CARE IS A LEADERSHIP PRACTICE.
But our society often positions care and caregiving as a supporting act or “soft skill,” expecting much, but offering little, to those in care professions and personal caregiving roles.
When care identities are devalued, so are the time, money, and energy resources of the person giving the care. When care professions are not protected, they are exploited. When care becomes the assigned duty of a few, it can never become a culture-changing ethic for us all.
At The Matriarchy, we see care-based businesses and care providers as leaders, visionaries, and the matriarchs of our world.
We center care as a tool for power and leadership, center small matriarchal businesses as vehicles for justice and innovation, and center the care-based entrepreneur as a steward of personal and collective thriving.
IT’S TIME TO MAKE CARE YOUR BUSINESS.
ARE YOU READY TO:
Create or refine your small care-based service business, rooted in rebellious, interdependent, justice-based values and practices?
Trust your anger to guide your vision, without needing to burn it all down first?
Learn a framework to audit your leadership through the lens of fierce care?
Embody the vision and energy of a matriarchy (regardless your gender or parenting status)?
Be part of a collaborative, fertile ecosystem of care-based entrepreneurs?
Call in your clients through attuned messaging, based in your vision, strengths, and expertise, and sell to them in a regulated, trauma-informed, high-regard way?
Be loud about what you stand for and the problems and oppressive practices you see in your profession?
Stop The Mommy Complex from further weaponizing care in your body and body of work?
The Mommy Complex?
The Mommy Complex is the systemic, oppressive web that dominates our (American) cultural norms around mothering. I’ve termed it a “Complex” both because it turns mothering into a machine, churning out narrow, one-size-fits-all specifications for how to be a mother, and because of the way it preys on the fears and insecurities of mothers, and then gaslights them when they show distress.
The Mommy part refers to the problematic and exclusive language norms of parenting. The term Mommy has often been a way to infantalize and gender birthing parents, and to manufacture discord between parents marked as female, and perpetuate gender stereotypes in parenting.
Put it all together, and you have The Mommy Complex (sigh. It’s always the mother’s fault, isn’t it? THANKS, SIGMUND FREUD).
In short, The Mommy Complex is the antithesis of our vision of a matriarchy:
Individualistic, when it should be interdependent
Objectified, when it should be intuitive
Intellectualized, when it should be embodied
Coercive, when it should be consensual
Destructive, when it should be generative
Shaming, when it should be nurturing trust
Dying of thirst, when it should be thriving
Feminine, when it should be feminist
Starting to get pissed off? Good (your rage is welcome here):
While the impacts of these messages may seem small and personal, they are in fact devastating: to individuals, to communities, and to the culture at large.
When care-based service professions are undervalued, it creates a cycle of extraction and injustice. Service providers (educators, therapists, birth workers, coaches, creatives, etc) are told that they should not expect a living wage, a life outside of work, or any systemic support. This causes providers to either turn away from their profession for something more sustainable, or remain in it and become completely burned out (thus not serving their clients and communities to the best of their abilities).
When care is branded as women’s work, there is an inequity in labor that harms everyone. Women become overburdened and exhausted, and men deny their own abilities to nurture and relate.
When care is assigned as a feminine task and one that invites unhappiness and oppression, people with more privileges may choose to reject it where they can. But without any actual change, extractive and problematic caregiving gets outsourced to those with marginalized genders, and the cycle continues.
When individual self-care is prioritized over community or cultural care (and packaged as something you need to buy), disconnection, individualism, extraction, and competition reign.
When care is not taken seriously as a source of power and leadership, practices based in oppression, scarcity, and supremacy are seen as more legitimate, and allowed to thrive.
And when care is made invisible, done solely to make life easier for the “leaders” of our society, it is easy to extract the benefits while exploiting the labor.
The vision of The Matriarchy is one of legitimizing care.
Photos by Katie Sikora
I work with people offering care-based services (therapists, coaches, educators, helpers and healers) to help build matriarchal small businesses and substantiate their care leadership practices.
I assume that most folks I work with hold personal, as well as professional care identities and responsibilities.
And I believe that your purpose, your value, and your care, extends beyond making other people’s lives easier, while yours stays hard.
Hi, I’m Allison Staiger, and I’m a care-based business coach and consultant.
I want care-based service providers to create their own rebellious, substantial, and justice-oriented small businesses in order to take a stand and care for themselves and their communities.
For the last 12-plus years, I’ve also been a clinical social worker who has built a successful private practice (twice) serving caregivers of all kinds: birthing parents, therapists, educators, creatives, birth workers, nurses, and other helpers and healers. I’ve worked as a community mental health professional, a teacher, and a service industry worker, and I’m the eldest daughter and primary parent to my own ten-year-old child.
I am in the business of care.
Because not only do I hold these care-based identities, I am also the owner of two successful care-based small businesses (both of which started as side dreams), and I have seen time and time again how the messages we internalize as caregivers seep into our business practices. We weaponize the same outdated and oppressive narratives of what a “good caregiver” is against ourselves, and let them run through our bodies of work, our business practices, and our marketing.
In my own experience as a baby social worker, I swung between feeling like I was assigned far too much power (sent here to save and fix my clients, while only seeing their deficits), and feeling completely powerless to the larger systems at play (structural oppression, medicalized care, laughably low pay, student loans, time and energy expectations, and burnout).
