S4: E2 - This is for the "Strong One", who Carries Everyone Else's Shit!

LOVINNNNNGGGG being back in your ears, and your messages after the last episode aired were soooooooo beautiful - thank you 🫶 

This is episode 2 of our season: "The Witch Wound Files: Why am I Like This!?"

At some point, a lot of women stopped being “strong” and just became emotionally over-responsible for absolutely everything and everyone around them 😅

In this episode, we’re talking about the women who carry everybody else’s emotions, problems, stress, expectations and chaos whilst quietly running themselves into the ground in the process. The women who struggle to ask for help, feel guilty resting, over-function constantly, and somehow become the unpaid therapist, emotional support human and crisis management team for everybody in their lives.

We’re diving into hyper-independence, burnout, people pleasing, nervous system survival, over-giving, emotional exhaustion, witch wounds, and why so many spiritually sensitive women feel safer being needed than being truly supported.

Because being “the strong one” all the time is absolutely bloody exhausting!

So a MASSIVE f*ck you 🖕 to the patriarchy - because women with boundaries aren't "bitches", and women who say "yes" all the time aren't "lovely"!

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello, hello, hello, and welcome back to the Witchy Wee Podcast. I am Kylie Anna, your host, and I am so so excited that you have come back to join me. And first off, I just want to say that I am so honoured to have had your gorgeous messages since the first episode of this season went out. You know, I've I've heard things like, oh, this is so me, and I didn't realise other people felt this too. And you know, people feeling seen is so important. It's it's what we all want and need, right? It's it's why, it's part of why the Witchy Woo podcast is here, it's part of why the Witchy Roo podcast exists because it's a space for all of us to know that we are perfect the way that we are, perfectly imperfect in exactly who we are and how we are. And today I want to talk about something that I think sits underneath so much of the exhaustion that women often feel, especially those spiritually sensitive women, those empathic women, and that's the pressure of always having to be the strong one. And you can't see me right now, but as I say the strong one, I am doing the quotes, doing the finger quotes. And when I say that, I think most women instantly know whether this is them or not. As I said, the strong one, you will know whether that's you. You know if you're the one that everyone else leans on. You know, the one that people come to with their problems, the one who keeps everything together, the one who stays calm in all the chaos, who sorts things, fixes things, who holds things, carries things. And the the trap with this is as beautiful as it is to help other people and hold things together. It looks on the outside like strength, and it is strength, but there is a but to it, it is something that shouldn't be revered because it's okay to a certain extent, but when you are the strong one, again doing it with my hands, you often sacrifice yourself, it is to your detriment, and that's where we need to obviously learn that balance. They'll admire you for it, they'll rely on you because of it. But what those people often don't realise is just how exhausting it becomes when you spent years and years and years feeling like you're not allowed to fall apart yourself. You're not allowed to have a bad day because you're the strong one. You're not allowed to let any crack show because you're the strong one. And you start to think that there must be something wrong with you because you're the strong one. You you don't feel that way. And a lot of women who are seen as strong are actually just really deeply conditioned to believe that they have to hold everything together in order to feel safe, in order to feel loved, you know, in order to feel useful or accepted. And I think there's a massive difference between true strength and survival strength. And true strength feels grounded and it's safe and it's supported and it can be flexible. But survival strength is like hypervigilance in a nice outfit, if you like, and it feels like constantly scanning everyone else's emotions, constantly anticipating the problems and trying to prevent things from going wrong, and constantly overfunctioning because your nervous system doesn't trust that anyone else will catch you if you stop. And I think so many women become strong because somewhere along the line they learned that they had to be. They had to be the strong one. Maybe it was emotionally or financially or energetically, maybe it was in their childhood, or maybe it was in their relationships, or maybe it was because they became the emotional support system for everyone else around them. And after a while, being needed can become part of your identity, the strong one becomes part of your identity, you become that capable one, you know, the one that everyone can depend on. In terms of spirituality, the healer, the helper, the teacher, the friend, the mum, the one who keeps going no matter what. But what happens when the strong one gets tired? And what happens when the woman holding everyone else suddenly realizes she doesn't actually know how to let herself be held? I think that's where a lot of spiritually sensitive women may feel that they are right now, you know, completely exhausted but still struggling to soften enough to receive support properly. And it's not natural for them because they're not used to being the one that gets helped. And I actually, someone that really helped me along my journey to allowing people to help, and also what a really, really big one for me personally was was asking for help, because that to me felt like I was failing, felt like I wasn't good