Book One · The Objectification Series
More Than What You Make Me Feel
Emotional Labor, Invisible Roles, and Why Being Needed Is Not the Same as Being Known
“You’re my calm.”
He means it as the nicest thing he knows how to say.
Book One · The Objectification Series
Emotional Labor, Invisible Roles, and Why Being Needed Is Not the Same as Being Known
“You’re my calm.”
He means it as the nicest thing he knows how to say.
The premise
“You’re my calm.”
He means it as the nicest thing he knows how to say. She is standing at the sink with a layoff list folded in her bag that he has not asked about, and will not, because in eleven years the question has never once formed.
This book is about emotional objectification: relating to a person as the feeling they give us — comfort, validation, stability, excitement, self-worth — rather than as a whole human being with an interior life running the entire time, on its own schedule, about things that have nothing to do with us.
Underneath it is a plainer claim. Nobody has ever felt what you feel, in the way you feel it, for the reasons you feel it. Objectification is what happens when that stops being honored.
What compression is
Picture a suitcase with a fixed size. Your friend has two hundred sides; the suitcase holds one. So we pack the side we need — the funny one, the calm one, the one who always answers — and we leave the rest of her on the bed, where she is still standing in the room with all of it, fully assembled, watching us zip the bag.
Being indispensable and being unseen are not a contradiction. The indispensability attaches to the function, and the function could be staffed by anyone.
What makes this one different
Most books in this territory hand the reader a comfortable seat: you are the one being used, and somebody else is the problem. Chapter eight takes that seat away, on purpose, and the rest of the book never gives it back.
Because on an honest night most of us are both. We have been someone's calm. We have had one. The question is not which of the two you are.
Twelve chapters
Plus a fifty-entry glossary, a thirty-day practice, an honest reading list, and One Room at a Time.
From Chapter One
Being adored for one quality is a strange kind of loneliness, because you cannot complain about it without sounding ungrateful.
There is a trick to the dishwasher, and Nadia is the only one who gets it on the first try. You lift as you push, and then you lean, hip into the corner nearest the handle, and the latch takes.
Oren tries twice and then calls down the hall for her. Tonight she does it on her way past without breaking stride, the way you step over the loose board in a hallway you have crossed ten thousand times, at 9:22 on a Tuesday, while Oren works his way through the day he has had.
It was a bad one. Genuinely, unfairly bad. Fourteen months on a project, a client who went quiet by degrees — first the slower replies, then the rescheduled call, then nothing at all — and at 4:48 that afternoon an email whose second sentence contained the word pause.
“Pause,” Oren says. He has turned his chair sideways to the table and is still in his work socks, the good ones, with the hole starting at the heel. “Fourteen months, and the man writes pause.”
He laughs at something she says. It arrives in one piece, the first whole one since he came through the door, and she feels the temperature of the room change the way a room changes when somebody finally shuts a window. Eleven years in, and she can still do that.
Here is what is standing in that kitchen that Oren cannot see. At 11:20 that morning, Nadia was told that her department has to give up two positions, that the choice is hers, and that they would like it by Friday.
Free, and no email required
A short instrument from the back of the book, free on this site. It shows you how differently you function in different relationships — and then refuses to give you a type, because that was never the useful part.
Who it is for
What it will not do
The author
A licensed mental health counselor and licensed professional counselor in Washington, Texas, and Connecticut, a certified Human Behavior Consultant, and the founder of GraceRoot Relationship Healing Institute.
Her work is trauma-informed and relationally focused, which in practice means two commitments: that the patterns people arrive with are treated as intelligent adaptations to real conditions rather than as defects of character, and that repair is understood as behavior over time rather than as a realization.
More Than What You Make Me Feel opens the objectification series, followed by Everyone I’ve Never Met, Nothing Personal, and Use Me. · Articles drawn from the series
Nobody has ever felt what you feel, in the way you feel it, for the reasons you feel it. That gap is the whole subject.
Read it if you have been someone's calm. Read it if you have had one. Most of us, on an honest night, are both.
GraceRoot courses are psychoeducational learning programs, not emergency care, legal advice, or a replacement for therapy. Certificates document GraceRoot completion. Court, employer, board, or continuing education acceptance should be confirmed before purchase unless a page states a specific approval.