Increasing resentment, frustration and disempowerment in your relationships? Caretaking might be the reason why.

Caretaking achieves the opposite of the intended, creating conflict rather than closeness in your relationships. Increasing resentment, frustration and stuckness are outcomes of caretaking.

Caretaking is different to caring. Caretaking disempowers, while care empowers. Caretaking creates resentment and disconnection between you and your partner, while care brings you closer and deepens your intimacy. Caretaking is rooted in an attempt to change them, caring comes from accepting them for who they are, and it’s an expression of love for the very joy of loving without ends.

Caretaking is a form of codependency, usually developed in childhood, and it can happen in any of your relationships: your intimate relationship, with your child, in your friendship, with your boss, with a parent.

There’s a superiority/inferiority dynamic rather than equality in caretaking. Caretaking comes from a perceived inequality. If you’re caretaking someone, you believe yourself to be superior to them. Care, on the other hand, comes from a place of equality. You see them as equal to you. You know that they are as wise and capable as you are.

Caretaking disempowers and belittles them, care empowers them. Caretaking is deeply disempowering to both them and you. It comes from a place of not believing in them and thinking that they’re less than. From that position, your attempts to caretake them broadcast to them: you’re too small, you’re too incapable, you’re too weak. Conversely, caring comes from a place of love, not fear. You don’t think they’re small, fragile, or incapable of handling life or themselves.

Caretaking leads to growing resentment of the caretaker. If you’re caretaking someone, you’re treating them as inferior to you. And you’re mirroring what you perceive as their smallness back to them. They often respond with increasing levels of frustration and resentment with you.

The reason you caretake people is because you can’t cope in yourself with the feelings and behaviours you’re trying to manage in them. If you can’t deal with their sadness, that’s because you are scared of yours. If you can’t deal with their anger, that’s because you’re not dealing with yours.

In caretaking, self-interest masquerades as selflessness. You tell yourself you’re doing it for them or even sometimes that they’re demanding it from you, when in fact you’re doing it for yourself. Caretaking often comes from guilt. A misconception that their happiness depends on you makes you feel guilty when your partner isn’t happy. In response to this guilt, you engage in caretaking. You tell yourself that you’re doing it for them and sacrificing yourself, when in fact you’re just responding to your own guilt.

Caretaking comes from your desire to avoid an experience, e.g. their bad mood, or their sadness, or their frustration. As a result you manage or tiptoe around their feelings, which often ends up leaving them in a worse mood, makes them more sad and more frustrated.

If you’re caretaking them, you’re threatening them like a threat. You walk on eggshells, you overextend yourself, you’re trying to get things perfect, you over-sacrifice. They in turn get tired of you treating them like a threat and start acting like one.

Key mindset shifts to end the cycle of caretaking

Recognise their inherent wisdom and goodness–and mirror that back to them.

Recognise that they are in no way inferior or superior to you.

Treat them as the conscious, timeless, boundless being that they are. A being that is complex, creative and powerful beyond imagination, and that is here on their own journey.

Apply the three above points to yourself.

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To what degree has caretaking been a pattern in your different relationships: with your partner, boss, employees, colleagues, children, friends, parents? On what end of the dynamic are you in each of these relationships? What changes would you love to see for a more supportive and creative partnership? If this is something you’re curious to explore with me, I’d love to hear from you. You can get in touch with me here.