I swear we need a twelve step program for overgiving.
Not to mention an overhaul of the culture that has trained us to do it. Barring such improbable changes, you can learn a simple technique to override the habit.
The following discussion provides the cultural context of overgiving in a hetero marriage which is my own point of reference. If this doesn’t apply to you, go ahead and skip to the end for the exercise.
Where’s this coming from, you might be wondering. For me, this issue never strays far from my mind. Honestly, it’s the most likely reason my own family of origin splintered apart. I imagine my mother wanted to be a person again, not just an invisible caretaker of four children while her husband came and went as he pleased. Having lived through this cautionary tale, I’ve been actively trying to unlearn my own conditioning ever since.
The best way to do this, imho, is to understand the context. A favorite coaching partner sent me a podcast yesterday that put it so bluntly I felt compelled to share.
In Episode 33 of Bewildered, Martha Beck and Rowan Mangan invite their dear friend, author Elizabeth Gilbert in for a chat. She gives a firsthand account of the hostility our society shows childless, single women who refuse to be free labor for a society that chooses not to take care of its citizens (see American childcare, healthcare, eldercare, education, etc.)
For one of her books, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage, Elizabeth learned the statistics.* She explains what sociologists refer to as the “marriage benefit imbalance” in which married women fare far worse than married men.
According to the studies, married women are more likely to suffer from depression and addiction than married men and even die ten years earlier than single women. Married men live an average of ten years longer than single men (a haunting data point if there ever was one). Married women are more likely to suffer a violent death than single women—usually, at the hands of their own husbands.
Conversely, “there is no better thing a man can do than hitch himself to a woman,” Gilbert says. Married men are healthier, accumulate more wealth, enjoy greater career advancement, and are far less likely to die a violent death than single men. Married men report themselves to be much happier than if they remain single. They suffer less from alcoholism, drug addiction, and depression.
For the married woman, however, every gain a married man makes is her loss. She cares for everyone, providing all the invisible labor in the family. Dentist and doctor’s appointments, parent/teacher conferences, the gatherer of supplies and planner of all. On top of the care, feeding and loving of children and old people, she is also expected to work the same hours as a man who has free domestic labor at home: his wife.
There are outliers, obviously, which I bet if you are married like me, you prefer to count yourselves among them.
Of course, I sent this podcast to my husband. We talked about it last night while we were both brushing our teeth.
“Is this your way of asking for a divorce?” he said with a smile.
To be clear, this is much less my own personal message and more the hard facts about marital health and satisfaction. If my husband and kids understand our conditioning around the invisible work we expect of women, we can all make healthier choices.**
As for my own marriage, this awareness affords us the opportunity to evolve. These days, grocery shopping, cooking and carpool are shared. With a bit less time on the family caretaking clock, I have more time for my own work. Not as much as I’d like, but it’s a process. We can do better.
The flip side is my husband’s conditioning that his value is based on the money his work brings in for our family, not on his physical and emotional presence in our lives. Also not true.
The reality is, we’d both be more fully actualized humans as equal partners in all of it. And if we both remain bogged down in our separate spheres, sharing the burdens equally will never be possible.
In both of our cases, the conditioning is real. It took me decades to even notice how all the free, invisible labor I provided my family and community actually made me feel. If you are constantly overgiving it could actually be making you sick.
The list of chronic diseases and mystery illnesses my married friends and I have suffered over the years is long. Chronic fatigue, migraines, breast diseases of every variety—who knew there were even this many.
Here is the good news. We can get in front of overgiving by checking in with ourselves FIRST. We can pay more attention to how it feels in our bodies to do certain kinds of work and to put ourselves in the company of certain people. That is a critically important clue to healthier decision-making.
This whole week, I have been inviting clients to use this readily available, always reliable tool. The body is constantly delivering signals which we have been trained to ignore with our intellect. We allow our verbal brains to make all our decisions when it is our nervous system that collects nearly three times the information.
Our bodies house our intuition. When we ignore the body’s signals, the communication lines between mind and body are cut. Without our intuition, we can make all kinds of decisions that aren’t right for us. We can even get ourselves into physical danger.
So how do you access your body’s wisdom? I’ve written about The Body Compass in previous newsletters. If you didn’t take the time to calibrate your compass then, here is your opportunity. This method will guide you on a purely intuitive level towards a life that works better for you. When we ignore our intuition, we stray from our true path.
CALIBRATE YOUR BODY COMPASS
Make yourself comfortable in a quiet space and breathe deeply.
Do a body scan, moving slowly, from body part to body part starting from the tip of your toe all the way up that side of your body and back down to the other, not judging anything, just noticing any sensation.
Now, think of a negative memory—not a trauma— just something you didn’t enjoy. Like an argument, an uncomfortable meal or something of that nature. Imagine the full sensory experience, the sights, sounds, smells, like you are stepping onto a movie set of this memory.
While you hold the memory in your mind, notice the body’s reaction and observe the sensations, scanning the body once again.
Where are the sensations located? How would you describe them? Remember to stick to physical sensations (“achy”) as opposed to concepts (“negative”). Come up with an unusual word to describe this feeling. (Mine is called The Clench.)
Give it a rating on a scale from -10 to +10.
Take a deep breath and let the memory out of your body. Shake it out, stretch, however you choose to release it.
Now here’s the fun part. Bring to mind a time when things were really working for you. As if you are stepping into a movie scene, picture the sights, sounds and colors of that happy memory. Do the body scan again and see what physical sensations are present, remembering to stay away from concepts like “excited.”
What is happening inside your body during this positive memory? Describe the feelings with a unique word or phrase, a “feeling of flying,” for example, specific to the way the body feels.
Name and rate this one too.
When you are done, observe that the negative memory was one of feeling burdened in a way totally specific to your own body. Similarly, the positive one had a feeling of expansiveness unique to your own physiology.
You now have a reference point and a name for when you feel negative or positive about a particular course of action. (The initial body scan will tell you when you are neutral as well.)
You can further calibrate your Body Compass by going through your To Do list and giving each item a rating on your -10 to +10 scale. So much information is available to you simply by asking yourself how a particular decision feels inside your body. It may be the tiniest twinge one way or the other, but you will can recognize it now.
Pro tip: if there is something that rates low on your scale that you must do, ask yourself how you can improve the experience or reward yourself afterwards. All small nudges towards a more joyful life accumulate over time. Before you know it, you are living life on your terms, going where you want to go, with the people you want to be with, doing what you want to do.
No matter what is expected of you by the culture, you have agency over your own life and a tool to figure out what is right for you and what is not.
Now its up to you to point yourself towards more joy, one decision at a time.
Love,
Elizabeth
If you would like guidance to calibrate your Body Compass, I offer one on one coaching using the Wayfinder Coaching model designed by Martha Beck. If you want to find out if this work is right for you, email me to schedule a Discovery Session at elizabeth@elizabethheise.com. And if you are family or a friend, I have a wonderful coaching community ready to partner with you.
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*based on studies of heterosexual marriages
**Did you know that Henry David Thoreau, the supposed isolated woodsman and author of On Walden Pond, actually had his mother and sisters bringing him food and fresh laundry every day? Like it was just expected, a natural part of life, not even worth mentioning. (!!!)