“Caretaking” vs “caring for:”  the health of your relationships lies in your ability to discern the difference.

Arjuna—the street cat we took in a month ago—has been teaching me the truth of the saying that “dogs have masters; cats have staff.”

He’s delightful, and sometimes scary. At night, he’ll get inexplicably frantic and attack my legs (thank goodness for winter and long pants.) Overall, he’s a handful. Our kitchen has never been so neat, because we wash each dish the second we are done with it. Otherwise, he’ll be on the counter snacking before you can say “cat.” The only safe place to defrost frozen meat or fish is the oven, like some kind of culinary Fort Knox.

He outdid himself last night, though. He figured out how to open the toaster oven. (Insert sobbing emoticon here.)

I had—ah, so cleverly, I thought)— ymkjnnoiioklo≈øøˆ• º ¬,,,,,,,,,,,0 ,≤≤≤≤≤≤≤≤≤≤,,, Excuse me. That was Arjuna, walking across my keyboard. (I kid you not.)

As I was saying, I had cleverly put my pizza slice in the toaster oven, assuming it would be safe there until I came back downstairs in an hour to heat it up for dinner. Ten minutes later—BANG! I raced down to the kitchen to find him with his head inside the toaster oven, chewing on MY pizza.

$%**^%$^#@!??

I would hate to end up resenting Arjuna. He is just a cat, after all, doing his cat thing—and doing it with single-minded focus, after life on the streets. He has many stellar qualities. However, I need to be sure I’m willingly doing what it takes to adjust to life with him, and my partner is wrestling with the same thing.

Am I taking full responsibility for my actions on his behalf? That question has me pondering the concepts of taking and caretaking.

About taking and caretaking

In the Inner Bonding® six-step process for healing, taking and caretaking belong under the popular category (or “cat-egory?”) of “Things We Do to Try to Control Other People.” As HSPs, we really need to grasp these patterns because we are highly susceptible to them.

In her article called, “Takers and Caretakers: The Codependent Relationship,” Dr. Margaret Paul offers these definitions of taking and caretaking:

Takers are people who tend to be somewhat narcissistic – that is, they are self-centered with an excessive need for attention and admiration. Takers generally attempt to have control over others’ giving them the attention and admiration they want in overt ways.

Caretakers, on the other hand, operate from the belief that “I am responsible for your feelings. When I do it right, you will be happy and then I will receive the approval I need.” Caretakers sacrifice their own needs and wants to take care of the needs and wants of others, even when others are capable of doing it themselves. Caretakers give to others from fear rather than love – they give to get.

These are not fixed labels. Each of us is capable of being either taker or a caretaker depending on the condition in which we find ourselves. However, most of us favor one role over the other. In my experience, highly sensitive people (HSPs) are prone to take on the caretaking role.

I suppose you could say that cats “take” from us, but they are not “takers.” We take care of them in the same we take care of small children, the very elderly, and people who are sick, injured, or in the grips of illness, injury, or addiction. To care for a person or creature is to offer them care they could not offer themselves. Caretaking is different.

What happens when we caretake?

Caretaking is hard on our relationships. It’s also really hard on us. When you caretake, you may—

• Forget to even ask yourself what you are wanting and needing
• Focus instead on what people around you want or need
• Feel helpless and powerless, like things are being done to you or happening to you
• Secretly resent the other person and judge them as selfish, demanding, or simply “bad,” while hiding hide those feelings and judgments even from yourself
• Live in fear of losing the relationship, and arrange your actions to try to avoid that
• Exhaust yourself even to the point of getting sick

When I got pissed off at Arjuna—and pissed off hardly describes my outrage upon seeing his head in the toaster oven—it was partly because I’m nearly as territorial as he is about my food. (Mess with my food at your own risk. You have been warned.)

But my rage had a deeper cause. It showed me I had been–at least to some degree— caretaking Arjuna. A young part of me felt hurt. It wanted him to be grateful that we have taken such good care of him: for taking him off the street, designing food puzzles for him, playing with him, reading books to try to understand him, and footing crazy vet bills.

In return for all that, this part of me wanted—wants—Arjuna to behave a certain way. That is classic caretaking.

Intellectually, I know you can’t expect a cat to behave a certain way (if I wanted that, I should have gotten a dog, right?) You get what you get from them, on their terms. Being nice to a cat can endear you to them to a degree I’m sure, but there are no guarantees. This young part of me evidently didn’t get that memo, however.

Why do we caretake, anyway?

To let go of caretaking, it helps a lot to understand why you started doing it in the first place. In my experience, HSPs learn to caretake at a young age. We do this to give ourselves the sanity-saving illusion of power over those from whom we need love and care.

It is a primally scary experience for a young child to perceive the love and attention of her primary caregivers as insecure, unpredictable, or conditional. In these conditions, a sensitive child will cope by turning to her strengths. She watches, listens, and processes what she has taken in—all long before she has the words to describe what she is doing.

She sees what pleases her grownups and what angers them. She adjusts her behavior accordingly. She becomes outward-focused in an attempt to control her circumstances. How she feels is beside the point: her mission is to somehow feel safer and more secure.

“But,” you might say, “Isn’t this a good thing for a child to learn to be good? Isn’t this how a child learns, by getting feedback about her behavior from the outside world?” Yes. But the experience of getting that feedback within a secure attachment is entirely different from the experience of standing over a trapdoor that could open at any minute, plunging you into a pit of rejection and shame.

From that point of view, caretaking provides an elegant solution. It helps us get through these childhood challenges without going crazy or succumbing to hopelessness. As we grow up, though, our caretaking habits start to make trouble for us.

Can I just stop caretaking?

In “real life” human relationships, caretaking creates an excruciatingly painful dynamic. We try hard to be “kind” and “good” and “considerate,” while unconsciously seething underneath. It’s exhausting.

It would be great, wouldn’t it, if we could simply let go of caretaking, saying, “OK. I get it. I’ve had enough. No more caretaking for me.” In reality, though, letting go of caretaking can be really scary. If you started your caretaking career as a scared little kid, then that scared little kid is still running the show in this area of your life.

This has nothing to do with your level of competence or success in “real life.” You can be a tech millionaire or a cashier at McDonalds: it doesn’t matter, because the fear that comes up in you when you let go of caretaking is survival-level fear. This fear sends you into your reptilian brain, which operates on sheer survival instinct. Your marvelous, deep-processing HSP brain goes offline.

As a result, letting go of caretaking requires great courage. It has for me, anyway: I’ve worked hard on this over the years. You will likely need support from someone with whom you feel safe, who can help you grow and strengthen your ability to sense what you need and what you want, as I do with clients.

In the process, you will need to develop a safe, compassionate inner relationship with yourself. When your inner relationship is sturdy, you can more easily hear and connect to your spiritual intuition, and this is the ultimate source of safety.

With these inner resources in place, you can show up fully as yourself in your relationships, without needing to take or caretake. You can weather relationship conflicts knowing that whatever happens, you will be fundamentally OK, and you can bow in retrospect—as I bow now to Arjuna—to the fellow beings who have given you opportunities to see and let go of your caretaking tendencies.

Image: 2024 Emily Agnew