The Type E Woman- how to overcome the stress of being everything to everybody by Harriet Braiker, PhD. 

This is a really great book and I really enjoyed  learning about many various things. My favorite quotes I have noted below:

Competitiveness, assertiveness, and independence- traits widely conceded to be what is needed to get ahead in the career world. When women display such traits, they are labeled pushy, aggressive, and well, bitchy. 

Type E women feel pulled in multiple, often conflicting directions by a seemingly endless stream of demands from family, work, husbands or boyfriends, and community and/or professional organizations. They assume unrealistic and excessive burdens. They want to keep everyone’s approval. They cope with the demands by trying to do it all, often at a substantial cost to their emotional and physical well-being. 

With so many demands, impinging on a finite supply of time, her daily schedule is crowded and precariously balanced. Minor inconveniences, such as a late delivery or a broken appliance, may trigger rage or near panic. And sometimes trying to cover so many bases produces a kind of mental fragmentation. When she is at work, she may find herself distracted by household responsibilities or personal relationship problems; at home, work-related pressures and worries may keep her from being truly present and available to her husband/boyfriend or family. 

The resentment and frustration produced by continually putting others’ needs ahead of one’s own- the everything-to-everybody Type E coping style-inevitably creates feelings of hostility. 

For Type E women, physiological arousal becomes a way of life. They are almost always “on”, in one role or another, pushing themselves to do their best and to please others. We know from the Type A research that chronic physiological arousal puts the body under unbearable strain and predisposes the stressed individual to cardiovascular disease as well as a myriad of other emotional and physical afflictions and problems that are caused or exacerbated by stress. 

In the book there is a fun quiz to take to see how you score. The guidance given is- try to become more aware of the ways in which you contribute to your own stress cycle by biting off more than you can reasonably chew, and pushing yourself beyond your physical or emotional endurance limits. 

The Type E woman has two jobs- or, at best, a job and a half. She not only “moon lights”, in the sense that her second job begins when she comes home from work, she “dawnlights” as well. Working women with children to send off to school are often awake and working from the crack of dawn. 

The Type E Woman’s dilemma is, in a way, an arithmetic problem. She adds up all the things that she is asked to do, is expected to do, or feels that she should do, in all her roles. The catch is that it totals more than one mortal, however talented and competent, can safely do. 

What women, as individuals, can do is make some constructive changes in the way they respond to the stressors in their lives. They need to learn new and better coping skills to deal with the very real stream of demands that their busy lives entail. 

Chronic stress is the single greatest contributor to burnout. 

Maintaining the belief that being everything to everyone is desirable and possible can have damaging effects on self-esteem. 

Type E stress can be divided into its component parts: Excellence, Anxiety, Ego Confusion, Excessive Self-Reliance, Erroneous Expectations, and Everything to Everybody Behavior. 

Excellence- “achievement motivation”; it is a concern with excellence. It seems to be the need to achieve is virtually fused to the need for what psychologists call affiliation, or the need for social approval and acceptance. 

If a woman doesn’t need you for status or money, then you have to work at getting her and keeping her with affection, sexuality, and, basically, with yourself. That is a frightening proposition for men with less than solid self-esteem. While many men give lip service to wanting an independent, smart woman, the reality of a relationship with such a woman makes them uncomfortable. 

Autonomy and independence are built into the rearing of boys; cautiousness and dependency are built into the rearing of girls. 

Investigators have been quite successful in isolating lists of adjectives that are seen by most people as applying to women, and a parallel list of traits that are seen as generally applying to men. In virtually every study, the ratio of positively loaded words assigned to men as compared to women was about two to one. 

Trust me. Superwomen have SUPERSTRESS. Some have just learned to manage the stress better than others. 

Many women have endured deep and painful emotional wounds to their own needs to be cared for, nurtured, and supported as a result of loving and giving too much without adequate reciprocation. 

Type E woman deny, suppress, and repress their dependency needs in other ways. They have difficulty asking others for help or requesting adequate support services in a work environment. 

But broadly construed, and without negative connotations, dependency needs can be understood as the desire to lean on another person, to rely on another for support, to be relieved of isolation, and to experience that desire consciously as a subjective “need” for another person. Stated in this way, dependency needs are part of the motor that drives love relationships. 

What’s more, for most Type E women, work doesn’t stop when they come home at night. They merely shift roles again and, relying on themselves, assume responsibility for meal preparation, or, at least, seeing to it that the people who depend on them for such things are fed well and on time. She still has deeper dependency needs for emotional support, empathy, affection, nurturance, protective warmth, and reassurance from her partner. 

Many Type E women have expressed to me the sentiment that it would be great to have a wife. 

A healthy, balanced, interdependent love relationship that includes mutual nurturance, affection, sexual loving, and emotional support is one of the best prescriptions for building stress resistance. 

Everything-to-everybody behavior is the result of a belief system that advises you to cater to others’ needs at the cost of denying of frustrating your own.

Nobody benefits from a woman’s denial of healthy dependency needs: both the woman and the man get the short end of the stick, and their relationship too often becomes a source of additional stress rather than the haven and source of stress resistance that it could and should be. 

Many Type E women deny or ignore their body’s signals, failing to heed the warning signs. The Type E woman will typically work excessively long hours (at work and/or home) and fail to take enough breaks, naps, vacations, or respites from the continuous energy expenditure. The unhappy-and predictable-result is often a compromise of immune resistance, vulnerability to infection and illness, and exacerbation of the physical stress signals that the woman erroneously overlooked. 

Your own sense of value and worth should be granted to yourself unconditionally. Once your sense of self-worth is established and solid, the compulsion to prove your prowess and competence at every turn abates, as does the stress cycle it produces. 

Type E women typically are drained by their own openness, availability, and emotional strength. Because they are emotionally open, as well as strong and available, other people plug into them like an energy source. And unless you regulate the outward flow of your finite resources, it is unlikely that anyone else will spontaneously moderate her or his level of need or demand. 

All too easily, other people can seduce the Type E woman into carrying too much of the responsibility and burden for their needs, to the point where the woman’s own emotional and physical resistance resources are severely compromised and impaired. It is appropriate, for example, to “mother” your children; it is not, however, your responsibility to instruct or “bring up” other adults. 

It is, however, a pattern of behavior that creates chronic overarousal, and thereby courts serious trouble in the form of physical and emotional burnout and illness. 

The point is that Type E women frequently sacrifice their precious time doing things that they don’t have to do and don’t want to do merely because they do not readily and forthrightly say “No”. 

To read this book yourself, you can order it from here:

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