160: Caretaking Men's Emotions is Secretly Destroying You (Do This Instead)

Caretaking is actually a form of manipulation. It's not kindness. It's a strategy. It's also a kind of micro consent to a dynamic that is not one you're actually fully, willingly participating in. Can you find somebody who you feel resentful toward, disappointed in, but somehow you also imagine has something that you need? This is the signature of a trauma bond. That habit of caretaking men's emotions is one of the greatest rotting poisons at the core of our responsibility as women to evolve the dynamics between men and women so that they are organized into our God-given roles. Maybe you're doing a lot right. You're working out, you're eating decently, and still your body feels puffy, your hair feels thinner, and your skin feels crepey. You were taught to call that aging, but I am choosing not to. I don't believe that beauty is vanity. I believe it's a hobby. It's a skill. It's something that you can practice and learn at any age. So I'm hosting a free beauty backroom event for midlife women who are ready to glow up and feel leaner, stronger, and more radiant than they have perhaps in their entire life. I will be sharing exactly what I've done over the past couple of months to do just that. So if 2026 is your rebrand year. Come play with me, kellybroganmd.com forward slash BB. Hi, and welcome back to Reclamation Radio. I'm Dr. Kelly Brogan. And today I have a public service announcement, which is that women, we could really benefit from a total cessation of caretaking of men. What would happen in the world if we stopped imagining that it was our role as women, as the softer, kinder, gentler sex, to emotionally caretake and soften the blow of how it is that we are really feeling? to wrap our no in a kind of candy coating when we imagine that a man might feel a difficult feeling. Now, obviously, the roots of this are something I want to talk about. The roots of this, when you examine them, it makes total sense that we would have developed this codependent strategy of giving kindness, softness, even sometimes avoidance or space when what we really want to share is some version of a no. It makes sense because manipulation is our strategy. Whereas physical aggression is available to most men relative to most women at any given minute of the day. I am extremely interested for personal and professional reasons in the anatomy of the poor bargain, right? And what I mean by that is when we say yes to something, we know is unable to deliver what it is that we want from it. We do this in business. We do this in relational dynamics. We do this all the time. We ignore the little no that says, this is not it. Now, sometimes that no is very visceral. Sometimes it can even be like an ick or a cringe or a sensation of disgust. And what happens is we almost invoke this inner pimp that says, I'm going to prostitute you out. That says, go, it doesn't matter. Just deal with it. Lay down and close your eyes. That manager is a strategy. That has been learned. But what often results is these push-pull dynamics. So if you look around your life scape, I bet that you can find at least one example of an organization, even an institution, but most likely a person that you have a push-pull dynamic with. amazingly even in conventional psychiatry you know when i was trained on the wards there was there were a lot of like kind of tropes and slang phrases and things that we were handed down from attendings and one of them is oh this is another fuck you don't leave me patient or a help-rejecting complainer. And so even in the very three-dimensional materialistic realm of conventional psychiatry, there's an appreciation of what happens behaviorally and dynamically when someone has a divided will, when someone has a split relationship to whatever it is that's in front of them. So if you look around your life, can you find a push-pull dynamic? Can you find a fuck you, don't leave me? Can you find somebody who you feel resentful toward, disappointed in, but somehow you also imagine has something that you need? This is the signature of a trauma bond. And again, you can have that relationship to government. It can materialize in so many different ways. But if you can find one dynamic, and if you can specifically find it with a man in your life, there is a lot of locked up eros there. There is a lot of room for tapping in to the reservoir. of what it is that you are working out through this dynamic. Usually what that is, is a projection, right? It's a projection of some dimension of yourself that you have rejected that now you get to judge in this other person. However, what I find even more high yield is to recognize that it feels sickening. Literally over time, it feels sickening to be pimping ourselves out this way. So if we are in dynamic with somebody who we are also in rejection of, yet we're engaged there, yet we are participating, that pimp is working. I wish I had a better analogy, but that's it. That pimp is on duty. And you are the one whoring yourself out, even though there is a fundamental no that is operative. And sometimes, maybe always, you feel that no from the very, very first interaction, and yet you proceed. so I am very interested in the anatomy of this like how do we get ourselves into these situations and often there is a part that is charged with curating the narration defending why we are still there right why what we know is possible is just around the corner or you know the spiritual bypass that like, oh, I'm growing here. You know it teaching me so much This push dynamic is also at the root of interactions with men that we feel emotionally responsible for because it is fundamentally repulsive on a primal level to this is in my humble opinion of course I free that disclaimer to imagine that it is our responsibility to be the cool, calm, collected manager of operations so that he doesn't have to feel the bad thing. So when you're in that, like disgust is such a powerful emotion. It's such a powerful sign and signpost for this push-pull energy, this split. So I was inspired to pop on here and have this little chat with myself because I heard in my daughter's friend cohort, it came up because I chat with their friends. And probably my greatest aspiration in life is for my daughter's friends to think I'm cool. So I have that pick me going on. Regardless, I was talking to some of my daughter's friends and it came up multiple times, right? Like there was, you know, in one situation, it was like a romantic thing. And it