“I’m tired of everyone depending on me to get things done!” Shelly said, screwing her face up into a pout of rebellious anger. At 32-years of age, Shelly had opened a beauty salon, offering premium quality hair treatments, make up, manicure, pedicure and weight-loss services. After graduating top of her class in beauty school, she got her license and created a hot social media presence on Tik-Tok and Instagram. With all her achievements she was still lonely and longing for a connection that made her feel valued and desirable. Her successful career didn’t improve her family relationships, friendships or collegiate associations. She was still the person who organized, arranged and executed get togethers, and she remained the one who felt used and rejected, devalued and discarded.
Why did she keep making the same effort and investments with these significant others, when the battle ended with her feeling spent, sad, cast out and fearful of being alone?
Tired of Taking Care of Everything and Everyone: breeding anger and resentment
Shelly was looking forward to a long Labor Day weekend to get a break from work. Everything looked good, except that her sister expected Shelly to plan their weekend getaway, and never lifted a finger to help even when they got to their destination. It had always been that way, and Shelly was no longer going to just accept it. She was fuming that Bethany never took the hints she gave about wanting to share the job, but couldn’t bring herself to get mad and take the risk of making Bethany dislike or disapprove of her. She was tired of taking care of everything and everyone, but kept her mouth shut for fear of messing up the weekend.
Tired of Taking Care of Everything and Everyone: the failed strategy that had been used to compete for her mother’s attention as a child
Shelly witnessed her mother do everything for Bethany when they were growing up. Shelly interpreted her mother’s actions as loving Bethany better than her. Shelly internalized this as a sign that she wasn’t worth loving. Fearful of not being as important to her mother, Shelly had to prove her lovability to have any chance of being loved the way Bethany was – being spoiled. Little Shelly couldn’t live her young life feeling left out, lesser than, or just a burden to her mother. She was compelled to show her excellence in academic work, in being a go getter, fixing things for her family when things went wrong – in an effort to demonstrate her fealty and devotion to her family – hoping and expecting their esteem, respect, adoration, and spoiling as a well-earned reward. Taking care of everything and everyone wasn’t working!
Tired of Taking Care of Everything and Everyone: hard graft at being the best ends in disappointment and dejection
Shelly outshone her classmates in high school and college. Her parents acknowledged her academic qualifications, but as if it was just the norm – nothing extraordinary. That was what they expected her to do and the fact that she did it, meant she avoided disappointing them, but it failed to earn mother’s love or Bethany’s love in ways that made them want to be with her and make her feel special. Shelly was devastated. She shoveled that early disappointment and anger towards a career. Her career would be her substitute family.
Her inner champion spoke to her this way: “It’s not enough that I’ve graduated with honors in a biology program, so who needs mom anyway! I’ll just get into beauty school, and have my own business.”
Tired of Taking Care of Everything and Everyone: the emptiness of choosing an alternative to getting care is heartbreaking
Shelly’s business success didn’t fill her up. She bought a nice place for herself, adopted a cat, and spent money on posh restaurants, cars and travel with friends. She dated several men using dating apps but other than them wanting her for sex, she didn’t feel wanted as a person with any of these guys. They all seemed to have complicated lives and families/careers that they had to attend to, making her the bottom of the pile. The similarities between her experience with family and with men she dated couldn’t have been more obvious.
The longing to be wanted, loved and spoiled by her mother and Bethany persisted. That nagging hole inside just grew bigger – and growled louder, because her success made her mother and Bethany demand more of her. They expected her to spoil them with her riches, flipping the script on Shelly, which now made her raging mad, but she kept silent.
Tired of Taking Care of Everything and Everyone: chopping off the connections with loved ones who have failed, gives a false and fleeting sense of strength
The rage fueled Shelly’s need to feel strong, and the only way she could do it was to cut off her mother and sister. She avoided their texting demands, and interpreted their queries about her well-being as insincere. They just wanted to know she could still be used, relied upon to fill them up on their schedule. Shelly felt good about punishing them for a short while, but then she went down two different darker paths – both leading right back to the cycle of trying to be the good obedient reliable family member in order to stay on their radar.
Tired of Taking Care of Everything and Everyone: two paths to dealing with the defeat and despair
Path one –The wounded unwanted unseen child. Deep despairing sadness. Shelly sunk into abject misery believing that her absence didn’t make her family alarmed and come take care of her, apologizing for their insensitivity. She enveloped herself in sadness that they didn’t get the message that they had wounded her and needed to tend to the wound with tenderness and care.
Path two – The naughty child who was being punished. Full of guilt and shame. Shelly went down a rabbit hole believing that she was the bad guy and had wounded her family so much by not responding to their demands, that SHE was the perpetrator of hurt and pain. Guilt and shame overwhelmed her, as she turned the tables on herself from the good one who was ignored to the angry nasty one who deliberately hurt her family and so risked losing them.
Both paths brought Shelly back to taking on the role of the fixer and the doer, but each time the cycle spun around, she was angrier and defeated about the stalemate.
Tired of Taking Care of Everything and Everyone: breaking out of the cycle of defeat:
Shelly’s biggest obstacle in getting what she needs is her fear that speaking up will destroy her family – that her words will be lethal bombs, making her into a orphan in an instant – a much worse fate than feeling hurt, disappointed and angry frequently.
She doesn’t want to feel like the one wielding the axe as she knows what it feels like when they wield it on her.
This is a no-win situation if she has to choose between her feeling bad and her family feeling bad.
But if Shelly allows herself to take the risk that speaking of her hurt among family members, it ceases to be a competition between the two sides of her conflict: OR a competition between who gets to feel hurt – her family or her!
Tired of Taking Care of Everything and Everyone: getting your wish to be taken care of in a reliable relationship focused entirely on you
Working in individual psychotherapy, Shelly can practice taking risks by sharing her feelings, needs, and disappointments with her therapist – and learn firsthand that despite her expectations of being punished or dropped, the therapist doesn’t retaliate, punish, cut her off or fire her as a client. NOR do Shelly’s words decimate the therapist, rendering her unavailable which is her biggest fear. So while she is tired of taking care of everyone and everything, she will be taken care as part of a solid relationship.
Tired of Taking Care of Everything and Everyone: will a therapeutic relationship become another iteration of the past?
Shelly cuts off her family and ignores them when they make overtures and want things from her as if she owes it to them. She is likely to do the same thing with her therapist if she feels that the therapist wants something from her (being a “good patient!”). She may cut off the therapist and take the risk of rebelling to test out whether the therapist will survive and acknowledge the fury of ‘tired of taking care of everyone and everything’ posture.
What she will learn is that she can do her thing and it will be par for the course to be discussed rather than acted out as a scenario where one or other gets killed off, never to revive.
Building up a more accepting, tolerant and loving relationship with her therapist, doing the family of origin work in session, will produce a more nuanced approach for Shelly to interact with her family. She can show them and ask for a greater give and take and more love in the way they display their expectations. The entire landscape can change when Shelly practices how to interpret her anger and hurt and how to use it in ways that reveal her needs, rather than just feeling entitled, defeated, cutting off and being left empty.
© Jeanette Raymond, Ph.D.
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