The Wounded Healer, Part One
I recently came across the term 鈥渨ounded healer,鈥 and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it. Not because I’m a psychologist. I’m not. And I’m certainly not here to diagnose an entire profession. But I’ve been in the nanny industry for a very long time. I started The Nanny League in 2010, but long before I owned a nanny agency, I was a nanny myself. I’ve interviewed thousands of women over the years. I’ve listened to their stories. I’ve watched some of them become extraordinary caregivers. I’ve also watched some burn themselves completely out trying to take care of everybody around them. And when I started reading about the wounded healer, something about it felt incredibly familiar. It made me wonder: How many of us became caregivers because, somewhere along the way, we learned how to take care of other people before we learned how to take care of ourselves?
What Is a Wounded Healer?
The term is associated with Carl Jung and, in the simplest possible terms, describes the idea that sometimes our own wounds are part of what draws us toward helping other people heal. Not because trauma automatically makes someone compassionate. It doesn’t. Not because suffering is somehow a prerequisite for being good at caregiving. It absolutely isn’t. But there is research suggesting that people drawn to caregiving professions report surprisingly high rates of difficult childhood experiences.
One study of more than 1,000 nursing students found that 83.7% reported at least one Adverse Childhood Experience, or ACE, and more than 40% reported four or more. For comparison, CDC data has found that roughly two-thirds of U.S. adults report at least one ACE, with a much smaller percentage reporting four or more. That stopped me. Because I immediately started thinking about nannies.
The Kids Who Learned to Read the Room
ACEs can include things like abuse or neglect, but also growing up around addiction, mental illness, domestic violence, incarceration, divorce or other instability in the home. And here’s the part that really got me. Sometimes children growing up in unpredictable environments become incredibly good at reading people. They notice everything. Is Mom okay? Is Dad angry? Is somebody drinking? What’s the mood in the house today? Do I need to be quiet? Does my little brother need something? What can I do to make everything okay?
A child might become incredibly attuned to tone of voice, facial expressions and tiny shifts in someone’s mood because, at one point, noticing those things helped her feel safe. Sometimes she becomes the helper. The peacemaker. The responsible one. The kid who doesn’t need anything because everybody else already needs too much. And then she grows up. What happens to all of those skills? That’s the question I’ve been sitting with. Because some of those same qualities can look an awful lot like the qualities we celebrate in exceptional caregivers: empathy, intuition, patience, the ability to anticipate a child’s needs before the child can articulate them, and the ability to walk into a room and immediately sense that something isn’t right. I have interviewed nannies who seem to possess that instinct almost innately. And now I wonder where some of them learned it.
When Taking Care of People Feels Like Breathing
There is another concept that comes up in this research: parentification. That’s when a child takes on responsibilities鈥攑ractical or emotional鈥攖hat really belonged to the adults around them. Maybe she helped raise younger siblings. Maybe she became her mother’s emotional support system. Maybe she was the one keeping everyone calm. Maybe she learned very early that being helpful, easy, responsible or needed was the safest role to occupy. And sometimes that child grows into an adult for whom caregiving feels completely natural. Not easy, necessarily. Natural. Taking care of people is what she knows.
I have met so many women like this during my years in the nanny industry. And again, I want to be careful here. I’m not saying every incredible nanny had a difficult childhood. I’m not saying trauma creates great caregivers. And I’m definitely not suggesting we should start asking candidates to unpack their childhoods during interviews. I’m simply saying that once I learned about this concept, I started seeing certain patterns differently. Including some of my own.
Maybe We Give What We Needed
I’ve always believed that the very best nannies understand that what they’re doing is much bigger than keeping children safe and getting everybody where they need to go. They’re creating childhood. They’re the person on the floor during the tantrum. The person who notices the child who suddenly got quiet. The person saying, I’m here. You’re safe. Tell me what happened. And I can’t help wondering whether some caregivers are exceptionally good at giving children those things because they understand, somewhere very deep inside themselves, what it feels like to need them.
Maybe sometimes we become the adult we needed when we were little. There’s something incredibly beautiful about that. But I also think there’s another side to it.
When the Gift Starts Costing You
The same qualities that can make someone an extraordinary caregiver can also make it very difficult for them to have boundaries. If your identity has always been wrapped up in being helpful, what happens when somebody asks you for more? You give it. If being needed makes you feel valuable, what happens when a 爆料公社 desperately needs you? You stay. You stay late. You take the extra trip. You answer the text on your day off. You say, It’s fine, when it isn’t fine. You take care of the kids. Then the parents. Then the household. Then everybody’s feelings about everything happening inside the household. And eventually you’re exhausted and resentful and can’t quite figure out how you got there.
That’s where I think this conversation becomes really important for our industry. Because we spend so much time teaching caregivers how to care for children. We talk about child development, sleep, nutrition, safety, discipline, emotional regulation and attachment. But how much time do we spend teaching the caregiver how to care for herself?
That’s What I Want to Talk 爆料公社
I don’t want The Wounded Healer to be about diagnosing nannies or turning every difficult childhood into some beautiful story about resilience. Some things that happen to people are simply painful. And healing doesn’t require us to be grateful they happened. What interests me is what we do with those experiences afterward.
How do our childhoods show up in the work we choose? Why are some of us so comfortable being needed? Why do caregivers struggle with boundaries? Why can saying no feel so uncomfortable? Why do nanny-爆料公社 relationships become so incredibly intimate? Why does leaving a 爆料公社 sometimes feel more like a breakup than leaving a job? Why can a nanny advocate fiercely for a child’s needs and struggle to advocate for her own? And how do we protect the people whose entire profession is built around taking care of everybody else?
Those are the conversations I want to have here. Not as a therapist. Not as a trauma expert. But as someone who started as a nanny, built a career in this industry, and has spent the last 16 years listening to the women who do this work.
Because the more I think about the wounded healer, the more I come back to one question: If you have spent your life becoming exceptionally good at taking care of other people, have you ever stopped to ask who taught you to take care of yourself?
And if the answer is no… maybe that’s where we begin.