But what could I do? All around me were messages that seemed to revere the work without nuance or actual support, and a contempt for people who questioned (or left) the profession as being greedy, weak, or not compassionate enough. In the space between what I was being told I was experiencing, and what I actually was, overwhelm, disconnection, and resentment seeped in.
I felt helpless, stuck, and quietly furious. Indignation simmered, resentment boiled, my pillow held many screams.
And I felt like shit about it.
But there was nothing wrong with me, just like there’s nothing wrong with you. What you’re seeing is the sad truth: care professions are notoriously unjust- to the communities they serve, and the providers they employ. Your rage is potent and necessary, it just needs to be directed at the right targets. Once you can see that you aren’t the problem, and that you aren’t deficient, you can get mad at what is.
The Mommy Complex. The Patriarchy. White Supremacy. Structural Scarcity. Capitalism. Caregiver Erosion.
With your fury directed at them, you are able to take care of yourself, protect your community, and build a new culture of fierce care.
Photos by Katie Sikora
What I do differently:
Elevate care as a leadership practice (versus a practice that exists to make life easier for traditional leaders)
Center care as a foundational value (versus an invisible background process)
Teach you how to create care (versus give care without reciprocity)
Work to de-gender care (versus seeing it as a feminine duty)
Help you build your business with matriarchal values (versus hierarchical, patriarchal ones)
Build care-based businesses that thrive off of abundance, sovereignty, and generativity (versus extraction, martyrdom, and exploitation)
Cultivate community, collaboration, and reciprocity (even if you are a solo provider)
Work to examine and be a traitor to unearned privileges (versus leveraging them for unearned likeability and trust)
While being an accomplice to justice-centered culture-making (versus a bystander of the oppressive status quo)
Use a model of trauma-informed leadership developed from years of practice as a trauma therapist (versus agitating and gaslighting in the name of sales)
Offer high-touch 1:1 and group services to create a community (versus creating a crowd)
Start from a strengths-based perspective that you already have most of what you need to thrive (versus starting with “deficits”)
(as well as acknowledging that your so-called “deficits” have probably helped you adapt and survive in many brilliant ways)
Normalize anger and rage as necessary fuel for culture-changing (versus demonizing or weaponizing it)
Help create your business ecosystem (versus assembly line)
Nurture attunement and secure attachment with your business (versus being stuck in dysregulation and one-size-fits all blueprints that…don’t fit)
Believe that your complex and nuanced story is the center line to your values and vision, and should be woven throughout your business in an authentic way (versus performing a role or using an overly simplistic “success narrative”
Uphold motherhood and caregiving as inspiration and lineage (versus othering and overlooking them as a sign of weakness)
Toggle between the individual experience and the systemic issues at play (versus solely focusing on the success/failure of the individual and self)
…and acknowledge that the system was not designed for people with marginalized identities and that’s why it feels so hard
Applaud having generations of iterations in your business (versus perpetuating the myth of the linear path and finite end point as success)
Assume you have caregiving responsibilities in your daily life, which factor into how you engage with your business (versus assume that there is someone else handling that for you)
Focus on conservation of money, time, energy, and pleasure (versus hoarding, scarcity, and depletion as a virtue)
Substantiate care-based businesses and caregivers as valued and valuable leaders of our new world (versus paying lip service and stripping away resources).
Let’s imagine a world beyond simply caregiving:
Care collaborating.
Care creating.
Care leading.
Let’s make care your business.
You can learn more about my feminist values and business practices here.
Photos by Katie Sikora
How to work with me:
1:1 Coaching Packages
If you prefer an individualized setting in which you can go at your own pace and have the Care Leadership Framework personalized for your specific needs, this is the place for you. My 1:1 package offers six 75-minute calls, as well as Voxer office hours in which you can receive asynchronous support, and additional curated resources. You can find out more here, or click below to book your obligation-free Connection Call to see if we are a good fit.
Group Coaching Programs
For a more collaborative experience, I offer two signature, high-touch small group coaching containers- a four-week program for those considering birthing a small, care-based business, and a six-month program for those who are in it to win it. While nothing is open for registration now, you can get on the waitlist below.
Discover Hearty: More than self-care, for when it’s more than burnout.
Hearty is a seven-day email series to help you locate, explore, and restore some of what you need to protect against caregiver erosion, so that you can connect and show up for what feels truly important to you, beyond your self.
I’ve created Hearty for you to get curious. As we spend this week together, I will send you daily emails with a summary of the issues that perpetuate caregiver erosion, as well as some considerations for how to shift. Each email will include prompts and/or activities for journaling and reflection. Take what’s right for you at this time, and let the rest go.
Feminist care requires consent, so full disclosure:
Signing up to receive Hearty will automatically add you to my email list. This means you will receive my email newsletter, which I send out 1-2 times a month, and you’ll also receive emails about any new offerings. You can unsubscribe from the newsletter at any time, and I will send out a “refresh your consent” email (h/t Kelly Diels), before I start promoting anything, to see if you’re still interested. Keep me around if I spark joy, and if not, send me to the clutter pile.