You're the One Everyone Calls. But Who Do You Call?
- Michaela Kozlik
- Mar 9
- 6 min read
Chronic emotional caretaking in women is almost always rooted in early adaptation, not your personality. Illinois therapist explains why the women carrying the most are often the most exhausted, why boundaries feel impossible rather than just difficult, and what somatic therapy and therapy intensives do that willpower and better time management cannot.
By Michaela Kozlik, LCPC · Therapist for women in midlife & perimenopause, Illinois
You're the friend who picks up every time. The sister who shows up. The colleague everyone vents to. The mom who holds it together even when she's barely holding herself together.
And on some level it feels good to be needed. It feels like you're doing something right. Like you matter.
But there's another part of this... The part where you hang up the phone after a two-hour call with a friend in crisis and realize you haven't told anyone that you're not okay either. The part where you sit in your car after a long day of managing everyone else's emotions and feel completely empty.
The Exhaustion That's Hard to Acknowledge Out Loud
Emotional labor is real work. When you listen, hold space, problem-solve, and show up for other people, you are spending actual energy. Real resources. And unlike physical tiredness, this kind of exhaustion is invisible, which means nobody around you is likely to notice it, and you might not even recognize it in yourself until you hit a wall.
You might be carrying too much if:
You feel drained after almost every social interaction, even ones you used to enjoy
You're irritable or snappy in ways that surprise even you
You've started avoiding certain people because you just don't have anything left
You feel quietly resentful and then guilty for feeling resentful
You can't remember the last time someone asked how you were doing and actually waited for the answer
You're exhausted but can't relax — your brain is always on, always scanning for the next thing someone needs
If that list hit close to home, I want you to know that what you're feeling is real. And it's not because you're too sensitive, but because you've been giving from an empty cup for a long time.
Why You Became This Person
Most women who end up as the emotional anchor for everyone around them didn't just happen into that role.
Maybe you grew up in a home where someone needed managing. A parent who was depressed, volatile, unpredictable, or just emotionally absent. A family dynamic where your feelings were too much, or beside the point, or simply never asked about. And so you learned to focus outward. To track other people's moods. To be helpful and low-maintenance and fine.
That was a remarkably smart adaptation.
The problem isn't that you learned to care for others. The problem is that nobody ever taught you it was okay to care for yourself too.
This is why trauma and caretaking are so often tangled together. The compulsive need to be needed, to earn your place through helpfulness, usually has roots.
What Happens in Therapy — For Real
I want to be specific here, because I think there's a lot of vague language around therapy that doesn't actually tell you anything useful.
When women come to me carrying this kind of exhaustion, the first thing we do is slow down. Not fix. Not optimize. Slow down enough to actually locate what's happening inside because most lifelong caretakers have spent so long attending to everyone else that they've genuinely lost track of themselves.
In session, this might look like noticing that when I ask "how are you feeling right now?" there's a long pause... maybe because you actually don't know. You know how everyone else is feeling. You've forgotten to check in with yourself.
That's where we start, with curiosity about what's actually happening in your body and your experience right now, in this moment.
Learning to feel your own feelings again
One woman I worked with realized in our third session that every time she started to feel sad, she immediately pivoted to problem-solving — for herself or anyone nearby. She'd never just let herself be sad. It had felt unsafe her whole life. In therapy, we practiced just... sitting with it. Not fixing it. Just letting it be there. It sounds simple. It was one of the hardest things she'd ever done — and one of the most freeing.
Understanding the pattern without blaming yourself
Part of what I do is help you see your patterns with compassion instead of judgment. The goal isn't to make you feel bad about how you've been operating. It's to help you understand why — and to start creating just a little more choice in how you respond.
Because right now it probably doesn't feel like a choice. It feels like just who you are. And that's exactly what we work to gently untangle.
Actually practicing something different
Therapy isn't just talking about things. It's practicing new ways of being in a space that's safe enough to try. That might look like noticing the moment you abandon your own needs to take care of someone else's. Sitting with the discomfort of not immediately fixing something. Saying out loud what you actually need...Small things. But they add up. And over time, they start to feel less terrifying.
On Boundaries — Because It's More Complicated Than "Just Say No"
I know. Every article about caretaker burnout eventually gets to boundaries. And I want to address it directly, because most advice on this topic is not helpful.
"Just set boundaries" is about as useful as telling someone with anxiety to "just calm down." If you could have done it easily, you would have done it already.
The reason boundaries feel so impossible for women with deep caretaker patterns isn't a knowledge problem. You know, intellectually, that it's okay to say no. The problem is that somewhere in your nervous system, saying no still feels like abandonment. Like you'll lose the relationship. Like you'll be too much — or not enough. Like something bad will happen.
That's not a mindset issue. That's a nervous system issue. And it responds to the kind of slow, careful, body-based work we do in therapy — not to willpower or better time management.
Boundaries aren't a skill you're missing. They're something your nervous system needs to learn is safe.
This is also, by the way, one of the reasons a therapy intensive can be so powerful for this kind of work. When you have extended, uninterrupted time to go deep — rather than picking things up and putting them down every 50 minutes — you can actually get to the places where this stuff lives. And start to shift it.
The Quiet Grief of Not Being Seen
Here's the part that doesn't get said enough: there's grief in this.
Grief for all the times you were there for everyone and no one showed up for you. Grief for the version of you that learned to make herself small and helpful and undemanding because that felt like the only safe way to be loved. Grief for the needs you buried so long ago you can't even remember what they were.
This grief is real. And it deserves space — not just acknowledgment, but actual, witnessed, held space. Which is part of what therapy offers. Not just tools and strategies. A place where someone is paying attention to you. Where your experience is the point. Where you don't have to take care of anyone.
For women navigating burnout or the upheaval of perimenopause — when the old coping strategies stop working and everything starts surfacing — this grief often comes up fast and hard. And having somewhere to bring it matters enormously.
You Deserve Support Too.
I want to say something directly: you do not have to earn the right to be supported. You don't have to be in crisis. You don't have to have tried everything else first. You don't have to be sure it will "work" before you let yourself try.
You can just be a woman who is tired of carrying everything alone — and decide that you'd like some help with that. That's enough. That's more than enough.
If you're somewhere in Illinois and you're reading this thinking this is me — I'd love to talk.
You've been holding it together for everyone else. Let's make some space for you.
Virtual therapy and therapy intensives for women across Illinois. Free consultation — real conversation, no pressure.
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