Category Archives: Assertiveness

Superwoman Under Stress: How to Overcome Over-Responsibility & Guilt

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I’ve encountered, through my work, many professionally successful women who struggle with immensely stressful lives.  It seems that they are pulled in so many directions that they’re breaking under the strain of their responsibilities.  They feel trapped in a life of unhappiness where every day is just about making it through the day with what little’s left of their energy reserve.  Having a successful career seems to come at a price, and this is especially true if you’re a woman. 

Whilst a lot of men’s issues can be traced to an unwillingness to grow up and be responsible, many women suffer from feeling overly responsible for those in their lives.  For one thing, women are naturally nurturing.  We have an inbuilt sense of needing to nurture the emotional needs of others.  Men, on the other hand, tend to act on a need to provide materially for their family and friends.  This is one of the ways the genders are wired differently and it is this kind of difference that make men and women complement each other so beautifully in relationships.  But while these different tendencies are our innate gifts that help foster closer relationships with one another, they can cause a great deal of confusion in certain contexts.   

Feeling emotionally responsible can be a curse, it can generate guilty feelings.  As I’ve written in previous posts, guilt is a corrosive energy that eats you up from the inside and quickly erodes your sense of worth.

Typically, a woman who holds a highly-demanding job and also has a family to look after can feel overwhelmed by responsibilities that go beyond her duties.  It is not just about juggling a career and family – often, a woman running a business will feel responsible towards her employees who have become like her extended family members, and she feels a level of responsibility for their welfare that exceeds that of an employer’s.  Thus, even when outwardly she is capable of making hard business decisions that affect her employees, the stress that builds up from guilty feelings can accumulate overtime.  For instance, making the decision to terminate the employment of someone is never easy, but for someone who feels guilty about not fulfilling her role as multiple nurturer, her guilt can reach damaging levels.   

This stress will tend to spill over to her family life and make her more distant with her family as she struggles with these uncomfortable feelings which are made worse by her sense of failure as chief nurturer for her spouse and children.  Concurrently, she may also feel she has failed as a friend as she judges herself to be doing insufficiently to support her friends or to fulfil her various roles in her social and community circles. 

If this sounds a bit like your life, try these suggestions: 

#1  Time-Off, Get Away

Find a time away from your environment.  Remove yourself from all sources of guilt, i.e. what triggers you to feel guilty (family, work, etc).  Even if you can only find half a day, it will give you back so much in terms of clarity of thought and energy.  It will also allow you to connect to your true self again, get to know your own needs and give you a chance to nurture your needs for a change.  Bringing back some balance this way will allow you to go back to your environment with a fuller tank and better ability to nurture others.     

For this reason, it is imperative to make it a priority to put aside some time for yourself every day.  Asking someone who is caught in a life of over-responsibility and guilt to take time out for herself on a daily basis is often met with resistance, as she is convinced it is impossible to find any free time from her busy schedule.  But it’s essential to find that time or you risk becoming even more unhealthy and unhappy.  Challenge yourself if you think you can’t possibly sacrifice anything from your schedule to create a slot for yourself.  Think of the consequences of burning out if you didn’t do something to correct that imbalance now.  

#2  Give Up Being Control Freak

Those close to you might have joked about you being a control freak.  Even if you tend to laiugh it off, ask yourself honestly if you might be just a bit too attached to your roles.  If so, you are putting in too much effort trying to control outcomes.  Most women are resistant to give up this control because it makes them feel like they’re not being a responsible mother/wife/boss.  But if you’re too controlling as a mother/wife/boss, giving up some of this control will make you a more responsible mother/wife/boss.  This is because when you’re stressed out from the crazy need to control, you will express your frustrations to those around you and end up doing the opposite of nurturing the emotions of those you love. 

One of the symptoms of being too controlling is depression.  I believe that depression is caused by an excess of giving or efforting.  When we focus all our energy on controlling, our energetic system becomes blocked: there is no flow of creative energy or life-force – and we feel drained, discouraged, uninspired.  In this state, you are useless as a nurturer.  Magic happens when you let go of this illusional control.  It opens up avenues, options, ways out – and you find your power again. 

