organizations, groups, and systems from confronting and correcting deep-seated problems; and, it causes you to feel resentful, steamrolled, and taken advantage of, which can make you feel angry and/or exhausted over time.
Healthy Helping
Healthy helping is the opposite of detrimental caretaking, and it’s where you want to be. Here, decisions are good for you and for others. Learning to stop giving it away isn’t about “me first”—it’s about “me too.”
Healthy helping is about sacrifice, extended effort, and proactive compassion—but cast within sensible limits.
Healthy helping doesn’t require us to sacrifice our health, personal boundaries, or emotional well-being: in fact, healthy helping contributes positively to all of those areas.
Trying to discern the differences between healthy helping and detrimental caretaking all boils down to one essential question: Have I made a conscious decision? Or, as inspirational coach Heath Howe puts it, “Am I living by conscious choice?” I’ll add, are you at peace about your choice.
If you fully see the decisions you make, understand the consequences, can tolerate the risks, and consciously choose to extend yourself for another, that’s one thing. But if you’re doing damage to yourself unknowingly—because that’s all you know and you don’t believe you have other choices—that’s another matter entirely, and it shows you’ve adopted a destructive pattern.
Ask yourself: Did I really, really want to do what I just did? How do I feel now that I’ve done it? Am I choking back nagging anxiety, discomfort, a touch of regret, or even a sense of foreboding? If you’ve just rescued, fixed, or enabled, your answer to that last question is almost certainly yes—because what comes after detrimental caretaking isn’t that satisfied, comfortable, pleasant feeling you get when you’ve helped someone who needs it; it’s an undeniable backlash, often signaled by a knot in your stomach and a dull ache in your heart.
Detrimental caretaking creates personal chaos. It leads to burnout, exhaustion, anxiety, and unhappiness. It drains you emotionally and spiritually. Healthy helping cuts that chaos and creates an environment designed in balance.
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Cherilynn Veland
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