How Martyrdom Keeps Women Small

I was praised for it long before I understood what it was. You give so much. You are always there. You never ask for anything.

For years I took that last one as a compliment. It took me a long time to hear it as a description of a woman who had quietly removed herself from her own life.

What martyrdom actually means

The word comes from the Greek martys, which means witness. The first martyrs were people who would not deny what they had seen. Somewhere on the way to the stained glass window, the witness turned into a sufferer, and suffering became the proof of sincerity.

The saint stories that carried that idea were written as hagiography, which simply means a biography that idealizes its subject. Read enough of them and a pattern shows up in the model of feminine holiness handed down to us. It is rarely a woman with a sharp opinion and a full life. It is a woman who endures.

That inheritance did not stay in church. It moved into families, into workplaces, into the way a woman is described at her own funeral. She never complained. She put everyone first. She gave until there was nothing left.

What psychology found when it finally looked

Dana Crowley Jack interviewed clinically depressed women and published the results as Silencing the Self in 1991. What she found was not a chemical accident. She found a moral system. Many of the women judged themselves by an internalized standard of feminine goodness, measured almost entirely by how well they cared for and pleased other people, and then silenced their own needs and perceptions in order to keep the relationship safe.

She built a scale for it. The Silencing the Self Scale measures four things: self-sacrifice, fear of conflict, externalized self-perception, meaning judging yourself through the eyes of others, and a divided self, the gap between what a woman feels and what she is allowed to show.

Then came a term I found even sharper. Vicki Helgeson described unmitigated communion in 1998, a focus on others to the exclusion of the self. Ordinary communion, the plain human capacity to care and connect, is good for us. Unmitigated communion is not. It predicts psychological distress, including depressive symptoms, and Helgeson’s work suggests it accounts for a real part of why women report more distress than men do.

The finding that stopped me was this one. People high in unmitigated communion have trouble disclosing themselves and are uncomfortable receiving support. Read that again. The women who give the most are the ones least able to let anyone give to them. The muscle that reaches out has never been trained in the other direction.

Why it works as a survival strategy

Martyrdom is not stupidity. It is strategy, and it usually starts when the alternative is worse.

Peter Glick and Susan Fiske described benevolent sexism in 2001 as the flattering half of sexism, the half that offers protection, provision and approval to women who stay inside the traditional role. It does not feel like oppression. It feels like being cherished. That is exactly why it works, and why it keeps the arrangement in place.

Being indispensable is another route to belonging. If everyone needs you, no one can replace you. In a world where a woman’s value has been conditional, self-sacrifice becomes evidence that she should be kept.

There is also the simpler, quieter reason. If you are busy managing everyone’s experience, you never have to stand in the room as yourself and find out what happens. Service is a very effective hiding place.

The bill comes due anyway

It shows up as resentment first, which is the honest signal that a boundary has been crossed. Then exhaustion. Then desire leaving, because desire needs a self to come from.

In my work I see where self-silencing lives in a body. The jaw holding a sentence. The throat closing mid-sentence. The breath that stops just short of full. The pelvis that will not let go because it is still bracing for the next demand. Fascia keeps a record of everything we did not say.

And here is the cruel arithmetic. The more you give without being known, the less anyone actually knows you. Loneliness then grows at exactly the same rate as your generosity, which is why so many generous women are also very tired and very alone.

What healing actually looks like

Care ethics argued with itself about this, and the argument is useful. Ines van Nistelrooij wrote about mature care in 2017, a care that includes the one giving it. Self-sacrifice and care are not the same act. Care with a self inside it can be sustained for decades. Care without one is a slow disappearance with good manners.

The work is unglamorous. Say the true sentence once, out loud, to a person who can hear it. Let someone do something for you and stay in the room while they do it. Notice the discomfort of being seen without immediately deflecting it. Stop explaining yourself before anyone has asked. Choose one thing you want and do not justify it.

None of that will feel like progress at first. It will feel like being selfish, because a woman’s nervous system usually files self-regard under that heading. It is not selfishness. It is the other half of the exchange, the half that lets care be real instead of a transaction you keep paying into.

Where a woman learns this

I did not invent this pattern and neither did the men I have been closest to. I learned it at home first. My mother demonstrated it so completely that I never thought to question it. It was simply how a woman moved through a room, how she anticipated what everyone needed before they knew they needed it, and how she never once said the sentence that would have changed the room.

