Author: Rosjke Hasseidine
Source: The Huffington Post
I believe that the next stage in women’s evolution involves speaking what women need emotionally. Most women come from families that have for generations been focused on what men think and need, and within this climate, what women need has been ignored and denied, creating lives in which women have suffered from emotional neglect. And as daughters, we have grown up not hearing our mothers speak openly and honestly about what they need. We watched our mothers and grandmothers wear selflessness and sacrifice like a badge of honor. And not having heard the language that inquires after and honors what women need emotionally has made us forget that this language exists. It has made us struggle, like our mothers have, to identify what we need emotionally. And it has stopped us from noticing that we are being emotionally neglected when our feelings and needs are not inquired after or honored.
In my family, for example, my mother and grandmother never voiced what they needed emotionally. And I never heard my father and grandfather ask their wives how they were feeling or show empathy or emotional support when they were upset. In my family women are viewed as caregivers, not care receivers. And not having witnessed anything different, I recreated this emotional neglect in my own relationships and marriage until I woke up and realized how invisible I was without my needs voice. I started to realize how I had learned to emotionally silence myself and how detrimental this was to my emotional wellbeing, my visibility and equality in my marriage and all my relationships, and in my work life.
Every day in my work with women I see how this theme ripples through women’s lives and mother-daughter history and the damage it causes! It is the single most common cause for mother-daughter conflict. It teaches women to emotionally silence themselves. It makes women invisible and powerless in their relationships because we have no voice when we do not know what we need. It creates relationships, families, and work environments where women are silent, invisible, and emotionally neglected. And emotional neglect makes women starving hungry for attention which causes them to develop manipulative behavior. And it is an underlying contributor to women suffering from depression, anxiety, low self-worth, and eating disorders.
We hear all too often women being criticized for being “too needy, demanding, and controlling”. These accusations are all part of the way patriarchy has silenced and denied women’s emotional needs for generations. They are designed to stop women from knowing that it is their human right to have their needs heard and honored. And these accusations are also supposed to stop women from recognizing that patriarchy is afraid of “needy” women because women who know what they need cannot be controlled. Knowing what we need emotionally is central to knowing who we are and our ability to voice our emotional truth. It is central to feeling entitled to being heard and emotionally supported. It is central to women no longer being enslaved to meeting other people’s needs while neglecting our own. And it is central to a world where women are equal.
The problem with recognizing how emotionally silent and neglected women are today is that this emotional reality lurks unseen and unspoken underneath the advances women have made. Even though daughters are going to college and enjoying access to jobs their mothers couldn’t have dreamt possible, emotionally, many repeat the emotional silence they learned from their mother. Many women with impressive resumes, who outwardly epitomize the success of the women’s movement, struggle in secret with knowing what they need and that their emotional needs are part of their humanity and equality. But the clues are there if you know what to look for. They show up in the way women overwork and over accommodate other people’s needs. They show up in today’s crazy juggling act that mothers perform on a daily basis. They show up in the way women talk endlessly about what their children, husbands, and friends are doing, and not about themselves. And they show up in the way some women can struggle to listen to other people because they are starving hungry to be heard, and their discomfort with asking for help and being the center of attention.
Restoring the forgotten language of women’s emotional needs is the next challenge for women today and the Women’s Movement! We need to look back at our mother’s and grandmother’s lives and understand the emotional neglect we have inherited from them. We need to collectively challenge the many ways that patriarchy shames women into keeping silent. And we need to support each other as we raise our entitlement to speak and be heard.
Imagine for a moment how different our relationships, families, workplaces, and world would be if women’s emotional needs ran off our tongues with ease! Imagine how it will feel if women are heard and believed without question. If women are not blamed for needing because we understand that being needy in that clawing, demanding, emotionally manipulative way is a sign that we are being emotionally neglected. If self-neglect, selflessness, and sacrifice are no longer cool. If saying no and voicing our expectations is entirely natural. If what mothers need, so that they can mother in the way that works for them, is provided. And imagine how strong our mother-daughter relationships and all female relationships will be when we no longer have to put ourselves last, or guess what we each need.
