I'm Not Your Emotional Vibrator.
I used to feel good about being the “therapist friend”. It made me feel competent and appreciated being the person people came to when they needed to scratch an itch. I could calm, comfort + counsel like nobody’s business. Then, I learned a phrase that would turn my identity inside out. I was reading the book Emotional Labor by Rose Hackman with my feminist study group + getting pissed off at every page turn.
The concept of emotional labor articulated something I didn’t know that I knew. That thing being…emotional care is real, effortful + valuable. Women have been handed down a generational task list of action items that must be performed to not be considered an evil bitch. Until given that phrase, my consciousness did not have the space to see the task list for what it was. An idea about what femininity should be. Not what femininity is.
When you wear an idea as your identity, you have no room to evaluate where it came from. The ideas of womanness I had been given required me to be self-sacrificing, self-deprecating and self-rejecting. If I didn’t comply, the evil bitch award was waiting for me.
Emotional Labor Costs You Your Body
What shifted for me was realizing the nervous system cost of being an emotional vibrator. Your vibration is actually a report on the state of your nervous system + internal world. We all receive nervous system signals from one another + perceive them at different levels of awareness. When someone came to me for comfort, what their nervous system was saying is “Hey, I can’t manage all this charge in here can you down regulate me?”
That’s a job. That’s emotional labor. And it costs you your body.
In relationships where regulation is mutually available, this can be a beautiful way to connect. In one sided dynamics, this will always lead to energetic drain.
(Check out my video below for a deeper dive on drain ⬇️)
Your Internal Power Plant
In a power plant, electricity is generated at very high voltage. So that our homes don’t literally explode, it has to go through a step-down process—traveling long distances and passing through multiple substations where transformers reduce the voltage in stages. That process isn’t free; it requires infrastructure, constant regulation, and energy is lost as heat along the way, making it an inherently expensive process just to make power usable.
Emotional labor is a costly process to the body in the same way the power plant step-down process is expensive. When you are using your emotions to regulate someone else you are going through a biological process that requires resources from your nervous system. That regulation burns real energy. The stronger the emotion, the more work your system has to do to soften, filter, and redirect it, which is why it can leave you feeling exhausted even if nothing “physical” happened.
When you understand this, you start to see that honoring your energetic limits and treating your energy like a valuable resource isn’t bitchy…it’s basic. You deserve well being, rest + to feel good in your body. Period
This is so felt.