As we touched on in my previous post, much of social media would have you believe that self care is all about relaxation and pleasure. This isn’t necessarily wrong, just a bit misguided, and incomplete. Relaxation, and pleasure are vital components of self care, but they’re just not the whole story. There’s a lot of drudgery in self-care. There’s a lot of trial and error; mistakes abound when you are constantly shaping and reshaping your needs. Something that worked for you yesterday, might be overwhelming today.
Self care is not linear. There’s not always a clear pattern. You can definitely form habits around it, create rituals for yourself, but they probably won’t look like doing a face mask every Tuesday night and taking a bath on Wednesday.
I prefer the word ‘ritual’ to the word ‘habit,’ because to me, a ritual is intentional, whereas a habit is automatic. And, at least at first, self care should be all about breaking habits, and creating rituals. If you have a habit of staying up late to make up for the time that you don’t get to yourself during the day, the way to break that will often be through creating a bedtime ritual that helps you to decompress, process your day, ease into relaxation, and finally drift off into dreamland.
When I say that rituals are intentional, I mean that rituals take thought. A habit is waking up and making coffee, simply because that’s what you do in the morning. A ritual is waking up, allowing yourself to come into consciousness, checking in with your body if you want something to drink, and if so what it would like. Giving your body the time to make that decision, and staying a part of the process.
Maybe all you want is water. Maybe you’re not craving coffee today, just a black tea. Great, start boiling the water, continue checking in with your body. Do you want creamy comfort tea? Or are you craving the slightly bitter tinge of a straight black tea? Give your body what it wants. Now you’re brewing the tea. Begin asking yourself where you would like to drink the tea. Maybe you are craving comfort, and just want to be back in bed, go there. Maybe you’re feeling energized, and would like some morning sun, seek it out. Maybe you feel better when you get up and immediately leave the house. If that’s the case you might enjoy going straight to a coffee shop and enjoying your cuppa there with a book, or a newspaper.
Do you see the intentionality? Everything we do can be done on autopilot, or it can be done with intentionality. Intentionality breeds self awareness. Begin by breaking down every day occurrences into smaller questionable chunks.
For example, after a long day of emotional beat downs, and tiny inconveniences that add up to crazy making frustrations, and faster than usual energy drain, you may feel the need to go home, lock yourself in your room, and scream, or cry, or punch your pillows. Great. Do that.
Self care is allowing yourself the space to vent and express your ‘negative’ emotions, but it is also figuring out where those negative emotions are stemming from. But maybe that last bit is too much for you right now. That’s okay, be gently with yourself, take small bites. Learn slowly, intentionally, and at a pace designed for you. Who decides that pace? You!
Ask yourself, what would help soothe you? If you can’t think of anything, or feel like you don’t know, don’t worry. This is where those soundbite self care tips can come in handy.
Perhaps you need a ritualistic bath with cleansing, relaxing epsom salts, essential oils, deep instrumental music, low light candles, and deep breathing exercises. Sounds like it should be perfect, right? But maybe that’s not the energy you need right now, maybe you need to blow off some steam first.
Maybe you need to go for a long drive with the windows down listening to Morrissey, or some other lovelorn artist and let yourself cry out your frustrations. Or listen to something harder like The Devil Wears Prada, and scream along. Maybe even some angsty early 2000’s pop punk like Fall Out Boy, or Neck Deep, singing along to every whiny lyric you know at the top of your lungs. These are all examples of self care. Try new things. Let yourself make mistakes. There are no right or wrong answers, only what you need.
If you can’t decide on something pick a number between one and ten, and then find a numbered list on social media or a search engine, and try your number. Indecision can be crippling, and if you are new to this process you may not know how to decide what you need. Flip a coin, and keep a list of what you like, or don’t like as you try new things.
Soothing your immediate symptoms is a wonderful practice, especially when it brings you back into your body. But once you are in your body, the real self care should begin. But again, begin when you’re ready. Stay at each step as long as you need, but once you feel comfortable with what you’ve learned it’s time to challenge yourself some more.
If you’ve struggled to recognize when you are in your body, or if you struggle with dissociation, put a pin in this, and stay here a while. Practice recognizing positive feelings and emotional states, and pursue pleasure until you begin to accept and normalize your need for it. Be hedonistic, in a self loving way. Start a list of what brings you joy. If you struggle with anhedonia [inability to feel or experience pleasure] that’s okay, too! You can work through this. Self care really is for everyone, and it’s one of the best ways to work through anhedonia, and dissociation, but you may need some extra guidance to work through any stuck patterns. This is also okay, and so so normal, we’ll just take a little extra care and patience.
Recap:
We’ve learned that self care has many steps, many more than social media would have you believe. Step One can be summed up in a word: Intentionality. As much as you are able, begin learning how to be intentional with yourself.
Intentionality is a beautiful and far reaching quality, but for now we are going to focus it in on ourselves. We are learning what it means to be intentional in our relationships with our own selves, one step at a time. If it spills over into other areas of your life, great! It all will spill over eventually, but for now, that is not our focus.
We are living in a world that constantly draws our attention outside of ourselves. With demands from home, work, school, friends, family, and basic bodily needs taking the bulk of our time and energy, we have little time left over for tuning into ourselves and our own needs. I believe this is creating a maladaptive response in us to become chronically ignorant of our own bodies, and experiences, whilst becoming evermore outwardly facing, producing symptoms of narcissistic tendencies, and an over emphasis on a surface level ‘self’ as a hail mary to not be completely forgotten. Or more simply, we over-express our desires to be seen, loved, wanted, valued, and cared for through ‘look at me!’ narcissistic tendencies and tactics in other realms.
This is maladaptive because a person who is feeling secure and taken care of [most ideally by themselves, but often by others] should not feel the need to hyper-focus on themselves around others. If we can learn how to fulfill our own needs, then we can show up more authentically in every other area of our lives. If we can’t we may find ourselves engaging in protest behaviors, and attention grabbing in order to get our needs met. This may act as a bandaid, but will never be fulfilling, and is all but guaranteed to cause problems in the long run. Self care may be one of the least selfish things you can do for yourself, and others.