#3  Take Risks, Delegate

In your efforts to control outcomes, you leave no room for mistakes.  Striving for high standards may be a good thing but it can cross the line of being healthy when it becomes an obsession.  A lot of the stresses of a ‘high-powered’ career woman can be alleviated by a willingness to delegate.  Yet she imagines that the consequences of not doing the work herself will add to her burdens.  Nobody can do it better than I can, is a common protestation.  If this is you, let go of perfectionism.  What you deem to be perfect is only one way of looking at things, and giving up your idea of what is perfect will relieve you of so many of the unecessary burdens you’ve chosen to carry.  Accept that mistakes may be made by those to whom you delegate the work.  Allow room for mistakes to be made, knowing that it will correct itself in time. 

#4  Create Distance From Your Critical Voice

Take a moment to notice that critical voice in you.  Pay attention to what it’s saying to you:  You’re a bad mother.  You’re a heartless bitch.  You’re not good enough.  You stupid woman.  You’ve done it again, haven’t you!  

This is the voice of your inner critic.  But you have adopted it as your own voice and you are totally convinced about what it is saying to you.  Reclaim your power from your inner critic by acknowledging that you are not your inner critic and it is not you.  It is just a voice that has taken on the messages from certain authorative figures in your life.  Creating a distance from your inner critic and its beratings will allow you to assess yourself in every situation more rationally instead of automatically buying into what it is saying. 

As strange as it may sound, your inner critic’s role is to protect you from being hurt.  Quite likely, as a child, you had learnt that certain behaviours brought on painful consequences.  For instance, you learned that after school when you went outside to play instead of doing your homework, your mother would scold you for being lazy and punished you.  To prevent you from being punished again, your inner critic serves to remind you what not to do again, over and over.  Acknowledge its intention but know that it is operating in the wrong context. 

#5  Learn To Say No

When you’re feeling like you have a thousand things to do, the only way out is to say no.  Saying no does not mean having a confrontation; you can be firm but polite, and firm does not mean hard or harsh.  Be gentle yet unwavering.  When you state what you want without any guilt or apology, people will likely accept it without drama.

Notice how your inner critic is making it difficult for you to say no.  Again, acknowledge why it is saying what it’s saying, and go ahead and do it anyway.  Notice the screechy and exaggerated tone of its warnings, designed to scare you off.  Refuse to be scared off from your efforts to nurture yourself.  Feel the satisfaction and excitement as you make your own choice, independent of what your critical voice is saying. 

#6  Celebrate Your Compassionate Nature

Turn your attention for a moment to acknowledge the part of you that is compassionate.  Sure, if you worry yourself sick over too many people’s welfare, you’re being overly responsible.  But it doesn’t take away from the fact that it is based on a positive quality.  Now strip it down back to its basic quality which is love.  Recognising that there is love at the heart of your problem can motivate you to see yourself in a more positive light.  After years of listening to your inner critic, it’s easy to believe that you’re a highly flawed human being.  It comes from focusing too much on how you’re not delivering, which will actually take you further away from love.  On the other hand, focusing on the aspect of love behind your intention can bring you closer to fulfilling your role as nurturer, to yourself as well as to others. 

#7  Learn To Nurture Yourself

It is interesting how women are natural nurturers but often we don’t know how to nurture ourselves.  There’s an almost self-sacrificing nature in us.  It is imperative that you learn to nurture yourself or else you’ll be driven to manipulate others to get their love and approval.  Nobody but you can give you what you need.  When you learn to nurture your own needs, you keep your relationships clean without acting out any unfinished business you may have with your parents in the context of your relationships.  Look at your unmet needs and think about how you can provide for yourself emotionally. 

Bear in mind that self-nurturance is an attitude rather than a list of things to do.  How might you change the way you relate to yourself?  Could you see yourself through a different lens, or modify the way you think about yourself?  Turn that compassion towards yourself and forgive yourself for the little things you beat yourself about. 

