...anything for you...
She pauses mid sentence and looks down at her hands. Through the zoom window, I can see her whole system trip over the question I just asked, it’s stopped her in her tracks.
She’s been telling me how busy and exhausted she is. How the business is going great, but she never gets to stop. How she loves her family but feels quietly resentful.
In a quiet voice she finally says, “I don’t know what my needs are…”
And I can feel it there in the air between us. The grief. The longing. The ache.
This is not a story about a particular woman.
This is a story about dozens of women I’ve sat across from over the last many years.
Smart, capable women. Leaders with awards and achievements to their names.
Women who have spent decades of their lives oriented to everyone, and everything, around them… to the point that they don’t know what they need anymore (if they ever knew in the first place).
Duty. Generosity. Being useful. Being ANYTHING, but not selfish or needy…
She prides herself on what she can do for you. She’s promised herself it’ll change once the kids get a bit older, but somehow they’re already teenagers and she’s still in the same pattern.
Sailing forever round and round what I call The Bay of Duty.
And the grief she feels when she acknowledges this can often be so hard to bare that she might be tempted to convince herself she’s ‘happy enough’ this way.
This pattern usually started young in her life and has stayed with her until adulthood as a means of getting love, staying safe and surviving in the world.
It works – like all survival patterns – until it doesn’t.
If you’re familiar with the Bay of Duty, it’s time to slow down and learn to feel yourself, and what you need and desire. Then give those things to yourself, and learn to receive them from the people around you.
The reward is a life rich with connection, joy and not always being the one to take care of it all! You’ll also find a whole lot of people who want to love you well, if you give them the chance.
The Bay of Duty is one of six survival mode patterns I see driven women trapped in.
Discover your dominant survival pattern – and what to do about it – with my new free diagnostic, The Survival Mode Decoder for High-Functioning Women.
The decoder is a custom GPT trained in my material – you need to be signed into your chatGPT account to use it.
