Women as Shock Absorbers
This Contract Needs Renegotiating.
I've held three people's nervous systems steady in one afternoon and called it Tuesday. A child's meltdown in one ear, a partner's feedback in the other, an "urgent" client email waiting to be answered that needed a grounded response as if nothing at all was happening around it. And somewhere beneath all of that, my own body absorbing it all, taking hit after hit so the household and the business could stay upright.
For a long time I thought that was just what capable women did. WRONG! I've since learned this has a name, a mechanism, and a cost.
Here's the truth as I see it: what we call being the calm, collected one is not a personality trait. It's your autonomic nervous system doing a full-body job, in real time, with a huge bill that comes due later. OUCH. This one hurts...
Here's WHY: The vagus nerve runs from your brainstem down through your heart, your lungs, your gut, and it's constantly reading the room for you, deciding whether you're safe before you've had a single conscious thought about it. When it reads safety, your voice softens, your face opens, your breath settles. When it reads danger, that same nerve pulls you into a fight you can't have in a conference room or a Zoom call, or a freeze you can't dare to express or show. What's less talked about is what that same nerve is doing to your immune system the entire time it's working.
The vagus nerve and the immune system are in constant conversation. There's a real, physical pathway by which your nervous system can turn inflammation in the body up or down, depending on what it believes is happening around you. Which means every time you swallow the shock so someone else doesn't have to...keeping your face steady, absorbing what's not yours…you're not just managing a mood. You're asking your body to run a stress response. And a body that runs that response long enough starts paying for it in ways that show up on a lab report, on an Oura ring report, or in the way your body starts to rebel, not just in a mood.
Chronic stress does something specific to the immune system that a single hard day never will. A short burst can sharpen your defenses. Sustained pressure, the kind that never gets a break, suppresses them instead. Researchers who study caregivers, most of them women, mind you, keep finding the same thing: the emotional weight of caring for others shows up as measurable inflammation and measurable immune strain. Our grandmothers weren't being dramatic when they said worry could make you sick. They were right! And science has finally caught up with grandma to confirm what they knew was true.I know this one from the inside, not just as a leadership coach who studies it. Over the last several years, I've lived this in a BIG way. Countless blood tests. Three painful, expensive surgeries. Massive diet changes. Expensive supplements. Relentless flare-ups and system shutdowns. All while parenting, partnering, juggling, and navigating some of the toughest seasons of my work and my life.
This IS the price: autoimmune conditions. Eighty percent of which are carried by women, by the way. Yep. 80%.
We were built for this and then punished for it in the same breath. Girls are trained early to read the emotional weather of every room and adjust before anyone asks them to. Anger gets suppressed, and assertiveness gets softened. In its place, we are rewarded, over and over, for making other people comfortable at the cost of our own truth, our own wellbeing. There's a name for this pattern now, the fourth survival response, alongside fight, flight, and freeze, is called fawn. It doesn't feel like a trauma response while you're doing it. It feels like being good with people. Professional. Unflappable. That's exactly what makes it so hard to see and so expensive to keep running.
And here's something that should make you a little furious and a little free, at the same time. We were told to leave all of this at the door. Motherhood didn't belong in the boardroom. The steadiness built inside a hard relationship wasn't a professional asset. And then, in the very same moment, we were expected to walk in regulated. Warm. Endlessly able to hold everyone's activation without ever naming our own. The skill was declared invisible and required constantly.
(Makes me feel like taking a nap or screaming my head off just thinking about this...)That's why I put motherhood and partnership on my bio. Unapologetically. Not as a soft, look-I'm-a-mom! attention-grabber. Because there is no executive program that will teach you what holding a marriage through its hardest season teaches you, or what showing up present and prepared for an 8 a.m. call after a 2 a.m. night with a barfing child teaches you. That's not the gentle version of leadership; that's leadership with no safety net.
That kind of leadership takes everything you've got, including, some days, your actual voice.
There's a distinction in all of this I keep thinking about, also, one that has everything to do with communication, and once you hear it you can't unhear it. Do this long enough, habitually enough, and your nervous system stops waiting for a new threat to show up. It builds itself a default setting instead, a kind of standing "I've had enough" that switches on before you've even registered what's being asked of you. It often comes out as, "I don't know."
And here's the thing...
Is it really "I don't know" OR is it "I don't know how?" These two are not the same sentence, and they're not coming from the same place in your body. The parts of your brain that produce language go silent under threat, the same way everything else does. You can know something in your bones and still not be able to find the words for it in that moment, not because you're unprepared, but because your nervous system has decided survival matters more than sentences right now. That's most of what "I don't know" actually is. Not ignorance. A body that went offline mid-thought in a room it decided wasn't safe for the whole truth."I don't know how" is a completely different animal. It's regulated. It says: I know exactly what's true and what I want; I am just asking for the road to get there. One sentence comes from a body in survival. The other comes from a body still online, still connected to what it knows, willing to be seen not having all the answers without disappearing.
None of this is an argument for learning to absorb more, better, longer. A regulated nervous system isn't a silent one. It's a responsive one, able to feel the weather of a room without losing itself in it.
We don't get to lead with integrity while leaving parts of ourselves at the door. Not the motherhood. Not the marriage. Not the body that has been keeping score this whole time, whether we were listening or not. Integrity just means the inside and the outside match.
What have you been absorbing that was never yours to carry alone? And where, in your body, do you already know the true answer to something you've been calling "I don't know"?If you're already exhausted just reading this, that's exactly where I want you to stop. Not to hand you one more thing to carry. To do something smaller than that, and harder.
>>> LOCATE. Before you say a word, before you decide what's safe to share and what isn't, notice what's actually true in your body right now. Most of us skip this step entirely and go straight to managing the room.
>>> ROOT. Find your feet on the floor. Find your breath. Come back into the body that's been running everyone else's emergency long enough to forget it's allowed to have one of its own. This isn't about calming down. A regulated nervous system isn't a silent one. It's a responsive one.
>>> LEAD. Only then, speak. Say the true thing instead of the translated one. Let your voice carry what your body already knows.
This is the work I do with clients every day, at the exact intersection of communication, nervous system regulation, and emotional intelligence: helping burned-out, fed-up women renegotiate the terms of a contract they never actually agreed to. If this article felt like I was describing you, I probably was.
And if you're ready to stop absorbing the shock by default and start choosing where your energy actually goes, that's exactly the work I'm here for @thehumanfield.co.The contract's still open. Let's renegotiate it together. I'm with you. And I feel you with me. 🙏🏾
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.
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, and consulting for the leader who is ready to stop translating herself and start communicating from who she actually is.
Sources: Stephen Porges' research on polyvagal theory and the vagus nerve; Kevin Tracey's work on the cholinergic anti-inflammatory pathway connecting the nervous and immune systems; a 2025 Cureus study on cortisol and immune function; Bessel van der Kolk's research on trauma and language; Pete Walker's work naming the fawn response; Yale School of Medicine and NIH data showing women make up roughly 80% of autoimmune disease patients.
