Ep. 25 What We Get Wrong About The Eldest Daughter | Somatic Healing for High Functioning Women and the Pattern Beneath The Burnout

There are incredible posts about the eldest daughter all over social media. They talk aobut burnout, resentment, the productivity that never stops. They're not wrong. But they're not the full story either. The wound isn't just being asked to do too much - it's that existing without function started to feel like disappearing. This episode goes deeper than the content you've already seen.
And if you want to go all the way in, the Put Her Down audio series is linked here. 

Book 1:1 here

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hey, I'm Leslie Turner. I'm a mom, a somatic practitioner, and an intuitive coach. This is the Intuitive Drop. Short conversations about emotional truth, the nervous system, and living from your intuition in real life without losing your mind along the way. Let's drop in. Hey, hey everybody, welcome to another episode of The Intuitive Drop. So I've been watching a lot of eldest daughter content lately, and uh I don't know if the algorithm found me or if I found it or just lingered too long on a real. I don't know, probably both, because I am an eldest daughter, oldest of four, and I recognize every single thing that I am seeing. The parentification, the caretaking, the resentment that shows up sideways in your 30s when someone asks you for a favor and something just in you goes, frick no, and tightens up. That burnout that doesn't make sense on paper because you're not even that busy. You're just exhausted in a way that sleep doesn't actually fix it. I know this content because I am this content, but something kept nagging at me. I'd watch another reel, I would nod along at the what they're saying, feel seen for about 30 seconds, and then feel this quiet frustration. Like someone had described the house, but had never gone inside. So I went looking for the depth, the underneath part, the basement of it all. And what I found is what this episode is actually about. Now look, the the content itself that you're seeing on Instagram, it's not wrong. The memes, the reels, the threads posts with like 40,000 comments on it that all say, why does this describe my entire personality? They're accurate. I'm not here to debate that. We did become the responsible one, the capable one, the one who just handles it. We grew up fast because usually the situation required it. And some part of us was good at it, which might have made it worse because then it just became who we were. There's one reel I saw recently. You might have seen it. Her idea of a quiet day is getting an enormous amount of shit done. And she feels really proud of herself. She measures her own rest by her output. A good weekend to her means that the house is clean, the emails are answered, and the things she'd been avoiding had finally gotten done. I do this, of course, um regularly. That productivity is a nervous system that was trained very young to believe that stillness is dangerous. That being caught doing nothing, just existing, not contributing, meant that you weren't pulling your weight. You might have even been called lazy. As I said, I'm the oldest of four. And I went into babysitting as like an 11, maybe 12-year-old, despite the fact that I actually hated looking after kids. And I didn't understand that until much later. I was just good at it. So I kept doing it. Being capable was my currency. And when I became a mom, there was this resentment that I didn't expect and couldn't explain for a very long time. The loss of freedom, my own space, my own time. I thought, what kind of mother actually feels this? And uh then I realized it's the kind who never just got to be a kid. That's who. Now, let's not skip over the fact that there's also some good things about being an eldest daughter. The eldest daughter gets shit done. She is the friend you call when everything falls apart because she will not panic and she will not quit. She's organized in a way that other people find slightly unnerving. She doesn't really understand when someone says something can't be done, because, of course, again, and I'm already halfway through doing it and probably faster than you thought. She is reliable and capable, and the kind of person that entire families and friend groups and workplaces quietly orbit around without fully realizing it. These are real, these are hers, and they didn't come from nowhere. But the resentment, that burnout, the productivity as armor, that's still not the bottom of this. There's something else that we need to talk about. This is part of it. So every sibling below you had someone to watch, someone a little further ahead who'd already figured out how the family worked, what was okay, what wasn't, how to get it right. They had a reference point. You had nothing. You were the first, which kind of sounds like a privilege until you realize it means that you were alone in a way that others never were, alone in figuring it out. Nobody had done this particular childhood before you in this particular family. You were making the roadmap while walking the road. And then handing it to everybody behind you without anyone ever acknowledging that you made this. And I remember knowing even then that I needed to put this down every once in a while, this responsibility. I couldn't carry it all the time. But even in my escape, it got called called selfish or lazy. And that's where the real layer starts, that depth. So what I started to realize when I stopped nodding along to all of the content about eldest daughters and actually went looking underneath it. We didn't just get assigned the role of the responsible one. There was a part of us that chose it. I want to be careful here because at three, four, or five years old, making a survival decision is not a choice the way we normally mean that word choice. Something happened when the second baby came along, or the third, suddenly mom and dad's attention, which had been yours fully, had to go where the need was the greatest. So the one who couldn't feed themselves yet took the attention. The one who couldn't speak needed them to speak for them. The one who couldn't do anything without help needed mom and dad 100%. And you could do things. You were the big one. You were capable. So you watched the attention shift, and something in your nervous system did a very fast, very subtle and quiet calculation. If I need them, I become a burden. If I help them, I become valuable. If I'm useful, I don't disappear. Now nobody said