#8  Strengthen Your Sense of Self

When you have a strong sense of yourself, you’re less likely to burn out from the demands of your roles.  It’s valuable to spend some time to get clear about who you are, beyond your roles as mother, wife, boss.  These roles have shaped your identity and you have adopted this identity as your immediate reference of who you are.  Yet who you are goes deeper than your ability to fulfil these roles.  What inspires you?  What drives you to become more than who you are being now? 

Pay attention to your emotions; they give you clues about your inner self.  Notice and acknowledge what is going on in your emotional world.  Explore your inner world – the dark and the light in you, the weak and the strong, the good and bad.  Observe the spectrum of emotions in you and what motivates you.  What makes you special?  Who are you, without your identity? 

#9  What Are Your Hiding?

Work, business, and your sense of responsibility for others, may be an escape – a way for you to mask unprocessed emotions.  Ask yourself what you might be afraid to face if you took away your identity as the boss or whatever your job title is, the reliable friend, the supportive wife, etc.  In other words, you may be creating dramas to distract you from your inner turmoils.  These dramas, including the generated anxiety, may act as your drug and you are addicted to it (see my next post on this subject).

Working on your personal issues will give you back some control and sanity when you realise that a bulk of your stresses are unconsciously created by you yourself.  You can then make an empowered choice to let go of this pattern and create a calmer, more fulfilling lifestyle.  

 

I wrote this article not to highlight the weaknesses of the female gender or to diminish the sense of nurturance in women.  Rather, it’s to show you a more empowered way to embrace the beauty of being a woman in the context of operating in the business world where our sense of responsibility can sometimes be overdriven and cause us problems.  When you turn that nurturing quality to yourself, your perception of how much work there is outside of you will change.  That old adage, “You need to be selfish in order to be selfless,” is never truer.  You need to take care of yourself first before you can take good care of others.       

Why People Are Driven To Destroy Themselves

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One of the themes that often come up when dealing with addictions is the tendency for self-destruction – when the drive to use drugs, alcohol or other compulsive activities renders a person unable to stop that behaviour but to spiral faster and faster into destroying himself.  Why do some people seem to have this need to destroy themselves?  What can they do to break out of this obsessive drive that seems to grip them so powerfully?

Whether a person is dealing with an obsession with drugs, alcohol, money, sex or food, the nature of this obsession is the same.  The greed for more (in quantity, frequency and intensity) escalates as the person breaks down more and more boundaries that have previously defined what kept him safe.  These boundaries may relate to the physical body (what is and isn’t acceptable for what we do to our body), social circle (who is and isn’t appropriate for us to hang out with), our moral codes (what behaviours we will and won’t accept from ourselves), and our dignity (what we will and won’t tolerate from others).  Deep in the throes of addiction, gripped by obsession, we cross that line again and again, pushing our boundaries further and further away from us.

These internal boundaries, which once prevented us from hurting ourselves and others, now can no longer keep our behaviours in check.  We’ve freed ourselves from our own protection and left the door wide open for careless indulgence in our drug, and we descend madder and madder into a tight, small hole of existence where the only thing that keeps us going is more drugs, even when it’s become obvious that we are destroying ourselves by continuing in that cycle.  Our mind directs this breaking-down of our boundaries, it has a life of its own and we can’t do anything to stop it from running our lives.

Or is it?  Are we really that powerless against our own mind?  If the mind is such a feared entity, then to conquer addiction we must find a more powerful adversary to fight the mind’s war of self-annihilation.  But before I get into that, let’s look at what makes the mind do what it does in promoting self-destruction.

A lack of self-worth, while cliché-sounding, is a good place to start.  If you had a total conviction of the true worth of yourself, you would not be driven to hurt yourself.  If, on the other hand, you have any doubt about your true worth, an inkling that you might not be worth much at all, that small seed of doubt can be massaged into a full-grown conviction of your unworthiness when the mind provides enough evidence for it.

When you are lacking self-worth, you’d tend to believe that you do not deserve to experience positive things and to sabotage the good that you do have.  This pattern might have been kept under wraps in normal circumstances but in the throes of addiction when the evidence stacks up with each episode of using, it becomes increasingly exaggerated until you are literally attempting to destroy yourself.

