Alongside our enriching psychotherapy training online we proudly presented the much-anticipated annual 2023 Wise Therapy Spotlight publication -a compilation of profound essays and captivating artwork from our esteemed psychotherapy training community. We extend our sincere gratitude to all contributors who shared their insights and talents, making this publication a true testament to the brilliance within our community.
A special congratulations to our featured authors! Your responses to the pivotal question, “How, as a community, do we repair a sick world when it is anguished with mental suffering?” have left us inspired.
If you’re interested in downloading the full Wise Therapy Spotlight December 2023 Issue, Click to Download the PDF now.
Dinorah Nieves, PhD
Self-Care Can Help Repair a World Filled with Mental Suffering
“Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation and that is an act of political warfare.” – Audre Lorde
My use of the term “self-care” is usually met with one of two negative responses. There are those who immediately hear/read “self-care” as a selfish, self-centered disregard and betrayal of others. Then there are those who romanticize it as a commodity easily attainable through bubble baths, spa massages and exotic vacations. Neither extreme quite captures the concept. At its core, self-care is a commitment to the daily practice of managing one’s own emotional state. It is grounded in balance, in equanimity, in restoration—in the processing of our highs and lows and an appreciation for the value in consistently guiding ourselves back to equilibrium. And while that can sometimes come in the form of a massage, or a seemingly selfish request, it more often involves developing two key habits: Managing our relationships with ourselves and managing our relationships with others.
Managing Our Relationships with Self
Self-Care begins with deeper self-awareness. We can’t shift or meet our needs if we are not conscious of what we are seeking, what we are thinking and what we are feeling. We’ve become such a busy society, placing a premium on productivity, and obsessed with action and outcomes. Sure, those things have their place. As a recovering “ambition addict,” I get it more than most. But learning to be present with ourselves is priceless. Only when we have a sense of our own internal experiences can we truly take accountability for the parts we play in our own tragedies, the power we possess to be our own heroes, the triggers that activate our fears and the strengths we can build on to begin healing. Yet, we are rarely taught to sit with our feelings; to question our pain or joy; to sit in our discomfort and unpack it; to calmly tolerate distress without needing to create it or needing to avoid it. We are rarely taught to dig deep, investigate our experience and find the true cause of what we feel; the true motivations behind what we need; the thoughts that keep us from joy.
Managing Our Relationships with Others
If self-awareness helps us to check-in, then let’s just say boundaries are how we healthily check out! Setting and maintaining boundaries helps us to stay out of others’ chaos and in our own lanes. And it keeps us from making other people responsible for our world or from making ourselves responsible for other people. It’s how we combat co-dependency and detangle our lives from others. When I was young, my mother would say to me in Spanish, “Juntos pero no revueltos.” In English, this translates to “together, but not mixed.” Without saying it, and perhaps without fully knowing it, she was introducing a motto for boundary-setting: connected but not enmeshed. Yet even with this bit of encouragement, we are still rarely taught to respect the limits that people set without pushing or to say no when we want to and ask for what we need, even if it’s space. We exalt kindness towards others as noble but forget to add that compassion should also be self-directed. We teach people to care for others but shame them for caring for themselves. We forget to teach people that they, too, matter! That they have a right to their own time, their own energy, their own attention and their own resources! We forget to mention that generosity does not require self-neglect. In fact, the fruit you offer others is more nutritious when it grows in richer soil. People who practice self-care don’t do it at the exclusion of caring for others. We do it in concert with caring for others. We’ve learned to show up in ways that say we all matter. And our offers to help, to work, to play, to love, all come with the understanding that we will not violate ourselves.
“Deaths of Despair” continue to plague our society, with suicide, mental illness and alcohol responsible for millions of deaths per year. I’ve lost several family and community members to these ailments in recent years and as I struggle to make sense and find peace with their transition, I find myself constantly coming back to one principle… Self-Care.
How would their trajectories have been altered by a healthier relationship with self and healthier relationships with others? What if they knew how to sit in their discomfort without the soothing of a substance? What if they could ask for help when they truly needed it? What if they didn’t spiral in shame when thinking about the past and didn’t panic in anxiety when thinking of the future? What if they could simply have been present with themselves at all times? What would have been of them if they could have said a strong no to the pressures that drew them in, or drawn a hard line between them and the people with whom they were tangled?
There’s no way to know that their lives would have been different. But we do know that skills like self-awareness, mindfulness and boundary-setting are all positively correlated with improved mental health and decreased substance use. So, can we work harder to teach, model and encourage these aspects of self-care in our families, friendships, communities and client work? How can we work together to promote true self-care in the way of healthier relationships with self and with others?
Here are some questions that I coach clients to ask when their thoughts start getting in the way of some focused self-care work…
- Thought: I get down on myself, thinking about all the mistakes that I’ve made.
- Questions: What have I learned? How have I grown? What insights do I now have to share? How do I want to be different? What changes do I need to make to get there? What habits can I put in place to support those changes? What supportive people can I enlist to help me?
- Thought: I get nervous, thinking about what might happen.
- Questions: Why am I always predicting the worst? What am I afraid of? Do I trust myself to get through it? Were there other times that I got through difficult situations? Do I have healthy ways of coping with things when they get tough? What if things go well? Why wouldn’t things go well? Don’t I have the same right to joy as anyone else?
- Thought: I feel bad saying “no” to people.
- Questions: What reaction am I predicting from them? What am I afraid of losing? What do I feel guilty about? Why do I believe that they deserve my time, energy, and resources more than I do? What power might I be trying to preserve? What do I gain from being available to them? How do I want to be seen? How does impact my decision-making?
- Thought: I hate asking people for help.
- Questions: Why is it so hard for me to be honest about what I need? Do I think others will support me? How do I think I’ll be perceived? What do I think it means about me and my success? What am I ashamed of? What am I afraid of? Do I believe myself worthy of help? Do I help others in need? What judgments do I hold against them? What support do I believe I deserve? Am I truly open to help?
With so many threats to our mental health and wellbeing, self-care truly is an act of political warfare, preserving our spirits and our stories so they can continue to evolve. Let’s continue to create a culture, a community, a language, and a space that encourages individuals to truly care for themselves!
If you would like to be inspired by more of the essays and artwork published in the Wise Therapy Spotlight December 2023 Issue, Click to Download the PDF now.
