Self-Martyrdom & Emotional Caregiving in the Female Psyche

Trusting the beauty and union of the The Sacred Masculine and The Sacred Feminine, beyond Patriarchal Survival Strategies.

Photo by Nitish Meena

Self-Martyrdom and Emotional Caregiving in the Female Psyche

When I had not faced or digested the heartbreak of my childhood, my mother and father wounds, I went into my romantic partnerships with the desire for my partner to be the love I never had when I was little. I tried to get this love through emotional caregiving and self-martyrdom. 

It is impossible for anyone to be the love I never had when I was little. My childhood is over. This was an unrealistic expectation and perpetuated the survival strategies of self-martyrdom and emotional caregiving. These ways of relating harmed my romantic partners and myself. 

Self- martyrdom through denying my own wants, needs and desires in a relationship, including being with a partner who was emotionally and physically available and differentiated with his own strong sense of self. 

Emotional caregiving through being an emotionally consistent support to my partners emotional struggles, at the expense of my own health, well-being and sovereignty. 

This was expressed through an incessant need to heal, lead, change, and evolve my partner to have more emotional and spiritual intelligence. Not only is this manipulation, but it is also demeaning toward the male half of humanity— as if they do not have their own oceans of spiritual and emotional depth to share with me. As if there are not men out in the world who have done their work around immature masculinity and are embodying the Sacred Masculine. 

If I were in my true self, I would not have dated men that I did not feel were expressing their deep emotional and spiritual intelligence and would have only been with men that treated me well. In my dissociative state, and survival strategy of being the healer, in hopes to finally be loved, I often dated men that treated me quite poorly. It was a co-created survival dance. 

In women’s movements that deny the realities of the Sacred Masculine and his immense power and love, this is a common theme. When women want to replace Patriarchy with Matriarchy, there is an underlying suspicion that the entire male-race is Patriarchal and needs to be dominated and healed by us women (this is not true, many men have beautiful Sacred Masculine hearts).

Because of the deep wounds of Patriarchy, women take on the role of trying to lead, change, heal and fix the Patriarchy. This sets women up to be in power-over man, which is another form of androcracy (domination and submission).

Love exists in gylanic social systems, where the vast intelligences of the female and male psyche and soul are acknowledged, supported and respected.

This emotional caregiving dynamic is an often-hidden relational stratum that happens between men and women and is often glorified by the culture at large. The woman leads the man to Church, to Therapy, to Spirituality, to the soft, more feminine arts and ways of being. In its less hidden covert archetypal pattern, we see the overt archetypal pattern of a woman who is in romantic relations to the addict, trying to save him from his addiction. 

Some of this comes from the fear of the predator and prey dynamic between women and men in rape-culture. Because many men have not taken responsibility for the ways they objectify the female-half of humanity, women become afraid of man, and try to manipulate, control and change him to keep herself safe. 

And yet, even beneath this dynamic, are our Mother and Father wounds, the ways we were harmed under the dominator family ways of relating of secrecy, silence, lies, punishment, shame and humiliation. And how our adult selves act out our undigested childhood wounds on one another.

For many women, a common survival strategy that develops in their family system is to become the emotional caregiver and martyr often through her parents placing her in roles of parentification and triangulation. She learns that she exists to bear the emotional weight of her family, to tend to their needs over her own, and this relational dynamic extends out to every other relationship in her life. 

As Bethany Webster says, under Patriarchy, women are ascribed the roles of emotional caregiving to a degree that harms and disempowers us as women. It is often seen as loving, caring and nurturing for women to play the role of self-martyr and emotional caregiver—  to lead their partner, friends or family out of their misery, to carry the emotional weight of others, at the expense of their own flourishing. 

Persephone 

During my yearlong soulcraft initiation course with the Animas Valley Institute, one morning I awoke with the striking image of a beautiful woman soaring toward the heavens, her hands and legs pulling many from the underworld up toward the sky. Shortly after, I heard a mythic storyteller reference this image as Persephone, Queen of the Underworld, daughter of Zeus and Demeter. She is known as the Queen of the land, of Spring and death, fertility and decay. In modern times, the myth of Persephone can often be interpreted as a path of transformation and healing.  

