A 46-year-old client says that when she started therapy with me, she remembered feeling she must endure everything at work, at home and as a parent even though she was running on empty. “Over the last few years I have begun to see how my emotional and physical fatigue is closely linked to this self-imposed belief. I feel my endurance serves me well in many scenarios but I also pay a price for it. Now I recognise that I never gave myself permission to feel exhausted.”
What the client is trying to articulate is that she has begun to see her capacity for endurance as both a strength and a weakness. In my experience, this is true for most of our qualities whether it’s empathy or our capacity to be pragmatic or optimistic. Very often when we label some of these traits as positive or “this is how I’m wired”, we begin to over engage in them. We miss out on recognising the situations where we need to pause and examine if these qualities are beneficial and serving us a purpose.
The trap of endurance
As a therapist, I see this theme across genders, though more in women. More often than not, it’s clients between their late 30s to those in their late 60s who tend to bring this up.
Endurance is a fundamental capacity that has contributed to the survival of our species. At its core, it refers to our ability to work through difficulties, pain, discomfort, ambiguity and it helps us manage the relentless demands placed upon us. It is very closely linked to grit and perseverance. It allows us to withstand hardship and persist. Given this understanding, it’s crucial to remember that all of us possess endurance. It’s a capacity built into our systems as humans.
At the same time, in practice and elsewhere, I see individuals differ in how they express, engage with, and cultivate this capacity. These differences may help explain why individuals differ in their capacity for endurance. This combined with the beliefs we have formed through childhood and conditioning explains how it manifests across individuals.
Women often discuss this in the context of the belief they carry that endurance is sacred and one should be able to endure no matter what. It is this belief which doesn’t give them permission to acknowledge their suffering or how depleted they are. This belief robs people of agency and makes them feel small or not good enough if they can’t endure.
As a result, women operate from a place of sacrifice, to such an extent that very often they don’t even recognise that they may be neglecting their physical, social and emotional needs. So the exhaustion they experience stems from constantly providing care, doing their share and that of others too (stepping into hyper-responsibility), and relational labour across relationships.
In contrast, when men discuss endurance in therapy, it reflects emotional suppression and a belief that being vulnerable or talking about it shows them as weak. Endurance often manifests as shame about their vulnerability, intellectualising their emotions, and jumping to solve the problem without acknowledging the emotional and physical energy it takes.
Learning to pause and recognise when endurance is healthy and when it is limiting is a good starting point. I often work with clients to identify old beliefs that may be fuelling endurance. The idea is to begin acknowledging areas where endurance pays off and at what time and in which areas it is sustained by guilt, unrealistic fears, rigidity or the belief that taught you to never give up, even though your functioning and relationships were getting impacted.
What we are not taught is that endurance can come with knowing when to stop, when to begin again and also asking for help. Often when endurance is carried on in unhealthy ways, people carry the belief that they have to do it all. Finally, when endurance is rooted in our core values, clarity and we believe that it’s coming from our own informed choice, it serves us a purpose.
Sonali Gupta is a Mumbai-based psychotherapist and author