This is a book for any woman who has felt overwhelmed and exhausted by everything she had to do, and yet still worried she was not doing “enough”. 

“I’ll do the self-care thing as soon as I finish this.”

We’re trying all the time, to do and be all the things everyone demands from us. Emotional exhaustion happens when we get stuck in an emotion and can’t move through the tunnel. 

Nobody teaches us how to feel our feelings. 

Emotions are tunnels. If you go all the way through them, you get to the light at the end. Exhaustion happens when we get STUCK in an emotion. Once you’re a parent, you’re never NOT a parent. You’re always going through the tunnel. 

Human Giver Syndrome is our disease! This book is the prescription. 

The stress response cycle needs to complete, and just eliminating the stressor isn’t enough to do that. 

We get stuck in the stress response, because we’re stuck in a stress-activating situation. 

From a biological point of view- fight and flight are essentially the same thing. But they’re both the GO stress response of the sympathetic nervous system. Physical activity is the single most efficient strategy for completing the stress response cycle. Some other ways to complete the stress cycle are:

BREATHING

POSITIVE SOCIAL INTERACTION

LAUGHTER

AFFECTION

Because you experience stress every day, you have to build completing the cycle into everyday. Dealing with the stressor and dealing with the stress are two different processes, and you have to do both. It is called Completing the Cycle and it will slowly kill you if you do not do it. 

When your stress level is elevated your body gives off signs. One of them is called “Chandeliering”. It is Brene Brown’s term for the sudden, overwhelming burst of pain so intense you can no longer contain it, and you jump as high as the chandelier. It’s the eruption you feel. It is a sign that you are past your threshold. If you are staying in bed all weekend hiding from your life…then you’re past your threshold. 

You may do all the things you’re supposed to do, without getting where you’re trying to go, only to end up somewhere else is pretty amazing. 

In the book they coined a new word….FOOP! It’s for when something at first seemed attainable, but now seems unattainable. Welcome to Foop town! Life sometimes can be a Foop-o-rama. 

IF you’d rather put your hand in a toilet full of tadpoles than spend one more day doing the thing, you should definitely quit whatever it is. 

Human Giver Syndrome is a collection of personal and cultural beliefs and behaviors that insist that some people’s only “meaning in life” comes from being pretty, happy, calm, generous, and attentive to the needs of others. It tells us that we have a moral obligation to GIVE our all to humanity. If you were raised in a culture shaped by Human Giver Syndrome, you were taught to prioritize being pretty, happy, calm, generous, and attentive to the needs of others, above anything else. It supports being of service. It is a theme of Behave yourself…Follow the rules….OR ELSE. It teaches that a giver has no needs and thus has nothing to fight for. It leads to us seeing someone who we perceive like they’re not trying and so in turn we feel outrage. So we call that unruly woman fat or bossy or full of herself. AS IF THOSE ARE BAD THINGS. In a sense, Human Giver Syndrome is the first villain in our story. 

When we make meaning, we can sustain ourselves through worse things than we can imagine!  

The inability to try is called Learned Helplessness. 

You might even hesitate to share your story at all because gaslighting is designed to make you question your own credibility and competence.

Black parents in America grow their kids differently, because the landscape their kids are growing requires it. The stark difference between how people of color are treated by police and how white people are treated results in white people thinking black people are ridiculous for being afraid of the police. People who are afraid of the police grew up in a world where the police are a threat. 

The accumulation of stress leads to compassion fatigue.

Signs of compassion fatigue are:

checking out emotionally

minimizing or dismissing suffering 

feeling helpless, hopeless, or powerless while also feeling personally responsible for doing more

staying in a bad situation, whether workplace or relationship, out of a sense of grandiosity- “If I don’t do it, no one will”.

The FIRST STEP in moving on is knowing the game is rigged. That the cycle needs to be completed, keep yourself satisfied, and engage with your SOMETHING LARGER; which will heal the Human Giver Syndrome. 

A lot of us are carrying around decades of incomplete stress response cycles because Human Giver Syndrome told us we had to be happy and calm and not make other people uncomfortable with our anger. Move, sing, scream, write, chop wood. Purge the rage. COMPLETE THE CYCLE.  

You then need to teach your nervous system that it’s not helpless. Your goal is to stabilize YOU, so that you can maintain a sense of efficacy, so that you can do the important stuff your family and your community need from you. 

The truth is you learned helplessness from experiences of BEING HELPLESS. Smash the patriarchy. You smash it by making meaning- engaging with your Something Larger in ways that heal Human Giver Syndrome. 

The body mass index (BMI) chart and its labels- overweight, underweight, obese, etc.- were created by a panel of 9 individuals, 7 of whom were “employed by weight loss clinics and thus have an economic interest in encouraging use of their facilities”. The BMI chart is nonsense as a measure of personal health. 

Many of us have grown into world class ignorers of our own needs, just as we were taught to be. 

When you were little, what did you eat when you were hungry?  People who grew up in a home where food was abundant, nourishing, and free of guilt and shame can answer that question with pleasure. People who grew up in homes where food was either scarce, low in quality, or laden with guilt and shame would answer it very differently. 

Social isolation and loneliness increased a person’s odds of an early death by 25-30%. 

What a person with that message is really saying is “How dare you break the rules and treat yourself as if you MATTER? How dare you respect your body, when I’m not allowed to respect mine? What’s the matter with you? Get back in line. When that happens, remind yourself that the comment is coming from someone who is suffering from Human Giver Syndrome. People will often say “Good for you” in a passive-aggressive manner. Your response to that should be, “It IS good for me”. OR simply smile. Remind yourself that they’re suffering from Human Giver Syndrome. 

You are not here to be “productive”. You are here to be you, to engage with your Something Larger, to move through the world with confidence and joy. And to do that, you require rest. 

The uncomfortable fragile part of ourselves serves a very important function. She grew inside us, to manage the chasm between who we are are who Human Giver Syndrome expects us to be. The constant giving women do is similar to Sisyphus rolling a rock up a hill only to have it roll back down each time. 

Toxic Perfectionism- perfectionism functions as a maladaptive strategy to cope with stress, depression, anxiety, loneliness, repressed rage, and helpless despair. 

If self-compassion is so good for us, why don’t we do it? We’ve found 3 reasons why this whole self-compassion thing might be surprisingly difficult.  

• We’re worried that if we stop beating ourselves up, then we’ll lost all motivation and just sit around watching Real Housewives  of Anywhere and eating Lucky Charms in a bowl full of Bud Light. 
• Our goals matter so much that we’re willing to suffer this self-inflicted pain. 
• We believe that because we’ve always done it that way, it must be why we’ve accomplished as much as we have. 

It is important to teach children that it is okay to need things. To teach that people will be there to help along the path. 

Many of us simply get used to walking around in some degree of pain all the time.

A fact about healing that most guru’s don’t tell you about…..HEALING HURTS. 

Being grateful for good things doesn’t erase the difficult things. 

Isn’t joy the same as happiness? OH, NO. Joy arises from an internal clarity about our purpose. 

 

To get your own copy of the book: you can click here to purchase it on Amazon! 

 

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