came up multiple times that these girls feel bad for a guy, right? So that's why they're not breaking up with them or they're not saying the thing that they need or they're not setting a boundary that does exist. Whether you express a boundary or not, it's there. So you either watch it be transgressed or you participate in protecting it. So I heard this, like, but I feel bad for him kind of a thing. And it inspires that like primal, no, this is not the right order of things, sensation in me. And so I just reflected on how If we could commit to this, ladies, all of us, to trusting and respecting men enough, if we could regard the, if we could contain ourselves sufficiently and hold the part that says, if he's mad, upset, or hurt, I will be punished, right? Because every caretaker has that intrinsic motivation to self-protect. And I would argue that's actually what the, it's not altruism, it's not benevolence, it's self-protection, right? If we can hold that, then perhaps we can start to participate in a social structure that inspires men to manage, contain, and process their own emotions, to grow, to hold more, and then to offer that to other men, women, and children. Right. Because one of my teachers, Omrapani, says, like, if your man gives you a suitcase, you can't really ask him to hold your suitcase because he just gave you his. So obviously he's not holding his and yours. Right. So if that is the emotional intensity of the moment, something is out of order. Yeah, we often find ourselves in the position of being the one to hold the emotional complexity of the situation, imagining that we can make it easier for him to not have to deal with the thing. But also we've abandoned the post of our own hearts when we do that. So let's talk a bit about the father wound. I like to distill down and did this also in my last book, Reclaimed Woman. I like to distill down the mother and father wound very simply because I'm a pragmatist. So when I think about the father wound, I just think about unsafety. When I think about the mother wound, I think of unlovability. So when your father holds monstrous energy, and specifically he holds it towards any threats out there in the world on your behalf, he fends for you reliably, consistently. You know he's got you as a little girl coming up into the world. That is a far safer experience than the Peter Pan pacifist who, you know, or like the nerdy intellectual or whatever, who you know you can rely on if you are actually in danger. And I'm talking more almost like the primal biological physical reality of the danger that exists being in a female body relative to a man's. If, however, that monstrous energy bleeds, leaks, or is somehow directed towards you. So now he's not just the villain for you. He's the villain toward you. There is a seeding of strategy to secure a semblance, because it really only ever is, of safety that then gets routinized over the course of your entire life. That becomes, in many ways, your defensive structure and sometimes even your personality. What happens in this wounding is that you become the woman who's got yourself, right? You don't need help. You don't know how to ask for help. You don't even know how to survey what it is that you would ask for help with. You're so attuned to self-sufficiency. You also are the woman who has a relationship to her own feminine, right? You have a relationship to your own feelings as something that needs to be fixed, like a problem that needs to be solved. You have vigilant productivity. So you're the to-do list queen. You're always surveying the landscape for what it is that you should be doing to feel useful. You are quite impatient and you have a habit of criticizing, shaming, blaming men, sort of leaking the truth of your wounding in every opportunity. And I would say how I phrase this shadow is the, I'll get him to see effort. So if you've ever been in a dynamic where instead of revealing your heart, instead of saying, ouch, instead of expressing rage, grief, sadness, disappointment, raw in the moment without residue, as David Data would say, you fly up into your mental defenses and you start to make your case. Then you're in this defensive habit of trying to get him to see, because if you can get him to see your perspective which he otherwise unattuned to then you can share a reality again and you can protect yourself from what might happen if he doesn see your perspective he perceives you as bad and wrong. And I would argue there's a biological white noise that is always rumbling that says you could be killed as a result. 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So all of this seeds that behavioral reflex to fawn, to appease, to feel bad. I learned from another one of my guests, Joel Schaefer, who you can find on a previous amazing interview about the Toltec principle, I don't know if that's the right word, but philosophy idea, that an aspirational destination is to get to the land of no pity, where you have no pity for yourself and you have no pity for anyone else. I love this because it's the simplest way to say, to sort of express the resolution of victim consciousness. That pity, that pathos, that I don't want to, you know, say the thing, do the thing because he's going to feel bad. You know, what if it's a daughter and her, you know, her father is going to be alone. I'm making this up going to be alone on his birthday and she also has this exciting opportunity with her friends, but she decides not to do that and instead hangs out with her dad, her grown ass adult man dad on his birthday because she feels bad, right? It seems like, oh, that's nice, compassionate, thoughtful. And that habit of caretaking men's emotions is one of the greatest rotting poisons at the core of our responsibility as women to evolve the dynamics between men and women so that they are organized into our God-given roles, is what I would say. So in this way, caretaking is actually a form of manipulation. It's not kindness. It's a strategy. It's also a kind of micro consent to a dynamic that is not one you're actually fully, willingly participating in because you have that push-pull, because you have the part that not only says, I need to take care of my needs that are at odds with yours, but then you also have the meta-awareness that you're whoring yourself out emotionally to take care of something. And it's a zero-sum game. It is a zero-sum game. and you lose when you think you're going to win the dividends of pleasing. It doesn't typically work that way, and that's why we end up