Why Do I Keep Putting Myself Last?

In my fourth blog on Mother-Daughter Attachment, I tell Selma’s story (name and identifying details changed) who came to see me because she wanted to stop putting herself last in her relationships because she was sick and tired of being overlooked and overruled by her husband, family, friends, and at work.

Selma introduced herself as a feminist. She told me that she believed in equal rights for women, but she wanted to know why she keeps quiet when someone ignores her, dismisses her, or overrules her, even on the tiniest of issues.

The other day Selma went to the local gym to walk on the walking track. Her husband arrived half way through her walk and asked her if she was ready to go home. Selma and her husband shared a car and her husband was ready to go home. Selma wasn’t, but instead of saying this, she asked to walk for a few more minutes and then went home with her husband. Later that evening, Selma was angry at herself for not walking as long as she had wanted to walk and asking her husband to wait for her, just like she has waited for him many times. She told me that she prioritizes other people’s needs before her own often without realizing it and doesn’t say exactly what she feels out of fear of upsetting people. The day in the gym she said was slightly different because she knew at the time that she didn’t want to go home until she had finished her walk, but she still didn’t say anything. She still acquiesced and didn’t stand up for her right to do what was best for her.

I have learned that assertiveness training, though helpful, does not change this behavior for women. Women need to understand that the larger generational and socio-cultural environment they live in has taught them to normalize and tolerate being silenced and to self-silence and acquiesce their will, needs, and rights. Women need to understand their mother-daughter history, and how self-silencing, self-neglect, and prioritizing other people’s needs over their own is a female characteristic that daughters inherit from their mother. Women need to understand how their family, culture, and society pressurizes or guilt-trips women into putting their needs last. And women need to understand the emotional, relationship, and equal rights harm that putting their needs last inflicts on mothers and daughters, women and girls.

When I mapped Selma’s Mother-Daughter History, she saw that she had stepped into her mother’s shoes and was repeating how her mother prioritized her husband’s needs, her son’s needs over her daughter’s needs, and her friends and colleagues’ needs. In Selma’s family, what men need was viewed as more important than what women need, and her mother and grandmother accepted this belief without question because they did not know that another reality, where their needs have equal importance, exists. Selma’s mother and grandmother were typical of their generation. They were steeped in “The Culture of Female Service”, an umbrella term that describes all the ways that women, and especially mothers are expected to be of service and be selfless caregivers. The Culture of Female Service had taught Selma’s mother and grandmother to fuse and confuse their needs with caregiving. And, as is common in this kind of patriarchal family, daughters were expected to meet their mother’s unvoiced and unrecognized needs.

Seeing how invisible she is and how invisible her mother and grandmother are, was difficult for Selma. She hadn’t realized that underneath her feminist values lay her internalized sexism that she had learned to tolerate and normalize. But when she saw how daughters in her family are expected to meet their mother’s unvoiced needs and advocate for their mother’s needs and rights, and how this dynamic and role expectation passes on the self-silencing from the mother to daughter, she felt strengthened. When she saw that her self-silencing and acquiescent behavior was an Attachment issue stemming from how women in her family are punished for advocating for themselves, criticized for being too outspoken, and blamed if people are angry with them, she felt galvanized. She saw for the first time that her self-silencing behavior was a learned behavior that made her feel connected to her mother and the rest of her family, but the feeling of connection that keeping quiet gave was an illusion. Keep quiet was not helping her feel heard, valued, and seen. Rather, it was ensuring that men’s voices remained dominant, and women remained silent selfless caregivers.

Over time, Selma unlearned her family’s conditioning. She learned to feel less responsible for other people’s needs and feelings, and to recognize that when her husband, for example, asked her to cut her walk short so that he could go home, there are two dynamics at play. The first dynamic was her own that involved her responsibility to advocate for her rights and needs. The second dynamic was her husband’s. Like her, he was responsible for meeting his own needs and should not expect his wife to help him facilitate them. And he was also responsible for providing enough space for his wife to say what she needs and to listen to and honor her needs. In Selma’s family, the balance of power was tipped towards men’s rights and needs and creating a more equal balance of power required that women learned how to claim their needs, and men learned how to inquire after and honor what women needed, and caregiving be viewed as a human, rather than a female quality.

In my experience, the unequal power dynamics that over emphasized men’s needs and dismissed women’s needs in Selma’s generational family is extremely common. Selma was thirty-one years old. She had benefited from the Women’s Movements, but as her story shows, in our relationships, old sexist thinking is still limiting women’s needs and rights.

(Read “The Silence Female Scream for more information about how women learn to silence their needs and “The Mother-Daughter Puzzle” for instructions on how to map your own and your client’s mother-daughter history.)

Reprinted with permission from my American Counseling Association blog.