The second reason why women are nervous is that they do not govern
their emotions. Very often it is the strain of unpleasant emotions
that keeps women nervous, and when we come really to understand we
find that the strain is there because the woman does not get her own
way. She has not money enough.
She has to live with some one she dislikes. She feels that people do
not like her and are neglectful of her. She believes that she has
too much work to do. She wishes that she had more beauty in her
life.
Sometimes a woman is entirely conscious of when or why she fails to
get her own way; then she knows what she is fretting about, and she
may even know that the fretting is a strain that keeps her tired and
nervously irritated. Sometimes a woman is entirely unconscious of
what it is that is keeping her in a chronic state of nervous
irritability. I have seen a woman express herself as entirely
resigned to the very circumstance or person that she was
unconsciously resisting so fiercely that her resistance kept her ill
half of the time. In such cases the strain is double. First, there
is the strain of the person or circumstance chronically resisted and
secondly, there is the strain of the pose of saintly resignation. It
is bad enough to pose to other people, but when we pose to other
people and to ourselves too the strain is twice as bad.
Imagine a nerve specialist saying to his patient, "My dear madam,
you really must stop being a hypocrite.
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