Self-Care: What’s Stopping You?
I speak about self-care in my therapy room and on-line. All. The. Time. So much so that I assume everyone knows what I mean when I say it. If you’re not overly familiar with it, or perhaps you even have an aversion to it like a business coach I know, here’s my sense of it.
What is Self-Care?
Self-care is about meeting the following:
Our psychological needs
Our emotional needs
Our physical needs
Our spiritual needs
Our sexual needs
Our social needs and more.
Like one person from the next differ in style, so will a person’s needs. Perhaps that’s why some people get so ticked off with the term, because it conjures up stereotypical images of getting your nails painted or relaxing in a bath of bubbles, but the fact of the matter is, self-care can look like anything.
Can everyone practice self-care?
If you’re not one for pampering, or walks along the beach - you can still practice self-care. Self-care can look like this:
Imagine you’ve had a busy day at work, or at home with the children, your senses have been overwhelmed with things to navigate and factor into your performance of the day - there’s been little space to think, never mind do.
You find a 5 minute window… What can you do with it?
Self care can be taking yourself off to a dark, cool and quiet room (or any variations of the image that creates for you), allowing your senses to pause, allowing you to breathe and exist without meeting any demand. No smellies, no fluff, no pipe music - and yet still self-care.
How do you get good at self-care?
If you’re not great at self-care, it’s probably not an issue of knowing what it is or how to do it that’s hindering you. Many of my clients know full well how to take better care of themselves, but they don’t follow up with actually doing it; the self-care behaviours.
Why?
Because knowing and doing are only half of it. Self-care relies on increased self-awareness, and the parts we need to add to the knowing and doing are our emotions and our physiology (physical body and it’s sensations).
This diagram shows the four parts of ourselves that I also speak about (maybe as much as I rattle on about self-care) - I like to draw the arrows in this direction because our thoughts trigger emotions, which then trigger sensations in our body and with all this information, we would then hope that it is reflected in what we do.
Knowledge of self-care is a cognitive process but so it our belief system and so, if you have negative thoughts about yourself, about being well/healthy/sane, about being important (enough to take care of), you can see how this would trigger a negative domino effect, which isn’t likely to result in positive behaviours in the context of self-care.
If you struggle to be with your own emotions, or you struggle to communicate them and/or express them - they will likely be held in your body.
Imagine a ridged, intense and achy body - the kind that needs a lot of attention.
The challenge here is, with all the emotion stored, clients sometimes disconnect from their physiological sensations so they can keep using it as an emotional storage unit (to keep avoiding communicating and expressing it), because if they felt it, it would cause huge problems and cause them to change/adapt and even feel intense emotional/physical discomfort.
Read ‘Am I Disconnected From My Body?’
The whole process of using our bodies in this way isn’t fruitful for our well-being in the long run and is the total opposite of self care.
This way of being is an example of how our whole self can inhibit our ability to commit to any long term self-care.
Want to lean more?
If you’re a parent/carer - join us throughout August (2020) in the Facebook Group to hear more about this as I do a Live video each Tuesday at 16.00. At the end of August, we are also joined by nutritional therapist Alice Godfrey who is going to teach us how to get more energy and how to improve our well-being through the food we eat.
Recorded for The Parent Circle, August 2020