The Women Who Are Tired of Being Understanding

Some women aren't exhausted because they love too much. They're exhausted because they've become exceptionally skilled at understanding everyone except themselves.

I meet a lot of women who can explain everyone in the room.

They know why their husband shuts down. They know their mother did the best she could. They know their friend is going through a hard time. They understand why their boss snapped at them. They know the kids are tired.

They know.

They just, know.

Then I ask them a question that should be so much easier: "What do you need?"

The room goes quiet. I watch it happen in the body before the face — shoulders drop, breath catches somewhere behind the sternum, something in the jaw twitches.

She laughs, and then her face turns to sadness. "No one has asked me that in a really long time, and meant it."

These women see themselves as burdens. And they're tired of feeling this way. They’re tired of not feeling like enough.

Understanding why someone hurts you does not make it hurt less. I've sat across from people who could map another person's entire nervous system — every trigger, every wound, every reason — and still go home and cry in the car.

Sometimes women use empathy to negotiate themselves out of anger: He didn't mean it that way. He's stressed. She's never been someone that has those kinds of conversations with me. I should just accept that. She's emotionally immature. He's avoidantly attached.

All of those things may even be true.

And you're still hurt. Your body doesn't take "but I understand why" as an answer. It keeps the score anyway.

Empathy without boundaries can become self-abandonment. Understanding someone's nervous system doesn't require volunteering yours as the place where they discharge everything they haven't learned to carry.

Maybe the next stage of healing isn't understanding him better.

Maybe you already understand them enough.

Maybe the person whose inner world you've been meaning to study is your own.

That's the study I get to be part of, with the women who sit across from me.

Dear fellow Gen X, Millennial, and Gen Z women,

I do this work for us.

Your stories are behind so much of my work with relationships, men, and sexual trauma. I hear about the things women carry — the emotional labor, the relationships they protect, the needs they postpone, and the complicated ways we learn to love and survive.

I also have the privilege of listening to the men you love. And often, when they talk about you, I hear admiration underneath the frustration. Part of my work with them is helping them understand themselves, validate themselves, and carry more of their own emotional weight — so you don't always have to.

Many of the women who find me also carry wounds from relationships with other women: mothers, sisters, friends, coworkers, or communities where they learned that closeness wasn't always safe.

Therapy with me is a place where we can look at those wounds without turning women against women. We slow things down, get curious about what your body has learned to protect, and practice asking for what you need without abandoning yourself to keep the peace. There is something powerful about women doing this work together — not becoming less emotional, less complicated, or easier to love, but becoming more fully themselves through another woman's support.

Not understanding him better. Not her, not them, not anyone else in the room.

You. That's the work.