One thing I know about women is, we know how to endure.
We endure unfulfilling jobs and taxing relationships. We endure being uncomfortable, overworked, and endlessly needed. We endure periods, pregnancies, caregiving, and grief. We become skilled at carrying a disproportionately heavy load, and we may even tell ourselves, “This is hard, but it’s just the way life has to be.”
Most of us simply want peace and harmony. We try our best to be good parents, partners, employees, and friends. When we appease, please, self-sacrifice, and “do it all,” we might call it resilience. But our bodies call it exhaustion.
These patterns usually begin early. As little girls, we learned to read the emotional weather in a room and adapt by shapeshifting. In trauma work, we call this fawning: staying safe and connected by tending to everyone else’s needs until we lose track of our own. This kept us safe with volatile caregivers and earned love from parents who praised us for being helpful, mature-for-our-age, and overachieving.
And society keeps rewarding it. The “good woman” is easy, kind, accommodating. She carries it all without seeming to need much herself. She doesn’t protest, rage, or make a scene.
Here’s what I’ve come to see in my work: calm can become another way of being good.
We’re often told the goal of regulation is to settle and soften. Those tools matter. But when we use them to regulate ourselves into lives, relationships, and jobs that don’t fit, we’re just enduring more skillfully. We clamp down on our anger, our agency, our sense of “no” and “enough!” We teach ourselves to tolerate what we’d be better off changing or leaving.
I once worked with a woman who felt so guilty about having needs that she barely recognized them. When she turned toward the simple fact that she had needs because she was human, her stomach knotted and heat rose into her face. She named it anger, then tried to breathe it away. Instead, I invited her to let the heat rise, to scowl and say “no!” out loud. A few tears of relief came. Afterward, her spine felt solid. For the first time in a long time, she was living in her gut.
So how do we unlearn this? Here are two simple places to begin.
The pause before yes. When someone asks something of you, notice your body first. Do you lean forward? Hold your breath? Feel your feet on the floor, let three breaths pass, and ask yourself what you actually want.
The push. Place your palms flat against a wall and press slowly, as if you could move it. Feel your legs root down and strength rise through your spine, shoulders, and arms. Say “no” or “enough” out loud. Notice what shifts.
Empowerment cannot simply mean becoming strong enough to endure everything asked of us. Sometimes strength is deciding that something should no longer be endured.
