Pulling Back the Veil.
Women Need Care & Repair.
A note before you read this: this piece discusses sexual assault and sexual harassment. If today isn't the day you have capacity for consuming this kind of content, please take care of yourself!
Sexual assault. Sexual harassment. Psychological manipulation. Emotional abuse. Gender discrimination. That’s the short list of what my nervous system has absorbed and endured in the workplaces I’ve walked through in my life from people I encountered on the job.
I am a white woman. If I were a person of color, someone whose gender identity falls outside cisgender, someone whose sexual orientation falls outside heteronormative, or someone of a different race, background, or religion, this list would be longer. The impacts deeper. This needs to be said, because it's true, and because naming it is part of the work.
To be clear: I'm not calling out any company or organization here. None of what follows is really about any one place, any one manager, any one job. It's about what was left in me after all of it, in my body, in my nervous system, and what I've come to believe that says about what women carry that never gets properly tended.
One of the first happened the summer after I graduated college, working as a waitress at a chain restaurant. A coworker assaulted me in the kitchen, in front of the cooks, bussers, and other wait staff, while I prepped a tray of salad and breadsticks. The male waiter who assaulted me stepped back and laughed. The cooks laughed, too. Everyone else ignored me. I was frozen. In shock. Disgusted. Later, when I gathered myself at the end of my shift, I went to tell my manager what happened, a man I expected to meet me with care and concern (obviously, I was young and naive). He hit on me instead and asked me out on a date. That was his response to me being assaulted mid-shift by someone he supervised, and I worked beside every night. I promptly quit that job and told no one about what happened. All I was left with was shame and the responsibility of holding that assault in my body forever.
Not long after that, early in my career, I found myself in an office with two bosses who made my life feel like living hell. The top guy had uncontrollable rage problems, and if you were someone like me, whom he didn't like very much for whatever reason, he would single you out for what you wore to work that day or for the minute and a half you showed up after you were scheduled and go on a screaming tirade through the halls, threatening you and your coworkers with strict dress codes, antiquated time clocks, and firing. In a professional business office. Nearly daily. The other one demeaned and belittled my coworker to the rest of the staff for needing to take time off after a miscarriage and kept pornography in his desk. I observed how even some of the more senior women in the office seemed to glaze over this behavior, likely as a matter of survival.
And the hits didn't stop there, and they didn't get better, either. Customers, managers, coworkers, colleagues, community members...running roughshod over me and the women working alongside me, on and off for years, across more jobs than I can count on one hand. I carried this trauma with me from one role to the next...
Over the last 18 years, I split my time between running a marketing agency and juggling motherhood. I called myself a full-time, stay-at-home working mom. Because that’s exactly what I did …ran my company and all our clients' needs from home while I tended to that home and the needs of everyone who lived there. (For the record, that configuration didn't insulate me from more experiences of harm by not working in a formal office. Not even close.) Recently, I’ve turned my focus outward and reconnected with old colleagues and friends from my earlier working life, before kids. I had lunch recently with a few former coworkers, and we ended up time traveling, trading stories from previous roles we held, many of which included experiences of harassment and harm. Every story was egregious in its own way, and almost none of them resulted in any real change or amends for what it cost us. And these weren’t similar coincidental stories, told over sandwiches and salads in a cafe. They were the SAME stories. This, my friends, is a PATTERN.
I've written recently about what it costs a woman's body to be everyone else's shock absorber, the meetings held steady, the moods managed, the storm swallowed so someone else didn't have to feel it. This is the other end of that same rope. Because underneath the conditioning and the years of being trained to read a room and soften ourselves into it, there was also this: an actual, physical vigilance. A part of me that was always scanning. Reading a manager's tone before he'd said a word. Clocking which coworker stood a little too close. Noticing who looked me in the eye or who was more focused on my chest. That kind of alertness isn't a character trait or an overreaction. It's a nervous system that learned, correctly, that danger in a workplace wasn't hypothetical. Ask any woman who's worked in a hotel, a bar, a retail floor, an office with a closed door and a boss who liked to close it. She'll tell you straight up what those environments require of her.
That's the part I think we still don't talk about openly enough. Not just what women absorb emotionally to keep everyone else regulated, which is its own silent cost. But what it does to a body to also be on watch, on high alert, for years, for decades, in the same spaces where we're supposed to be doing our best work. Two full-time jobs running at once (on top of the actual job we were hired for...ugh), both invisible, both unpaid, both eventually showing up somewhere: in the body, in the sleep, in the health problems (like autoimmunity) that get labeled as stress, like that explains anything.
I don't share any of this to argue that every workplace is toxic or every person in it is dangerous. Most days, most people, most jobs are not that, thank goodness. What I am doing is pulling one thread through my own life, and through the lives of the women I keep hearing from and working with, and noticing how often it leads somewhere familiar. And I've come to believe the fix was never only going to be a better policy or a better training, because policies were never what was missing in the first place. What's actually needed is slower and much harder than that. It's people, especially the ones with power over someone else's paycheck or safety, doing the real work of knowing their own unfinished business well enough that it doesn't leak onto whoever's in their care. That's not a small ask. It's the whole damn ask.
But beyond even that, here's the point I really want to make, the one I circle back to again and again. Women need care. We need repair. We need real healing, not the managed, professionalized, symptom-soothing version of it we've been handed instead. What I've shared here is the darkest edge of something much larger...a nervous system that has carried more than its share for longer than it should have had to, in ways loud and violent and in ways so deeply underground they never were named at all. The assault, the harassment, the abuse of power, all of it sits on the same continuum as the smaller, constant vigilance most women live inside without ever calling it what it is. None of it was ours to carry alone, and none of it gets resolved by being strong enough to keep carrying it.
Repair looks like what happened at that lunch table. Women naming what actually happened to them, out loud, to people who believe them without needing convincing. It looks like a body finally getting to stand down from a watch it's been keeping since it was a teenager. It looks like healing that isn't rushed, isn't optimized, isn't scheduled between two meetings. Care first. Then repair. Then, eventually, whatever comes after that, once there's room for it.
That's the field I'm building toward. Not a workplace redesigned around better policy. A place, and a practice, where women get to step off watch duty and be tended to, finally, the way we've spent our whole lives tending everyone else.
AUTHOR'S NOTE: This article is part of an ongoing series on The Field for Human Communication, the work of helping people find and use their authentic voice in professional life.
"I guide women who are DONE performing leadership and are ready to embody it through The Field for Human Communication™ - the living system where humans communicate, relate and regulate." -Mary 🌱
How this article was made
Ideas and insights: Original, drawn from lived experience, research, and field observation by Mary Huron Hunter.
Editing tool: Drafted and reviewed for syntax and style with the assistance of Claude (Anthropic AI).
Writing: Authored by Mary Huron Hunter.
Mary Huron Hunter is the founder of The Field for Human Communication™, a space for growing leadership from the inside out. Coaching, coursework, consulting, and feminine leadership guidance for the leader who is ready to stop translating herself and start communicating from who she actually is.