Guilt and shame about past or present behaviours can cloud a person’s view of herself.  They promote a self-punishing mindset.  Guilt makes you look for punishments, and when it is not apparently forthcoming from others, you tend to inflict that punishment on yourself.  This is especially prevalent in situations where you are keeping a secret – if only you are aware of what you have done, then that punishment can only come from yourself.  That guilt which only you are aware of can drive you to subconsciously inflict damage on yourself.  Like guilt, shame makes you want to punish yourself – if you feel that the person you are is unacceptable, then you would tend to seek punishment, or punish yourself.

Unresolved anger is another emotion that promotes a self-punishing mindset.  When you’re angry with someone, eventually you will take it out on yourself.  If you have a tendency to be passive or passive-aggressive (i.e. instead of asserting your feelings you keep them to yourself to avoid confrontation, but the feelings remain in you), your anger will likely build up until you explode in a fury against others.  A lot of times, however, you will seek ways to deal with that anger before you explode, and one of the easiest ways we know is to punish ourselves.  Sometimes, even when we have asserted ourselves, we are still left with the feeling that justice has not been restored.  In the absence of a way to right the wrong, we berate ourselves for not being able to ‘fix’ the situation.  Why can’t I handle this? you scream inside.  Your mind begins to find a list of reasons, usually about you being a failure, inadequate or stupid.  That anger is eventually turned against you.

These underlying beliefs and attitudes towards yourself give rise to a mentality of self-punishment, which if unexplored can drive you to destroy yourself.  Trapped in the cycle of self-destruction, you generate more emotional pain and mental anguish, until there seem to be no escape or respite.

Spirit is the true direction.  It is the true power.  The mind is nothing compared to spirit.  Spirit can befriend the mind to take away some of its power.  The mind can absorb the influence of the spirit’s magical pureness and transform itself to be outward expanding, taking us to a positive outlook.  Spirit can lift us from the mind’s manipulations and show us a better way of being, that there is a more worthwhile pursuit other than destroying ourselves.  Spirit can wipe out the mind’s ego trip.

There’s a hidden element in our path of self-annihilation – an attempt to find out what is left after we’ve destroyed ourselves.  It’s our unconscious search for spirit, guided by a belief that there must be something more than just this form of existence that we know of.  But we go about it the wrong way – we fight, we conquer, we destroy, when the way to spirit is to relax all resistance, give up all judgements and see what’s left there.  Spirit is found not by doing something but by undoing.  If you simply relax into being, you will see and feel spirit right here.  It has always been here.

Pick any scene you like.  Coming to in a drunken mess.  Stuffing yourself with food uncontrollably until your stomach aches.  Screaming at your loved ones when they try to show their love to you.  Locked in a compulsion to buy more and more to make you feel better about yourself.  In each of these scenarios, you’re bound to be left in a state of self-loathe and self-pity, with hopelessness draining the life out of you.

No matter how hopeless you feel, look for the tiny spark of light within you.  At first, you may only sense a vague, dim spot among the darkness.  Focus on it, until it grows bigger, and bigger, and it overwhelms your entire being.  This spark is your all-healing spirit.  Inside of us, there is a part of us that has remained pure and sacred no matter what kinds of trauma we’ve experienced in life.  I call it our Sacred Self.  In all our struggles and turmoils, we tend to see ourselves as damaged; to see that there is a part of us that is uncorrupted, unpolluted, untouched by it all can be very healing.  Once you acknowledge this part of you, it will expand, and very quickly, you’ll be able to see your situation more clearly, ideas will come to you as options to get yourself out of your situation, and you won’t feel so lost and forsaken anymore.

A Tribute To Personal Freedom

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In my work as well as my personal growth, I often examine how our fears entrap us in a false sense of imprisonment.  We fear expressing ourselves, making courageous decisions, saying no to those who’re abusive to us, standing up for ourselves … because we might leave ourselves exposed to judgements and rejection.  The cost of asserting ourselves and exercising our freedom is the shame and embarassment of being shown that what we do is not acceptable to others.

