This is episode 241 And it's another episode in the body image series. I'm taking a deep dive into Superwoman syndrome. If you struggle with trying to do it all and be it all then you don't want to miss this episode, I talk about what Superwoman syndrome is six ways to identify whether you have it, how it impacts your body image and 10 ways to break free, you can find all the links and resources mentioned including a free worksheet called 10 ways to reject Superwoman syndrome at summer innanen.com forward slash Two for one. Let's give a shout out to Cal flan who left this review. Listen to this podcast summer has awesome insight and hosts great guests. This podcast has literally changed the direction of my life for the better. Thank you so much for leaving that review. I would really appreciate it if you took a minute to leave a review as well. Go to iTunes search for eat the rules. Then click ratings and reviews and click to leave a review or give it a rating. Don't forget to grab your free copy of the 10 day body confidence makeover at summer innanen.com forward slash freebies with 10 steps to take right now to feel better in your body. And if you are a professional who works with people who may also have body image struggles get the free body image coaching roadmap at summer innanen.com forward slash roadmap. Don't forget to subscribe to this podcast to takes a second to just click that little follow or subscribe button via whatever platform you're using. All right, let's dive into this week's episode, I want to talk about why I'm doing this episode when I was living with the challenges of adenomyosis. Or when I was going through a lot of pain and just the stress of having to kind of design my life around it. And not getting sleep for a week, every couple of weeks. If you want to hear more about that, you can go back and listen to episode 232, where I talk about that in more detail. But when I was going through that, it made me realize how often we're used to suffering. We're used to just, you know, having pain or having some kind of discomfort or being exhausted, and really just downplaying it and saying, oh, you know, it's not that bad. Or, oh, I'll just wait to see a doctor. Or I'll just, you know, continue to kind of keep pushing through, I just need to work harder, I just need to get off earlier or, you know, I or I am able to just push through and people praise me for it. So that motivates me to keep doing it. It really made me reflect on that both with that. And also, after I had COVID and my heart rate was higher. And yeah, it just made me really think about these things. And I also hear from clients all the time, that really struggle with this pressure to do it all and be at all. And we're conditioned to ignore things like exhaustion, or pain or other discomfort from our body in an effort to just keep all the balls in the air, right? Like we just think like, well, I don't have time for that or it's not that bad. Instead of really like valuing, if there's, you know, valuing ourselves enough and respecting ourselves enough to say, hey, you know what, I'm not really feeling like myself, or outside of just kind of like more medical symptoms, really just, you know, the sheer exhaustion and loud voice of your inner critic that you end up suffering with as a result of trying to do it all and be at all. And I remember seeing this post on Facebook. This was a few years ago, and I'm going to try and keep this as anonymous as possible. Pretty much no one listening to this is going to know who I'm talking about. So that's good. I don't think so at least. Anyways, there was a post that came up on my Facebook feed and it was someone praising their wife for working full time and
I just want to be someone. Well doesn’t everyone : Surviving Superwoman Syndrome.
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and going to the gym and taking care of their kids right up until her, I think it was like their third or fourth child came. So she was like, extremely pregnant. And it was this post being like, I'm so proud of my wife, you know, she's still seeing so many clients every day and she's going to the gym and she takes care of the kids. And everyone in the comments was like, You're so amazing, your wife is so incredible. And I was like, why are we praising this? Like, why do we praise this, like the baby's literally about to fall out of her, like, take some damn rest, you know. And it actually frustrated me so much that inspired me to write this post many years ago. So I'm going to read you a Facebook post that I wrote, that was inspired by seeing that I'm hyper aware of how our culture praises the super woman, the woman who can manage being a mom, a career person health enthusiast, while maintaining a Pinterest worthy home. And how this obsession with doing it all starts to impact the pressure we put back on ourselves. I've decided I'm here to praise the ones who rest the ones who set firm boundaries, the ones who say no, the ones who ask for help, the ones who admit they don't have it all together, the ones that choose the messiness of life, instead of trying to keep everything polished and pristine. That's the kind of Superwoman I am here for. And it got a really great response, because I think everyone really needed to hear this. And it's a sigh of relief, to think like, Okay, we don't need to be like no one is perfect, no one is holding it all together, people who kind of give that impression typically either have a ton of help that you don't see, or there's a lot going on in their inner world, that would be we don't know about, like, maybe they don't actually feel that good. And they just give off this perception of it. I think that happens, the majority of the time, to be honest, and our culture really glorifies and sees people as morally superior, who can juggle everything. And what happens is, is that we then internalize that we internalize that we should be able to then do everything effortlessly. And then if we can't, there is something wrong with us. So for example, like kind of like what happened to me when we look at social media, and we see people with their well organized homes and their glossy skin and their homemade meals, and they're raising five kids, and they're working a full time job. And we think, well, I should be able to do that then too. And I see this time and time again, I see clients beating themselves up because they feel like they can't do it all. And they feel like there's something wrong with them as a result of that. And that need to do it all. And B it all has a name and that name is Superwoman syndrome. And that is a very gendered name. That is the kind of official name that people use and psychologists use around it. However, I recognize that that is extreme that's looking at things very binary. So maybe we call it superhero syndrome. Although I would say it does disproportionately affect people who identify as as female. And it really is this idea that we can do it all and be at