Later I watched a chief information officer at a law firm where I worked run the same hierarchy from the other direction, from the top down. Different seat, same system. He did not have to raise his voice. He only had to let it be understood that some people’s time was worth more than others’.

Then I watched it in the businesses I have helped build. Over the years I have seen the same shape more than once: the man holding the authority, the woman beside him holding the harmony, often while carrying just as much of the work. I have watched what that costs a woman who is also a partner, in the business and closer to home. I am not going to describe anyone in particular. I am describing a shape I have seen enough times to know it is not an accident. Nobody wrote that rule down. It did not need to be written down. Everyone already knew it.

What I had to face is that I have also been the one holding it. Years ago I ran a beard and moustache federation, and I ran it in a way that made some people smaller than me. I told myself it was standards, or leadership, or knowing what I wanted. It was none of those things. It was the only version of authority anyone had ever shown me, and I wore it because it fit.

That is the part I would rather leave out of this essay. I am leaving it in because a pattern you can only see in other people is a pattern you are still serving.

What it costs you to carry it

The woman who will not take up space and the woman who takes up everyone else’s space are two endings of the same story. Both of them are building a life around keeping other people’s experience steady, and neither of them gets to find out who she would have been.

What I am practicing now is different in kind, not just in degree. Boundaries built on fear keep a woman small, because fear always chooses the smaller of two answers. Boundaries built on values do the opposite. They cost something, they can be stated plainly, and they survive other people’s disappointment. I am learning that on purpose and I am not fast at it.

The word that unlocked it

An associate handed me the word martyr the day before I started writing this. Not as an insult. She used it in passing, about something I had just described, and the word landed like a key turning. Until that moment I had been describing my life in the language of love and loyalty. Martyr was the name of the thing underneath it.

That is how awareness works. We cannot see what we have no name for. Once I had the word, I started seeing it in my mother, in a boss I worked for years ago, in the men I have built businesses beside, and eventually in the mirror. None of it was available to me before the word arrived.

Which is most of why I am writing this down. Some woman will read it and find her own name for it, or borrow mine for a minute, and she will start seeing it too.

What healing it does to the line

My mother could not name this. I can. That difference of one generation is not a small thing. When I stop earning my place, something older than me sets down a weight it was never asked to carry, and something younger than me will not have to pick it up.

Patterns do not stay inside one person. They travel down until somebody with enough awareness stands in the middle of the road and refuses to keep walking.

Why I am writing this now

I have been healing this in myself, and I am not far enough along to write from the other side. I am writing from inside it.

I played the part. Nobody coerced me. I chose it again and again because it worked, because it kept the peace, because it made me necessary, and because a woman who is necessary never has to risk finding out whether she is wanted.

People I love and work with have been catalysts for this learning, which is what catalysts do. They brought the pattern right up to my face. What I saw, once I stopped defending myself, was not a series of people taking from me. It was me volunteering, over and over, and then feeling unseen by people I had never actually let see me. I am grateful for the mirrors, including the parts I did not enjoy.

If any of this is familiar, start with the smallest possible question. Where in your life are you calling it love when it is actually a bid for safety. You do not have to answer it out loud today. You just have to stop pretending you have not noticed.

If you want to see how much of this is running in your own life, I made a short quiz. Fifteen statements, three minutes, and it tells you not just how high you score but which shape the pattern takes for you. Might you be a martyr?

If you want company while you look at this, that is what my awareness coaching is for. You can reach me through the contact page, or come sit in the Den on a Tuesday night and start with cacao and conversation.

And because this pattern never lives in only one person, there is a companion piece now: The Other Half of the Ledger, about what it costs the person beside the woman doing it. If you have a partner, or if you are the partner, start there.

References

• Jack, D. C. (1991). Silencing the Self: Women and Depression. Harvard University Press.
• Jack, D. C., & Dill, D. (1992). The Silencing the Self Scale: Schemas of intimacy associated with depression in women. Psychology of Women Quarterly.
• Helgeson, V. S. (1998). A theory of unmitigated communion. Personality and Social Psychology Review.
• Glick, P., & Fiske, S. T. (2001). An ambivalent alliance: Hostile and benevolent sexism as complementary justifications for gender inequality. American Psychologist, 56(2), 109-118.
• van Nistelrooij, I. (2017). On mature care and self-sacrifice in care ethics.