What is it about being accepted by others that make it such a powerful drive that stop us from living a happy life?  Reading this, it may sound ridiculous that we short-change ourselves so readily to gain the approval of others, yet it happens more often than we’re comfortable admitting to.  This feared unacceptability can come in various forms – e.g. being told we’re not good enough, being persecuted, leaving someone unhappy.

The rules we learned as children followed by a lifetime of putting into practice those rules (often in inappropriate contexts) have convinced us that straying from what’s kept us safe will bring about the same outcomes we had feared as children.  Our logical minds (A will lead to B; C will lead to D) are influenced by fears that put an irrational spin on how we make decisions.  In other words, we are stuck in a world governed by a set of rules that we ourselves have chosen (whether influenced by others or not) when the reality is that in many circumstances as adults we have the freedom to act as we please – our actions governed only by our conscience.

And what of our conscience?  Our conscience should only be dictated by what we know to be our personal values, and we guide our actions by ensuring that we uphold those values.  What this means is that the clearer we are of what our values are, the more confident we are of making the decisions that are right for us.  Having a weak sense of our values, on the other hand, would make us waver in our decisions and more likely to yield to the desire to seek the acceptance of others at the cost of what we truly want or believe in.

Sometimes, it takes a traumatic experience to enable us to learn our true values.  Those who have gone through great hardships will tell you that having experienced the lack of something they now value that thing much more.  When we value something to the extent that we will do all we can to keep it intact in our lives, it becomes our guiding force in what we choose to do.  Although at times our choice will come at a cost, it enables us to act with certainty and to accept the consequences of our choice.  This is personal freedom at its essence – the ability to make our own empowered choices to shape our own lives.

What we must nurture is self-acceptance – having a respect for who we are and a belief for what we stand for.  Self-acceptance takes the focus away from others and towards ourselves.  Instead of focusing on how we are perceived and judged by others, we concentrate our care on what brings us happiness.  Here we get to sieve out the truth from a generalised belief that it hurts us to hurt others.  This is our bottomline fear.  Only when our personal boundaries are firmly intact can we know the difference between guarding our values and compromising our wellbeing.  Misplaced guilt and the fear of being punished are a result of having loose boundaries – it takes us away from acting from our empowered center and into giving away our sense of freedom.  We become our own persecutor when we’ve discovered that those who persecute us are merely boogey-men conjured up by fear – so real and familiar is that sense of being restricted about what we can do that we continue to restrict ourselves long after any real threat is gone.

An over-inflated and misplaced conscience is the culprit behind many failed dreams.  Who are we really afraid of hurting?  Is it worth protecting this hurt?  Is this protection still relevant in your life right now?  Knowing who the real target of our fear is, we can set ourselves free, so that we no longer spill over this over-protection to those we have no business protecting.

Discarding this mental baggage will lead you to a greater capacity to assert your powerful self.  In recovering from addiction and other dysfunctional behaviours, lapses and relapses (when we go back to our old behaviours) usually happen because we’re afraid of asserting our powerful selves.  That feeling of being weak is more likely to be due to this fear than to a shortage of inner resources to make the right choice.

Freedom to act as we choose is the most fundamental right we have and cannot be taken away unless we give it.  Step into your power and make empowered choices that bring you closer in line with what you desire and believe in.  There is, at the end of the day, only one litmus test which may be crudely spelt out: are you man enough or woman enough to stand up for what is deeply important to you?

Note the word ‘deeply’ – so often we confuse what’s superficially important with what can fill us up from within.  People have a tendency to spend years immersed in something that only satisfies them on a superficial level but that comes at a cost of endless chaos and stresses.  True freedom is when we make the decision to disengage from these superficially important matters and seek out the things that give us a warm feeling of fulfilment – calm, expansive, joyful and soothing.  In contrast to maintaining the superficial, there isn’t a sense that there’s ongoing price to pay – and that is a sign that what we’ve chosen, in exercising our personal freedom, is right for us.