enough if I had to ask for help from someone else. But my beautiful friend Claire Anderson, and be sure to connect with her if you haven't yet, Claire Anderson of Be Your Own Kind of Beautiful. She is so beautifully giving, and she's such a generous soul, and she also is so wonderful with acknowledging when she could do with some help, and she isn't afraid to ask people around her because she knows that they will rally, and she knows that she rallies for other people, and I definitely look up to her for inspiration in those moments where I know that I need help, but you know, that old part of myself still sneaks back in and tells me that I have to do it by myself because it means that I'm a failure if I don't, and really seeing it as a beautiful gift and something to look up to and something that is brave to do, and reframing it in that way is so valuable, and you know, obviously, I've told you my story. I know this pattern really well myself. I think that when you're intuitive, when you're empathic, and perhaps naturally nurturing, people often unconsciously place you into that role very early on. You know, you will probably find that even tiny little interactions, like when you first meet someone, who is the one that comes away from the conversation knowing more about the other person? And if you are the one who always comes away from a conversation, knowing more about the other person than they know about you, chances are you are the strong one. And that has been placed onto you because you're holding that space safely for someone else to tell you about themselves, and perhaps there is an element there as well of not wanting to take up the space with you, with information about you, but you become the safe space for everyone else whilst you know carrying your own emotional weight in the background as well, and over time that can create this really kind of strange loneliness where you're surrounded by people but still feel like nobody fully sees how much you're actually carrying, and that's not their fault, it's not that they're that they don't care, it's actually on you, on me, on us, for not truly sharing how we feel. But the reason that we do that is because we perhaps have never felt safe, or if you if you're like me, perhaps there's that that sense of it's almost a failure if you have to ask for help from other people. And I think this is where the witch wound can show up in a really interesting way as well, because so many women with this deep spiritual you know gift have lifetimes where service and sacrifice and self-denial can all become tangled together. And those are the women who gave and gave effortlessly, the women who healed others and neglected themselves, the women who became martyrs for their own compassion, and the women who believed that their worth came from what they could provide to everyone else. And even in this lifetime, look how much women are praised for self-sacrifice. The woman who does like everything for everyone else is usually celebrated far more than the woman who has strong boundaries. For me, this is um a very patriarchal thing that comes up a lot. If a woman has strong boundaries, then maybe she's a bitch. You know? Whereas if a woman will allow her boundaries to be crossed time and time again and she will say yes, oh, isn't she wonderful? Isn't she lovely? And you can see how we are fed this narrative, not only from these past lifetimes where we've learned, perhaps in a more you know, savage way, but also through this lifetime, the beliefs that have been formed. And I think many women are walking around completely kind of disconnected from their own needs because they've spent so long prioritizing everyone else's survival and their comfort and their emotions above their own. You only need to look at most women in motherhood, or not even motherhood if you if you don't have children, your fur babies or you know, the people that are around you that you love, you will probably find yourself doing everything for them and not expecting anything in return, and that is that is a beautiful trait, but we need to learn that it shouldn't be at our detriment. We can put us at the top as well, as well as with the people that we love, because eventually our bodies do start to speak to us, and it's usually through exhaustion, and you may find yourself growing perhaps resentful. You may find that you get a little bit numb and you just go through the motions of you know everyday life, going through the routines, not thinking about what you're doing, just numbing yourself, and then we might reach a stage where we feel like we're burning out, we have nothing left to give, and so absolutely everything feels like so much effort because we've reached the point that we just don't have anything left in our cup to give, and then we just disconnect completely from ourselves because our soul can only carry that self-abandonment for so long before something starts really screaming for our attention internally, and I think one of the hardest things for strong, again, in those quotation marks that I'm doing with my hands, even though you can't see, one of the hardest things for strong women is receiving, not giving, just receiving, you know, as I've said, how how I've personally felt, but receiving help and care and support and rest and softness and receiving love without feeling like you have to earn it. Because when your nervous system has been built around that survival mode, receiving can feel really, really vulnerable because it means letting go of that control and trusting in someone else and allowing yourself to need something from someone else. And if you've spent, you know, all these years being the emotionally capable one, and when I speak like that to emotionally capable, that that's when I'm doing my fingers again for the quotations, that can feel really, really uncomfortable, and I think