all, that we can maintain our hosts and focus on our health and have the perfect body and be career oriented, and effortlessly manage, like all that mental load of running household, which is especially dominant if you're a parent, and then just show up in life like Kelly Ripa with like a lot of energy and a smile. You know, that's that's kind of how, when I think about who, who's sort of like, you know, the Superwoman archetype, I really always think of like Kelly Ripa and like Gwyneth Paltrow, those are kind of the two people that come to mind for me, I'm always curious as to like, who might come to mind for you, it's probably different. But that's who I think about. And I think, we think, okay, I should be able to do that, too, I should look like them, I should be able to be like energetic, and perky and all this other stuff. And it tears us apart inside. When we're attempting to do all this, we're doing it at the expense of ourselves, we're putting others needs before our own, we're putting all of our energy into kind of this image that we want other people to see us as. And we put that into how we may appear to others. And we putting that all before our own well being, we're usually putting that before a lot of our own wants and our own needs, and the things that we truly value. And so in other words, what we're often doing is we're chasing this illusion of having it all together and this illusion of perfection over what we actually want to need. We say to ourselves, you know, I'm going to put other people's needs before my own, I'm going to put how I how I think other people should perceive me before my needs. And what I mean by that is that we often get sucked into kind of being a superhero because we don't want to be perceived as less than so there's definitely an external influence here, in terms of how other people perceive us and judge us. And there's a fear behind that there's a fear behind these behaviors. And that fear is often I'm sure there's more than a Milus here, but those fears are often that we're going to be perceived as inadequate, that we're going to be perceived as less than that we're going to be perceived as failures or NP
reductive or lazy, and that is cultural conditioning, this has been conditioned in us as a way to gain more social currency, if we can just, you know, give the impression that we have it all together, then we'll get more power or will be more open to being desirable and lovable and all of these other things that come along with that. Our culture praises busyness, it praises the hustle, it praises hard work. And that's really, if if you kind of look into the history of that, and the racial origins of that, that's really the culture of, of whiteness. If you Google the culture of whiteness, you'll find a lot of stuff on that. And if you look at the images, you'll find really good illustrations of the breakdown of what that looks like. It's kind of like this idea of quiet quitting, that's come up right now, where if you're just doing your job, you're considered, you know, not as valuable. Because again, this ties back to this culture that we have that really praises kind of overworking and going over and above and competition and all this other stuff and productivity. And I'm not saying that you can't work hard at things and go to the other or go at or that we should all just go to the other extreme, and do nothing. But there's a diminishing point of returns to hard work, there's a diminishing point of returns to these efforts. And if they're not coming from a place of respect for our own needs and wants, then it's absolutely going to be at a detriment to our mental well being. And all of this sources from the archetype of the quote unquote, perfect woman, I kind of mentioned this earlier, when I talked about when I think of when I think of the perfect woman I think of, you know, Gwyneth Paltrow, or I think of Kelly Ripa. And it's really just, you know, that that woman that like, has it all together and is successful and is like, has a smile and all this other crap. But that trying to fit into that archetype of the perfect woman steals our time, it steals our energy, and it steals our resources, much like diet culture was, which is a subset of that. So trying to like hustle to give off this illusion of perfection. It takes a hell of a lot of time, a hell of a lot of energy, and money, and just our resources in general. And I want to note here that this is much more difficult for women of color or other marginalized groups, as they often have to work much harder to prove themselves. And in order to deal with subtle and overt forms of discrimination. I came across this interesting article by Dr. Helen fosu, who is a psychologist and wrote this great article about her own lived experience with Superwoman syndrome. So I'm going to link to that in the show notes. Because I think that offers a different lived experience than the one that I have with it. And there's also this really interesting study that I came across that I'll link to in the show notes, which is called Superwoman schema, African American woman's views on stress, strengthen health, which really breaks down the origins of this even further and how the this really does stem from more racial origins that and that's not easy to find when you kind of just loosely Google Superwoman syndrome online. And what they talk, one of the things that they really talk specifically about in that study is that among black women, Superwoman syndrome is quote, unquote, necessary for survival. And the thing that I really took away from that is that depending on your level of privilege, you likely feel greater pressure to engage in Superwoman syndrome as a means of survival. And I've certainly worked with clients that identify as fat, who have felt increased pressure, they felt increased pressure to work harder to prove themselves because of their body size. And again, this is coming back to just the product of the culture that we live in the dominant white culture, the fat phobic culture, the sexist culture that values overworking and competition and power. And so I think that it's always really good to know the origins of these things, it's really important to look at the social justice aspect of these things. Because it's not an individual defect. It's not just like, oh, you know, you just need to, like stop trying to work so hard. It's literally in our DNA as a way to try to survive for a lot of individuals more so if you experience different levels of oppression. And so it's not something to feel bad about. So don't beat yourself up for having this. It's not something to, you know, again, feel shame about. I think, let's bring awareness to this and see how our culture perpetuates this narrative. Like let's open up our awareness to it so that we can actively reject it as individuals and also look for the systemic ways that we can try to create change or reject it on a 2ff7e9595c
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