Knowing the difference between caring and caretaking can sometimes be confusing. Discover how to tell the difference.
Have you sometimes wondered how to know the difference between caring and caretaking? This is the question that Arielle is asking:
“I’m mindful of my over-giving tendency. But often I don’t realize I’m caretaking until after the fact when I feel drained. How can I know (before I take the action) when my giving is really caretaking?”
To know the difference, you need to become aware of a number of issues. Here are some questions you can ask yourself:
Do you have the courage to risk loving yourself – even when you might encounter your children’s uncaring behavior?
Most of us really don’t like it when someone is angry with us. We don’t like it when someone goes into resistance to helping us when we need help, instead of caring about us. We . . . → Read More: Do You Have The Courage to Be a Loving Parent?
Do you sometimes look back and feel as if you have wasted your life caretaking others or trying to get others to take care of you?
Very often, in my work with my clients and with people who attend my workshops and Intensives, once they understand that they have been abandoning themselves, they feel . . . → Read More: Making Peace With Lost Time
A client of mine asked, “Is there such a thing as healthy caretaking?” Here is the answer!
I was trained by my mother and grandmother to be a caretaker. The messages were: “Your feelings are not important to us at all. You need to learn to completely ignore your own feelings and instead take care of our feelings. In return for this, we will occasionally give you some approval for being a good girl.”
I learned my lessons well. I learned to stay in my head rather than my heart and soul so that I wouldn’t be aware of my own feelings. I learned to be very vigilant regarding others’ feelings and to do all I could to be what they wanted me to be. I completely lost touch with myself. Continue reading Is There Such A Thing As Healthy Caretaking?
I used to think that caretaking was the opposite of narcissism. I thought that narcissists were people who demanded that others give themselves up to care-take the narcissist. I thought that caretakers were people who were programmed to take care of others instead of themselves. I thought that caretakers needed some healthy narcissism and that takers/narcissists needed more compassion for others.
Now I know that there is a bit more to it. Caretakers do give themselves up to take care of others, but underneath their caretaking, they have the same agenda as the narcissist – to be taken care of by the other person.
The kind of narcissism I’m talking about here is about making another person responsible for your feelings and needs.
We all have this kind of narcissism in our ego wounded selves. The wounded self believes that our good feelings come from getting love, rather than from being loving with ourselves and others. Continue reading Caretaking: A Covert Form of Narcissism
“I freak out when my husband even looks at another woman. I trust him not to wander, so I don’t know why this upsets me so much.””My partner spends too much time with her friends and family. What’s the point of being together if she’s always gone a couple of nights a week?”
“My wife wants to go back to school now that the children are older. She doesn’t need to work, so why does she want to do this? It’s going to take up way too much of her time.”
“My husband has to go out of town for work a lot. I feel so angry about this. What about me?”
“I love to dance and my husband doesn’t, so why does he get so upset when I dance with someone else – even with another woman?”
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