that's why so many, especially women, crash once they finally get the thing that they wanted. You know, that healthy relationship, the successful business, the visibility, the peace, whatever it is, because their body has become so used to surviving that safety just feels unfamiliar, you know, and so things kind of get turned upside down where chaos feels normal and struggle feels normal, and overgiving feels normal. One kind of personal experience of mine is in a past relationship that was very abusive. I came to the belief, and it wasn't conscious, it was completely unconscious, but I came to the belief that all relationships needed to have an energy within them where there was toxicity. In my mind, it wasn't toxicity that I was at the time. Obviously, now looking back, hindsight is a wonderful thing. But when I then met my husband and I was in a healthy and loving and full and perfect relationship, it felt at the start somehow unsafe because there wasn't this air of, well, when is something gonna happen? When are we gonna have this massive argument? When is he gonna do something that I'm gonna hate? And it was almost like I had rewired my brain to believe that a relationship needed to have that chaos in order to actually be a relationship, but it took a long time for me to relearn how to do relationships healthy, and my husband, bless his heart, was very patient with me and very kind with me and allowed me that space. And I actually found that that was the time where I softened into my feminine energy because I realized that before I was with him, I was very, very, very much within my masculine energy because I felt that I had to protect myself, I had to protect my daughter, and I wasn't, you know, my feminine wasn't safe to come out because I needed to have that more masculine energy in order to survive. But then when I had this healthy, masculine, you know, divine masculine energy coming from my husband or my partner then at the time, I suddenly realized that I didn't have to be within my masculine all the time, and bit by bit my feminine started to come out and she started to heal because she started to feel safe, and you know, it's not just relationships, that's obviously just one example from my lifetime, but we can often become so used to doing things that perhaps aren't the healthiest thing for us that we we rewire our nervous system to believe that that's the way that things have to be in order to be safe, and it just takes time and love and compassion for yourself in order to change that, in order to start, you know, feeling different. I think part of healing is beginning to separate your worth from your usefulness, you know, like you're not only valuable when you're helping someone else, you're not only lovable when you're giving something, you're not only worthy when you're holding everyone else together, you're allowed to exist as a you know, whole human being with needs and emotions and exhaustion and limits and boundaries, and I think so many women need to hear that far more often. That your worth is not the same as your usefulness, and I don't think the goal is to stop being, you know, caring or nurturing or supportive. That's not what I'm saying at all. Those things are beautiful. I think the goal is learning how to hold space for others without abandoning ourselves in the process, and as I say, that's something that I'm still working on as well. You know, that how to soften, how to ask for help, how to stop carrying things that were never mine to carry, and how to stop believing that I have to earn rest through exhaustion first. And I think that if this episode is speaking to you, if it's resonating with you and you can you can feel yourself within the words that I'm saying, one of the most powerful things that you can start doing is noticing where it is that you're overgiving. I'm a firm believer that self-awareness is the first step to any form of healing, and within itself, knowing things about yourself and being open to realizations about yourself is so super healing within itself. You know? So have a think about where are you over giving? Where are you over explaining? Where are you over functioning? Where are you taking responsibility for everyone else's emotions? And where do you struggle to let people show up for you? For whatever reason that may be. Because as I say, awareness is where the healing begins. Everything that we bring attention to, we bring intention to. Instead of that, perhaps ask yourself what would feel supportive for me to do. And notice the word supportive. I'm not using the word productive. I'm not using the word useful. I'm using the word supportive. Because when we talk about productive, we often go into doing mode. We often go into you know what are we doing for other people? When we talk about useful, again, we're tying that usefulness with our value. But what would feel supportive for you to do this week? How could you be better supported? Because you do deserve support just as much as everyone else that you are so lovingly giving it to as the strong one. So as always, I would love, love, love to hear your thoughts. If you feel called to reach out, please know you can email me, you can connect with me on Facebook, Kylie Anna. I would love to hear your thoughts, your experience, how you are perhaps going along your healing journey of you know being the strong one, but doing it from an aligned place that doesn't exhaust you, that doesn't make you burn out in the end, where you do have strong boundaries. And I would love, love, love to connect further. So thank you so much for sitting with me again during this episode. Or I say sitting, you could have been, I don't know, cycling, you could have been in the gym, you could have been doing absolutely anything. But thank you for being here with me today. And I cannot wait to connect with you again in the next episode.