Self-care

It's been a crazycrazycrazy month filled with many a good thing. Don't get me wrong: I wouldn't change anything about it. Or maybe I would. Who knows. Can't do anything about it now anyway. And I thought that I was coping well. At least until last Tuesday…

I ran a group for women in the morning. Everything was fine. Or as fine as can be when the topic of the day is “Impact of domestic violence on children” and when you are also battling a headache that kinda gets worse by the minute. I remember debriefing with my co-facilitator afterwards and she suggested that my workload had increased over the last weeks and that maybe I should think about whether I was getting enough self-care. I told her that I was indeed taking good care of myself. That it was just a headache. Really.
It hit me when I drove back, going from one thing to the next to the next to the next. I realised that I had hardly stopped during the last weeks. That I had not even written another entry for my blog in the last couple of weeks. So, where was my self-care again? When this realisation hit me, I broke into tears. I felt extremely tired and low, fighting to keep the car safely on the road. Eventually, things got a little better when my headache subsided, but the question remained: Was I doing enough self-care…

People generally fall into two categories: Selfish or selfless. People who are selfish find it hard to be selfless and vice versa. The key to self-care is to understand that self-care actually needs both sides of the same coin: Sometimes it means that we are able to give to others and sometimes it means that we need to have firm boundaries. It means that we are able to say both Yes and No. That we understand that they are both valid. That they both have their place and time. I talk to my clients about this and still, I so struggle with it myself at times.

The people I am privileged to see in my clinical work inspire me. They are full of strength, resilience, wisdom. They sometimes lack hope or the ability to see future possibilities. They might need someone who encourages them to put themselves first.But they eventually get there. They learn how to dance with adversity and be in relationship with themselves.
Right now, I need to do the same for myself. In order to be a counsellor, I need to be gentle with myself. I sometimes need to make decision that others might interpret as selfish. And that's actually ok. I have zendoodled my Hand of Self-Care a couple of weeks ago. As an exercise and as a reminder for myself. Maybe I need to look at it more often and then actually put it into practice. For I wholeheartedly love my job. And to do it justice, I need to wholeheartedly love and care for myself…