Not all women of course and certainly not all the time but enough women, often remarkable women, for it to become impossible to ignore once you start seeing it.
The interesting thing for me is that very few of them actually describe it that way. Most tell me they’re just being sensible, keeping the peace, being realistic, picking their battles, managing a difficult relationship, avoiding unnecessary conflict, being professional, being kind, being understanding, being patient, being the bigger person. All of which are perfectly reasonable explanations when you examine them one at a time.
The challenge however is that when you place enough of them together and repeat them often enough and over a long enough period of time, something else starts to happen. A woman slowly begins to adapt herself around the people and systems she is navigating, usually so gradually that she doesn’t notice it herself. A little less direct, a little less visible, a little less likely to challenge something she knows isn’t right, a little more likely to explain herself when no explanation was ever required and thus a little more likely to smile and say “Yes” when she wants to shout and say “No”.
“Over time, what began as adaptation starts to feel normal and in many cases it starts to feel like personality”.
My father was a highly abusive alcoholic. The lifelong damage he caused my mother and sister shaped my life in ways I am still understanding today. What I didn’t understand then was that one of the things I was watching was how women learn to adapt who they are and how they behave around men like this and how, as a result, they become smaller than they know themselves to be in order to survive.
Children become extraordinarily skilled observers when they have to. They learn to read mood, tone, energy, atmosphere, the sound of a door closing, the way somebody walks into a room, the difference between a healthy silence and a dangerous silence. Many women become experts at exactly the same thing, not because they are weak or overly emotional or lacking either ability or confidence but because adapting to insecure male behaviour is often the safest thing available to them at the time.
“The trouble is that adaptations which help us survive one environment often follow us into environments where we no longer need them”.
So now we are dealing with habit…and the good news about habits are that given the right environment, encouragement and determination, we can unlearn and change them.
This is one of the reasons I became so interested in understanding insecure male behaviour. Not because I believe men are the enemy (I don’t) but because I spent much of my own life being one of those men. Insecure, defensive, needing approval more than truth far more than I realised, confusing control with care and confusing being needed with being loved. Looking back now, I can see that many of the behaviours I now help women navigate were behaviours I once displayed myself, albeit in ways that seemed perfectly reasonable to me at the time.
“That is the thing about insecurity; the person carrying it rarely experiences it as insecurity. They experience it as logic, common sense, leadership, protection, love, standards or expectations”.
Only later do they begin to see what everyone else was experiencing all along.
Over the years, thousands of women have sat opposite me and described some version of the same experience. They know something feels off, they know they are carrying too much, they know they are adapting, they know they are editing themselves and yet they keep going. What continually strikes me is not that women do this but how normal it has become for them to do this.
The real cost is not simply the promotion that wasn’t pursued, the opportunity missed or the relationship that lasted longer than it should have. The real cost is much more personal than that. It is the gradual abandonment of Self, the habit of overriding what you already know, the slow erosion of self-trust, the distance that forms between who you are and who you have learned to be.
That is the conversation I want to explore here, not because women need fixing (they absolutely do not) and not because men need blaming (they don’t) but because once you can see a pattern clearly, you no longer have to keep living inside it.
Much of what I write will be about this cultural, societal dynamic because women are so often the ones paying the highest price for these dynamics and we share a collective responsibility to heal and close this divide. Much of what I write about will be about men because unless we understand what creates insecure male behaviour, we will keep mistaking it for something else.
What interests me is freedom, for women from the patterns that cause them to abandon themselves and for men from the patterns that cause them to abandon themselves too.
“Women should never feel powerless in the face of insecure male behaviour and men should never remain trapped inside it”.
Neither was born to live this way.
I suspect we’ll talk about power, self-trust, leadership, relationships, confidence, patriarchy, insecure male behaviour and the subtle ways both women and men learn to abandon themselves.
This is the conversation I hope to continue exploring here.
Not simply insecure male behaviour but the wider patterns that cause women and men alike to abandon their true selves, how those patterns and resulting habits shape our lives and relationships and what it might look like to move beyond them.
I don’t claim to have all the answers. Much of what I write will be me sharing what I’ve learned, what I’m still learning and the questions I find myself increasingly curious about as I get older.
If any of that interests you, I’d love for you to join me.
With love,
James
P.S. If you’d like to explore more of my work, including my upcoming book How To Stop Taking Sh*t From Insecure Men*, my coaching programmes and free resources, you’ll find everything at www.jamesdakin.co.uk.
This was a wonderfully written piece! James, you know I'm a fan of yours, so I'm glad you're taking the step of publishing articles on Substack! It's a better place because you're here!