resentful. That's always going to be the signature of this operating in your life. So what do we do instead in most situations? I mean, in a situation where you're with somebody out in public and it's a superficial interaction and you otherwise might feel bad or might like talk to the icky, creepy guy at the gym because you don't want to be rude or whatever it is. Usually just withdrawing your energy and exiting with grace is the best thing for all of you. Okay, in a more multi-layered dynamic, presenting the reality of your feelings and then allowing him to solve the problem. I love you, dad, and I feel excited. to hang out with my friends. I also feel, when I imagine you being alone, kind of sad. Like, what do you think? Just the raw, real inner scape of your actual feelings and allow that man to solve the problem because he will. He will solve the problem. And then you don't have to imagine that you're the one who solves all of the problems because you often have a limited scope of what the potential solutions are. And this is one of the great limitations of the caretaker I did this long form podcast once like I was a guest on a podcast and it was in this recording studio I live in Miami so I am used I in actively in my sports blog at this moment in March and I'm used to, right, a tropical temperature. Okay, so this was in California, which can be quite freezing. And there's like some total gaslight that's being run in California all the time that says it's so lovely and sunny and beautiful weather. That's not my experience. So it was freezing in this room. Freezing, freezing, freezing. I was in a silk dress. I was actually chattering. Like my jaw was actually chattering. And I'm having a conversation with this lovely woman about all the things, right? It was very meta, like about boundaries and about your yes and your no. Okay. While I'm sitting there, not saying anything to the guy who is behind all the equipment because I thought through the solutions, right? And I was like, well, I could get like, ask them for a, first of all, I'd have to stop the flow of the conversation and that's not good. And then I would ask for maybe a blanket, but like, do I really want to sit here? Like that's kind of weird optics with like a blanket on. and I had learned that they had a space heater that blew a fuse. So I knew that wasn't an option. So I sort of worked my way through what I could perceive to be potential solutions, and I couldn't find one that I liked. So I fawned. So I did the whole damn thing, and I didn't say a word. I didn't represent my needs. Now, energetically, probably the other folks in the room, at least in their primal animal bodies, could feel something was maybe off with me. Maybe they couldn't consciously, but I believe that on that limbic level, on that animal level, they could. All I had to do was say, hey, can we pause for a minute? Present, I feel really cold. Is there anything that you can do to help me with that? I have no doubt that that man could have come up with some solution. But why did I do that? Because I I thought I could take care of it. I thought my needs were not that important. I didn't want it to be awkward. I didn't want him to be in the position of not being able to come up with a solution. And then we both have to witness his incompetence. This is a silly example. But it has the ingredients of so many interactions where we micro consent to experiences, dynamics, and worse that we are not actually on board with and we're acting as if we are. And my belief system is that what is best for you is actually best for all, right? if you're a teenage girl and you are like, well, I don't know. I feel bad ending the relationship. He really loves me. And you are not the best girlfriend for him. There is a better one for him that doesn't have that split divided will experience of him. So what is best for you is always organizing. It is a harmonizing principle for the whole. So when we trust that, then we start to practice the soft skills of expressing our needs without entitlement, without bratty energy, and not waiting for them to bubble over into punitive, indicative retaliation, which is sometimes what happens. And from what I've learned in, David Data's containers, etc., is that men actually navigate by this raw, real, often nonverbal feedback. And that when we are in the caretaker, when we're in the fawn, it's disorienting because they have less information and data by which to calibrate their own consciousness. So who are we actually serving? Well, we're just protecting the part that imagines we would be murdered if we did the unlovable thing. If we expressed a need that is at odds with theirs, if we entered into that zero-sum game energy, of course, there's a fear that we will lose. And that is a very valid, very real fear, fear because of the basics of biology. So I invite you to just begin to observe, ladies, when you are feeling an ick, a no, a kind of contraction in your body around an interaction with a man. And yet you stay, you continue to engage, maybe even you offer up more. you're in that pimp energy, right? Just start to pay attention to it. Start to observe where the push pull is living in your life. And even if it's in your mind's eye, start to play around with what you could have done in that situation where the guy comes up and talks to you or where your dad, brother, uncle, husband does or asks for the thing and you suppress your no, your expression of no in the raw and real, which again is appropriate to certain relationships and less to others where you might just recognize your energy is yours to offer. So you reel it back in, take your gaze and your presence, attention, and being elsewhere. You cut it off and you do so, in my opinion, the least friction arises and all the parts can be happy when you do so with ease and grace. And sometimes having a couple phrases in our pocket, like that doesn't work for me, I'm not available then. These kinds of behavioral tools that allow us to say a softer no, that is less self-proving, self-defending, self-explaining can be helpful as we legitimize around what it is to align and get clear, align with that no so that we can very reliably trust the yes, because that's what gets contaminated is that we end up not trusting our own yes, having doubts and second guessing and imagining that our enthusiasm misleads us, misguides us. When we don't have that fundamental, I listen to my no, I honor my no, practice down. So I hope this is helpful and I will see you next time. Don't get out, it's justみたい...