I Was Raised to Anticipate Everyone’s Needs Except My Own

I developed the habit of caretaking in my relationships because that’s what my parents forced me to do as a kid.

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I’m sitting at a table next to the outdoor BBQ at my apartment complex. My friends are mingling, eating kabobs and corn. I glance over at my friend Nancy. She had come alone, still recovering from a breakup. She was the 9th wheel among people she’d seen before but wasn’t close friends with (except me). I check her face to see how she’s doing. She’s in conversation with another one of my friends who she’s met a few times before but was not close friends with. Nancy glances down at her plate and puts a piece of chip into her mouth.

She’s not laughing, I think to myself.

I’m in the middle of a four-way conversation between my boyfriend and a couple I haven’t seen in a few months. Yet, I find myself disengaging from that conversation and getting up to sit next to Nancy.

I sit down next to Nancy and join her conversation, only to find that she seems to be doing fine. So, a few minutes later, I head back to my original conversation with my boyfriend, but I’ve lost the conversation thread.

Throughout the night, I find myself checking on Nancy several more times. By the end of the night, I find that I haven’t had any chances to truly catch up with my friends who were at the potluck because I was too busy monitoring Nancy the whole night.

Here’s the thing: Nancy never asked me to babysit her. She likely didn’t even need it.

Yet, somewhere along the way, I had learned that my job in relationships was to manage other people’s emotional states. How did I develop this belief? And how do I correct it?

I spend a big portion of my time with friends preoccupied by what the other person may be thinking and wondering if I need to do something in reaction to it. In other words, I’m hypervigilant when I’m with my friends and have a constant running commentary in my head. In the example above, my thoughts were, “Is my friend doing ok since she doesn’t know anyone else here? Does she feel self-conscious? I think I need to keep her company so she doesn’t feel lonely.” I made many assumptions about how she was feeling, which may or may not be correct.

One of the reasons I’m doing this is because I was raised to caretake for other people. In my family, my mother and aunts expected me to caretake for others. My mother demanded my constant attention. Once, I was at the dinner table with her and my sister-in-law. I was still getting to know my sister-in-law at that point, and engaging her in conversation. From across the table, my mother would call my name, right when I was in the middle of my conversation. She did it repeatedly. I got the sense that she was left out and needed me to be the one giving her attention.

In another instance, I was once again at dinner with my family including my mother and sister-in-law. At the end of dinner, my mother noticed an empty to-go container sitting on top of my sister-in-law’s plate. My mother glared at me and said, “Why haven’t you packed this for her?”

I started back at my mother. “Why would I pack this for her? I don’t even know what leftovers she wants. She can pack her own to-go container.”

My mother’s words communicated that she expected me to anticipate needs before they were spoken aloud and criticized me immediately when she perceived that I didn’t. I felt like I had to constantly be on guard and this immediately sent my stress levels shooting up. Every time I was in such a situation, my shoulders tensed and my stomach knotted up at the anticipated scathing barb from my mother.

The thing is, I’ve been on the receiving end of my mother’s attention. When my brother and I ate dinner at home, my mother buzzed around us instead of eating together with us. She would tell us over and over again what she cooked and try to shove food on our plates while we were in the middle of eating. It was annoying and intrusive and we asked her to stop. I would have much rather enjoyed simply eating a meal with her. But I understand that she believes she is doing her duty as a mother, as she sees her role.

Looking back, my adulthood caretaking habits make perfect sense. As I began to reflect on why I felt the way I did, I realized there were many glaringly dysfunctional dynamics in my childhood that led me to be conditioned to caretake my parents. The conditioning grew out of how I was treated and expected to behave in my childhood home. I never questioned these expectations because they were all I had known. I simply carried them into adulthood.

In my childhood and teens, I had to be hypervigilant during tense family gatherings at my grandmother’s house with my father’s family of origin when I was growing up. Family members were constantly criticizing each other and taking digs at one another. Sometimes, my aunts, uncles, or cousins would take digs at me. I’d sit there and wonder if I should talk back and defend myself. However, I knew that if I did that in front of the rest of my family members, I would be reprimanded for it. So I often stayed quiet, seething inwardly. I’ve been traumatized by these family arguments.

Other times, I’d watch them take digs at my mother.

