relationship with you – The Healing Modalities

Relate to Self.

We’ve heard the term “self-care” being thrown about somewhat recklessly lately. It could mean anything from taking a bubble bath, getting a massage, going out in nature, or drinking a frothy, sugar-filled drink.

Yes, those are all things we can do to take care of ourselves – unless we’re cutting down on sugar, then maybe pass on the frothy, sugar-filled drink!

The way I view self-care is in a transformative way. And there are three pillars of transformative self-care:

1. How we think about ourselves
2. How we speak about and to ourselves
3. How we treat ourselves

All this adds up to how we relate to ourselves – our relationship with our Self.

How we think about ourselves will determine how we speak about and to ourselves. If we mainly think thoughts that reflect poorly on ourselves, we will likely speak poorly about and to ourselves. This shows up in self-denigrating language spoken out loud to others, like “I’m so lame, you’ll never guess what I did yesterday!” Or to ourselves, “I can’t believe I messed that up again! Why am I so stupid?!”

How we think about ourselves also impacts how we treat ourselves. If we don’t think we’re deserving of care, we will likely not take caring actions towards ourselves, even if we know what to do to take care of ourselves. This shows up in how we blow ourselves off by not doing what we say we want to do. For example, we scroll on social media when we have plans to take a walk instead. Or we eat three cookies when we said we’d only have one. We don’t take our commitments to ourselves seriously. We flake on ourselves. We self-sabotage.

And then we wonder why our relationship with ourselves can feel so frustrating. Why we never do what we say we’ll do. Why we end up feeling disappointed with ourselves. Why we feel discouraged about our goals. Why we keep making decisions out of alignment with ourselves.

We can start to build ourselves back up, to transform how we care for ourselves. We had a strong sense of ourselves when we were little kids. Over the years, most of us got that knocked out of us unintentionally by certain adults, society, peers, our culture, the media.

We can think about ourselves intentionally and with kindness and care. Start treating ourselves like our 5-year-old self who is just starting to learn more about the world and other people. What would we say to that 5-year-old when she (or he or they) makes a mistake? Or when she is excited about something she’s doing? Or when she is sad because something didn’t go her way?

This is one way to engage in transformative self-care: by becoming aware of our relationship with ourselves and to start nurturing it even more.

Your turn: What do you want to think about yourself on purpose, with kindness and care? Here’s a clue: What would you love to hear someone else tell you about yourself? What if you tell that to yourself and you believe it? How can you practice believing it even more?

Subscribe if you want to receive this content directly in your inbox.

Work with me: Want to see how self-care is transformative and can help you create the results you want in your life? I can show you how. I offer first-time seekers a complimentary 60-minute exploratory session. Sign up here.

What’s on your mind? It can be powerful to learn from each other and our common struggles when it comes to our practice of self-care–or just being a human being. If you have something you’re struggling with and would like some perspective, share it here. Your issue may be chosen and addressed in the next post–it’ll be totally anonymous.

Care for yourself instead.

Do we have space in our lives for self-care? Some of us may think that we don’t because there are “so many” other things that we “need to” do. Why are we doing so many of these other things and not caring for ourselves?

In the past I used to think I needed to DO all the things in order to prove my worth, because I used to think I wasn’t “good enough.” I wasn’t even conscious of this as a choice I was making-–I just thought it was how I was supposed to be living my life.

I’d do things from a sense of internal pressure—take classes to learn a certain skill, exercise only for weight loss, do activities where I could “meet new people,” be on nonprofit Boards for a sense of prestige, volunteer my time in other ways. I ended up DOING so much in order to feel like I was “good enough” that I ended up exhausting myself and feeling stressed out and overwhelmed. With no time to really care for myself in intentional ways.

Only looking back, and through the self-awareness work I’ve done through therapy and coaching, I see that I was “doing” in order to prove myself as worthy and valuable. Because I thought I wasn’t good enough, I thought I could DO things to feel good enough.

Now I know that worthiness comes from within, that I can choose to have the belief “I am already 100% worthy. I don’t need to DO anything to prove that.” And that belief is available to ALL of us. We get to choose to believe it (or not).

So if we decide that we don’t have to DO things to prove ourselves, what might we let go of doing? How might letting go of some of those things create more space in our lives to prioritize and care for ourselves intentionally instead?

Your turn: What if you stopped doing all the things to prove your worthiness and value and started spending time checking-in with yourself? What’s good about you? (Think about who you ARE, not what you DO, to answer that question.) How can you enjoy being with yourself even more? How can you enjoy being YOU even more so that you feel deserving of the care you’d like to give yourself?

Subscribe if you want to receive this content directly in your inbox.

Work with me: Want to see how self-care is transformative and can help create a more meaningful life in which you start committing to yourself and show up the way you want? I can show you how. I offer first-time seekers a complimentary 60-minute exploratory session. Sign up here.

Tag: relationship with you

3 Pillars of Transformative Self-Care

Doing all the things?