Although there are many positive interpretations of Persephone’s journey, I find this myth telling of the inherited misogyny present within many of the Greek Myths. Persephone is abducted and taken to the underworld by Hades, rather than choosing to go herself. Her Father Zeus has to intervene for her to arise from the underworld, and upon learning that she has eaten pomegranate seeds, punishes her to the underworld for half of the year, while allowing her to sing in Spring the other half. This sounds like slavery to Patriarchy to me.

Persephone’s journey and fate is dictated by the hands of dominating men. One of the modern interpretations that she is a guide of transformation and healing, leading others out of Hades is symbolic of the pervasive and detrimental yet culturally praised dynamic of emotional caregiving and self-martyrdom in women.

Often, rather than women standing in their sovereignty, they are stuck in subservience to emotional caregiving and self-martyrdom— which are glorified traits for women under Patriarchy, and yet are actually detrimental to the flourishing of the female psyche and soul. 

Self-Martyrdom Masked as Healing Ancestral Trauma

There was a time in my own healing journey when I felt and thought that in order to heal my ancestral, intergenerational trauma, and my lineage, I needed to pull my ancestors and family system out of hell. I became the leader, the guide, the spiritual teacher in my family.

Much of my ancestral journeying, earth-based practice, and connection to ancestors came from a place in me of rescuing, saving, and carrying the emotional weight, baggage, trauma and unspoken pain of my living family and ancestors. My egoic self felt proud. My true self was burned out, exhausted, resentful and angry. In truth, I had zero interest in carrying the emotional baggage of my family, this prevented me from living my own life, and pursuing my own dreams. 

In an MDMA session with my therapist over zoom years ago, I remember him saying something like, “You don’t have to go back and heal and feel all the wounds of your ancestry. Just be you, Tara, and the lineage will be cleared.” In the beginning of Credo by Andrew Feldmar he writes,

 “I had a discussion, once, with Leon Redler and Ronnie Laing, about the possible origins of our suffering. The source of our pain might go back seven generations; one generation automatically, subconsciously, passes it on to the next. We are bound up in multigenerational curses. This poem, “The Seventh One,’ seems to encourage me to leave all this behind, to wake up and be myself, despite all reasons to the contrary.” 

Here is a link to the poem if you want to read it: Babel Web Anthology :: József Attila: The Seventh One (A hetedik in English) (babelmatrix.org)

So, while it is true that intergenerational trauma is living within us and is passed on, what if phenomenologically and existentially, we can let it go simply by being ourselves? Living our own lives. Feeling the grief of what happened to us in our family systems. Pursuing what we love, leaving what we don’t. A core principle of Feldmar and Radical Therapy is to, “Endure Nothing and Nobody.” 

Patriarchy has taught women to endure the suffering and pain of others, to carry the emotional weight others will not take responsibility for. It left women in roles of self-martyrdom, and emotional caregiver— slaves to Patriarchy. 

If you are a woman, and any of this resonates, here are some steps for you in moving forward.

Steps to Recovery from Emotional Caregiving and Self-Martyrdom:

1. Recognize the Pattern itself. Where do you notice yourself giving more emotional energy than you want to? Where are you putting up with poor treatment from others? Where is your perceived compassion for others, actually a detriment to yourself?

2. Practice setting boundaries and limits with others who are coming to you for emotional support. Be clear with yourself and with others about what you are actually up for hearing, experiencing and listening to around others emotional processes. 

3. Recognize that you are not a bad person if you do not want to carry the emotional burdens of others. Your creativity, sensuality, self-expression, passions, deepest desires are actually the most potent gift you can offer the world. 

4. If you are not in therapy, or seeking support from another professional, you may want to reach out to a person who can walk alongside you as you reclaim your agency and power as a woman.