We live in the wake of three patriarchal religions that posit the view that women are dangerous, unequal to men, and have the ability to distract men from important work. Women's sexuality, emotions, and natural work of nurturing and caretaking are seen as troublesome, weak, and inferior. To the degree that any individual woman buys into this scapegoating as the weaker and inferior sex is the degree to which the woman will render herself invisible, not wanting to take up any space and certainly not needing anything.
To need is to be present, alive, and deserving. To be a scapegoat means your role is to sacrifice your needs for the good of the dominant society. To “go against” the role given can induce a feeling of being wrong, standing out too much, and experiencing shame. Women still collectively carry the shame of needing something for themselves. And not just women who identify themselves as victims, either. It is a rare woman who does not hold, in some fashion, the scapegoat complex. It's as if we are all following an eleventh commandment: Thou shalt not need!
needs? who me?
I would be a wealthy woman if I had a nickel for every woman who told me it was selfish or unnecessary to think of herself before others or to go out of her way to get her needs met. The baby needs me, the dog needs me, the Third World needs me, the environment is dying, and my husband's work is more serious and therefore more important. If not selfish then not deserving; if not deserving then invisible; if not invisible then overreacting; if not overreacting then too unimportant to be taken seriously.
A woman I work with is very strong and powerful in the work world. In fact, she is the president of a firm made up mostly of men. She manages to deal effectively with her work world as well as raise her family. One day she found herself with a splitting headache. She was at work and did not have any Excedrin in the office. She would not buy herself another bottle because she had one at home. She didn't “need” another bottle, so she suffered the headache until she got home four hours later. Why? Because on some level she didn't believe she should have needs; and certainly she couldn't justify buying another bottle of aspirin for herself when she could surely survive the headache until she got home.
Another woman I work with is nothing short of a warrior for every family member, client, and cause that requires her attention. She is truly strong, stable, and impressively capable. It took two years of concentrated effort before she could say, “I need your help” to her daughter.
Women do have needs—naturally and genuinely. Simply because we don't recognize, vocalize, and activate them does not mean we aren't attempting to meet them, however. Just like any other oppressed energy, needs go underground and come out in another fashion—often indirectly, covertly, slyly. Sometimes we might not even be conscious that we are managing to get our needs met, and sometimes such subterfuge results in us settling for secondary gains—in other words, when we cannot say directly that we want and need to be taken care of or given attention, we will, as one example, sometimes magnify, massage, or fabricate ailments to get the attention or care or to avoid being abandoned. It doesn't matter that we do not need to be sick; in fact, it is often a big price to pay simply to get attention.
Not only do we, at times, settle for secondary gains, but we also build a reservoir of resentment. Resentment toward the people who are getting all of our attention at the expense of us taking care of ourselves, resentment that we are not able or willing to take ourselves seriously, and resentment at the gargantuan price we pay for not getting our own needs met. Gillian wanted to keep two old flowerpots that had never been used but would make a designer-quality end table. Her husband Stan said absolutely not. “I am not lugging them in the car for 200 miles and having them take up extra space in our home. We do not need any more furniture.” End of discussion. For the umpteenth time, Gillian gave in. She was used to it. Her wants and needs had always been given little airspace or consideration in this marriage. She gave the flowerpots away. She gave them away to a woman she didn't even care for, which, in some ways upped the martyrdom quotient. A possible secondary gain—she found a way to express her irritation and see herself as such a “good” person!
Around the same time Stan began to have some physical ailments and exhibited a great deal of stress and anxiety about his well-being. He was feeling too weak to assist himself, but Gillian promised to call and inquire about getting him some help in the local hospital. Somehow she just couldn't seem to remember to make that call. This passive-aggressive behavior was her way, however unconsciously, of getting her needs met—the need to be heard, the built-up anger at not being taken into consideration, the need to be taken seriously, to believe she has equal weight in a discussion. Because these needs did not get brought to consciousness and acted on in a direct fashion, they came out in less-than-helpful and constructive ways. And because she was not able or willing to make enough waves to get her needs met directly, her resentment kept her from being available when Stan genuinely needed her.
We are trained to think it selfish to consider ourselves, but needs are natural and necessary to being resilient. To be resilient requires overcoming the resistance and collective tide of not being deserving or taking yourself seriously. A sentence in the research on resilience marked itself indelibly into my psyche: “The resilient have an uncanny ability to get their needs met”—no false modesty or blind eye to real needs and the importance of taking care of themselves. They did what they needed to stay strong and upright.
In their work on children, psychologists Michael Murphy and Michael Moriarty found that resilient children had a pattern of reaching out and finding “another mother” in the neighborhood. My friend Suzanne, who suffered untold physical abuse by her stepmother, tells me how she picked her boyfriends in high school. “I checked out their mothers. If the mothers were cool and available I would go out with the guy. That way I could spend time in the kitchen with the mom.” (The secondary gain was getting a substitute mom out of the deal—which was worth it even if she did not like the guy all that much!)
In addition to finding that kids would seek substitute parents, Murphy and Moriarty found that resilient children would work to excel in an area that would increase their resourcefulness—instinctively knowing that this would enable them to feel good about themselves and allow them to carry on with their lives and purposes.
For example, look at two little girls who lived in similar circumstances of abject poverty and neglect. They literally did not have enough to eat and were left to their own devices for hours at a stretch. One of the little girls, feeling ashamed and helpless, sat in the dark, twirling her hair and thinking of all the food she would eat if she had the money to go to the store. The other little girl, recognizing her physical and emotional hunger and using her observation skills, remembered what she knew about her neighborhood. There was a family down the street that was not much better off financially but somehow that mother managed to feed her family every evening at 6 P.M. The little girl knew that if she showed up right before suppertime she would be invited to join them. She not only found a way to fill her empty tummy, she fueled her self-respect with her resourcefulness and got to be around other people for a meal. Getting her needs met increased her sense of confidence, esteem, and security. It gave her a sense of her own power to know that she was capable of taking care of herself when the occasion required.
In order to bounce back, we need to take care of ourselves. We hear the message every time we fly: In case of an emergency, put on your oxygen mask or life vest first before attempting to help others. You cannot be helpful to others if you are not breathing! The same principle applies here: Being depleted, martyred, bruised, or otherwise occupied steals the very thunder needed to survive and triumph. In order to be available for life's ups and downs, to be resilient, we must discover what soothes, comforts, aids, supports, and enables us to take care of ourselves. An African proverb says the same thing poetically: “Be wary of a naked woman offering you a dress.”