“You don’t cook enough soup for your children? Don’t you care about them? I’ll do it if you can’t handle it.”

“Why are you always out? You need to make sure to pick your children up from school on time.”

My mother would weakly try to defend herself, but my dad’s family would just team up on her. She’d give up. I hated watching this. Family gatherings became stressful for me.

I was hyperaware, reading people’s faces to see if the mood was going sour. Although the evening would start relatively calm, arguments would often break out among my father’s family of origin. Brothers and sisters (my aunts and uncles) would start taking digs at one another. One would get pissed off, and the yelling would begin. A lot of arguing and crosstalk would ensue. If it seemed like this was going to continue for a while, everyone else not involved in the argument would leave the table. As a kid, I’d run off with my cousins into another room. We’d close the door to dampen the noise and try to find something fun to focus on.

These repeated experiences have led me to approach large gatherings with apprehension as an adult. I think I still expect to get scolded or see an argument break out at group events. I am bringing that same hypervigilance with me when I see my friends, even though the situation is different. I try to remind myself that I’m not at my grandmother’s house anymore. My parents, aunts, and uncles are not there. My friends are not as argumentative and competitive as my family, and would never get into that type of argument. Nowadays, these family gatherings occur rarely, and I skip them whenever I can.

There were two consequences of feeling overly responsible for my friend. The first consequence was that I was missing out on precious and valuable time with my friends. Adults become very busy and rarely have time to see each other. I was wasting what precious little time I had to enjoy and deepen my friendships on doing emotional work taking care of someone else. Being distracted by caretaking led to shallow relationships instead of intimacy. Each time I saw my friends but couldn’t have meaningful conversations with them was a missed opportunity. I look back at them with regret.

This leads to the second consequence: I became resentful about the burden of caretaking. Part of me knew that I was not responsible for the emotional work, yet my family system constantly reinforced the notion that it was my responsibility. My mother constantly demanded my attention and the family culture I grew up in pushed women into caretaking roles. I felt like acting as a caretaker was met with the least resistance, whereas trying to live my life independently was seen as an affront to my parents and family.

As I process the trauma I suffered throughout my childhood, I understand why I feel compelled to act the way I do, and what unconscious beliefs are driving this behavior. I was surrounded by many emotionally dysregulated people, including my parents, who were emotionally out of control. This led to a lot of yelling, arguing, and emotional neglect of kids. I felt like I had to take care of my parents’ emotional needs to survive, and this behavior became ingrained. I am still driven to do it to this day as I react to situations that remind me of my past trauma.

Now that I’m aware of my past and the reasons for my behavior, I can work on reframing my response to everyday situations that are not as dangerous to me now as they were when I was a kid. Group hangouts are not the same as family gatherings, and I don’t need to monitor my friends for potential blow-ups in the same way that I had to monitor my family members. I’m surrounding myself now with more emotionally stable people who can self-regulate, so I don’t need to do it for them.

The next time I hosted a gathering with my friends, including Nancy, I approached it with the intent to not caretake. We were doing karaoke this time. I deliberately chose to sit somewhere not next to Nancy. In the beginning, I noticed that Nancy was trying to figure out what songs she wanted to sing, and I refrained from running to her rescue or walking up to her to suggest songs. Instead, I focused on singing the songs I wanted to sing, even if they were very happy songs that Nancy might not want to hear at the time. After fifteen or so minutes had passed, I glanced over at Nancy. She seemed to be doing fine and had sung several songs, including some duets with my friends.

She was doing fine after all. I didn’t need to rescue her. I felt a sense of guarded relief, like I was glad that I didn’t need to carry the emotional weight I was forced to carry my whole life. At the same time, I wasn’t sure if it was a new pattern or just a fluke. After this, I tried to remind myself at every friend gathering I hosted, and every family dinner I attended, that I didn’t need to caretake anyone. It would take many more repetitions of the same situation, and me taking a more inward approach with no resulting negative consequences, for me to become used to this new approach.

It took a long time, but I finally unlearned the belief that it was my job in relationships to take care of others’ emotional states. I’m learning proper boundaries now and understand that other adults are responsible for managing their own emotional experience. After spending so much time watching other people, I’m finally learning that I don’t need to spend my relationships on guard. I can focus on showing up in my relationships and being present.