Why women in healing & helping professions are phone to anxiety and panic

We do what we were trained to do from birth

The job you do, assuming it’s something you feel called to, likely involves a skill that played an adaptive survival role for you growing up

We heal because when we were very small people around us needed healing.

We help because when we were very small people around us needed help.

We care, and that caring is real because it’s the deepest part of who we are but we also feel compelled because if we can’t heal and we can’t help we’ve learned that bad things happen.

When you’re a kid, playing this role helps you adapt and stay oriented to your environment and so you may have thrived in difficult situations as a kid but as you grow up life gets more complex and you need to adapt and respond in new ways that maybe weren’t trained for, ways that maybe were dangerous for you

I have no idea who said this originally and the internet doesn’t seem to know either, but it was repeated to me as a truism when I was a child and i’ve seen it play out not only in my own life, but in the lives of so many of my clients.

I help people regulate their nervous systems because - in one way, shape or form - I have been doing that since birth.

When we heal, help and regulate others from the time we’re very young, we develop unique strengths an resources.

We also develop unique vulnerabilities.

When we fail to acknowledge those vulnerabilities, then we can tend to spiral into isolation, feeling that it’s not safe to be honest about how we’re feeling because the life we’ve built revolves around being “the okay one”.

And so it’s common to experience a breakdown in your 20’s or 30’s and because you are so used to taking care of people and so not used to letting people take care of you a split develops - the face you show to the world is always calm, always caring, always inn control while inside, you start feel more and more isolated, broke and crazy.

But here’s the good news..

You’re not crazy and you’re not broken.

You just need aa new way of orienting.

You need to use your unique skills to heal and help people out of choice and agency, not because it’s required for your survival.

The skills you’ve been training since birth are real, and if you know how to lean into them in a healthy way, you can learn how to be a true force of transformation.

What you learned to do was good work. The key is to learn how to make choices about it now, instead of feeling compelled to heal and help out of a survival necessity.

In resilience,

Caitlin