that to you. Nobody taught you that. You arrived there on your own because you were smart and you were watching and you were trying to figure out how to stay loved in a family that suddenly had less margin and patience for your needs. So you stopped having needs, or you learned to have them very quietly. So a book on the bed, a door closed just enough before you went back downstairs and resumed being helpful. Existing without a function started to feel like disappearing. When you weren't performing or producing or being needed, that became freefall. There was nothing to grasp onto. Like, who am I if I'm not doing these things? If you weren't useful, you weren't sure, you were still there, still wanted, still safe. And you have been running this pattern ever since. And it's why on a quiet day you have to be productive to feel okay. It's why rest comes with a heaping pile of guilt. It's why you can receive love and praise from the people around you and still not be able to pour into yourself. Because pouring into yourself doesn't come with any proof that it worked. Nobody witnessed it. Nobody thanks you for taking a nap. Nobody sees that you chose a hike in the woods over your to-do list. Your nervous system doesn't get any feedback for that. And you were never taught to trust that you're worth the investment before the evidence comes in. Now I want to tell you about someone I worked with. I'm not going to give you details on about her because I don't want to identify her, but I want you to hear this story. She came to me very capable, competent, the kind of woman who handles everything and makes it look effortless, but is also quietly dying inside. When we got into it, she told me that by the time she was six years old, she was making meals. She was watching the younger kids, holding the household together because her mom was very overwhelmed, checked out in the way that overwhelmed moms sometimes do. And it wasn't out of malice, it was purely survival. But this girl was six years old. And she had an older brother who was kind of the golden boy, who was loved out loud and visibly and consistently while she was running the household and getting leftover love on a good day. She couldn't even tell herself the story that I had been able to tell myself, the one that goes, if I just do enough, if I'm useful enough, the love will come, because she did more than enough and the love still went sideways. She kept going anyway. Most of the women I work with don't come in knowing any of this. They come in thinking that they're too much or not enough or just wired this way. And part of the work that we do together is going back far enough to show that little girl, the one who made a very smart decision in a very hard moment, that her worth was never supposed to be something she earned. What we assume is just how life is, because it's all we've ever known, isn't always the truth of us. Sometimes it's the first story we told ourselves in order to survive. So when we find the bottom of it, everything this woman thought was a problem in her turned out to just be a symptom of survival. Here's what I want you to know about this pattern now that I couldn't see before. It's not just the big things. It shows up this pattern of productivity and usefulness shows up in moments of ordinary life. It's jumping off the couch the second your husband walks in the door because you want to look busy. It's making sure dinner is on the table at exactly the right time, not because your family is necessarily hungry, but because you need to prove your place in it. It's the guilt that creeps in when the laundry piles up or the meal doesn't happen, or something you were supposed to handle gets dropped. The feeling that you're failing, that you're less than, that a good wife, a good mom, a good woman doesn't let things slip. I know this because I lived it. I also know what actually restores me, which is like hiking in the woods, time and meditation, being genuinely present with my family, not just physically there while my brain is like composing a caption for Instagram, but these deep conversations where I'm I'm present, where nobody needs anything from me except my attention. When I'm in those spaces, I feel the most like myself, the most grounded, and the least like a pattern is running the show. And still, I'll catch myself mid-hike, thinking, ooh, this could be a newsletter. I could use this moment somewhere in my business. How do I take what's happening now and make it useful? That's the pattern right there. Even rest has to earn its keep. And the distinction that matters the most, though, is because I don't want you to walk away from this episode thinking that the goal is to stop doing things. Because, you know, the laundry still needs to get done, the dinner still needs to get made. The house does run better when you're on your game. And that's that's just true. But the question is, who's in charge when you do it? The pattern running the show sounds like if I don't do this, I'll lose my place. If I stop being useful, I stop being loved. But choosing it, choosing to do the laundry is sounds like this is how I take care of the people I love. This is what keeps our family stable and healthy and whole. It's the same action, but completely different place that it's coming from. And the work, the real inner work that I do every day with my clients is learning to tell the difference. You've been so good at your role for so long that it stopped feeling like a role. It just felt like you, your identity. And there's a version of you underneath that usefulness that's been waiting a very long time just to exist, not perform, not produce, not earn her place, but just exist. We'll go deeper on this. There's more here, but for today this is enough. Now, if you're ready to set this all down, the productivity, the efficiency, the usefulness, not just understand it, but feel it in your body. I made something for you. It's called Put Her Down. It's a somatic audio series. There are four guided practices designed specifically to help you release the eldest daughter pattern at the level where it actually lives, which is not in your mind. It's in your body, where it's been running quietly for most of your life. It's $37. You can do it in your car, in your bed, in whatever stolen 20 minutes you can find. You don't need anything except your willingness to show up for her. It's on my website. I will link it in the show notes. You've been holding this for a very long time, and you're allowed to put it down now and meet who you actually are.