Becky Blab

On the Psychology Today blog there’s a post which highlights the difficulty of dealing with gender roles as a wife and mother:

The fact is that women in most countries are expected to be compassionate, nurturing, and to put their own needs aside on a regular basis. In most Third World countries, a woman’s primary job is considered to be homemaker and mother. Few ever have the opportunity to pursue an interest, much less a job or career. If a woman is not compassionate, she is considered a bad woman. Even in more modern societies like Japan, women are still supposed to make their husband and children the primary focus of their life. For this reason, many Japanese women are deliberately delaying getting married, since they know that once they do so they will be expected to stop their career and make homemaking their major occupation. The same is true in many Middle Eastern countries and in India.

In my practice I have worked with many Middle Eastern and Indian women whose own mothers were pressured into getting married. Far from being compassionate, they describe their mothers are harsh, critical and impatient. Sensing that they may be the same way with their own children, they resist getting married. But they receive so much pressure from their families that they usually give in. They end up not only sacrificing their own lives (many would prefer to have a career) but their future children’s lives as well since they find they cannot emotionally connect with their children or that they take their anger and frustration out on their children.

This links to my recent UV post where I referred to the idealisation of sacrifice, and when it is forced everything goes awry. In theory it sounds nice, but actually we all have hopes and dreams for ourselves which often do not fit with society’s expectations for us. So the cycle of suffering keeps getting perpetuated…