7/31/2017 0 Comments The simplification of self-careHow fortunate are we, who live right now, in this information-rich age. There is so much material available on the internet – the world is literally at our finger tips – but often we have to wade through a lot of muck to get to the really useful bits – the true – the reliable. It applies to news and what we now commonly refer to as fake news – but nowhere is this more prevalent than in the area of self-development. Today I want to talk about what we commonly call self-care. It’s a topic often spoken of around recovery - even common place – and yet I feel we need to take a fresh look at it. I’ve seen a lot of things recently about what people are calling ‘serious self-care’ or 'self-care for the not so faint-hearted'. Some of what I have seen is really important – a call to go further, deeper, more meaningfully into caring for ourselves. I have read some really interesting articles and many have made me stop and think but I have noticed that many of the things I have come across, while true to a certain point, also carry a subtle dig, a judgement, at what is considered then to be pathetic attempts at self-care – things like getting a manicure, or buying oneself flowers. The suggestion is that this is a kind of namby-pamby self-care – not deep, not real, not significant. This is where I have a problem. To me, self-care is at its very roots all about being kind to ourselves. And here is what is important - there is no limit, level or scale in how we act with kindness towards ourselves. Many of us have had to learn how to care for ourselves when self-care has been a foreign and quite alien process for us. Many of us are still learning. We have been strangers to the concept and like with all things, we have to start small. We start with the simple and easy things and no one has the right to undermine this starting place. When I first heard about self-care I had no idea where to begin. I made myself a very simple and basic list – and it was truly very basic. In fact, at first, I had no clue where to start and everything felt like a crazy struggle. Trying to come up with things that I liked or wanted felt quite overwhelming. I took myself out for a coffee once in a while. I went for a walk without the children. I bought myself a magazine I liked to read. Some of the things I listed then are the kinds of things named in these articles as pathetic – they were basic – but this is how it should be! That’s what growing up is all about. Self-care, showing ourselves kindness, naturally will grow and evolve along with us – like every aspect of our growing, recovering life. But this one simple fact remains – there is no right or wrong – there is no superficial and deeper – there is no basic and advanced – there is one simple thing – that our practice of self-care is about showing kindness towards ourselves. This so-called advanced level of self-care is just an over-complication of what is a very simple concept. Be kind to yourself. Today. Tomorrow. To the best of your ability. Do whatever you need to do. Are you being kind to yourself? ♥ ~ Sue
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7/31/2017 0 Comments The Simplification of self-careHow fortunate are we, who live right now, in this information-rich age. There is so much material available on the internet – the world is literally at our finger tips – but often we have to wade through a lot of muck to get to the really useful bits – the true – the reliable. It applies to news and what we now commonly refer to as fake news – but nowhere is this more prevalent than in the area of self-development. Today I want to talk about what we commonly call self-care. It’s a topic often spoken of around recovery - even common place – and yet I feel we need to take a fresh look at it. I’ve seen a lot of things recently about what people are calling ‘serious self-care’ or 'self-care for the not so faint-hearted'. Some of what I have seen is really important – a call to go further, deeper, more meaningfully into caring for ourselves. I have read some really interesting articles and many have made me stop and think but I have noticed that many of the things I have come across, while true to a certain point, also carry a subtle dig, a judgement, at what is considered then to be pathetic attempts at self-care – things like getting a manicure, or buying oneself flowers. The suggestion is that this is a kind of namby-pamby self-care – not deep, not real, not significant. This is where I have a problem. To me, self-care is at its very roots all about being kind to ourselves. And here is what is important - there is no limit, level or scale in how we act with kindness towards ourselves. Many of us have had to learn how to care for ourselves when self-care has been a foreign and quite alien process for us. Many of us are still learning. We have been strangers to the concept and like with all things, we have to start small. We start with the simple and easy things and no one has the right to undermine this starting place. When I first heard about self-care I had no idea where to begin. I made myself a very simple and basic list – and it was truly very basic. In fact, at first, I had no clue where to start and everything felt like a crazy struggle. Trying to come up with things that I liked or wanted felt quite overwhelming. I took myself out for a coffee once in a while. I went for a walk without the children. I bought myself a magazine I liked to read. Some of the things I listed then are the kinds of things named in these articles as pathetic – they were basic – but this is how it should be! That’s what growing up is all about. Self-care, showing ourselves kindness, naturally will grow and evolve along with us – like every aspect of our growing, recovering life. But this one simple fact remains – there is no right or wrong – there is no superficial and deeper – there is no basic and advanced – there is one simple thing – that our practice of self-care is about showing kindness towards ourselves. This so-called advanced level of self-care is just an over-complication of what is a very simple concept. Be kind to yourself. Today. Tomorrow. To the best of your ability. Do whatever you need to do. Are you being kind to yourself?
If you could go back and speak to yourself when you were 5, 10 or 15 what would you say? If you were able in some way to go and be there with yourself as you were struggling to come to terms with abuse in your early life, as you were actually facing it, what would you say to your younger self? I was in my 40’s when I began recovery. Up until then I would have said I was doing okay – but that was only because I had buried most of how I felt so I wouldn’t have to worry about it – I thought it was all well hidden away and that I had been able to build a life for myself despite the abuse. But when my 18 year marriage imploded and my husband told me he didn’t love me or the kids and just wanted to be free and single and able to travel and just live his own life, I realised that my past was not buried but like a stinking corpse I was dragging along behind me – I was chained and shackled to it and it was going to impact on my everyday life until I took some action to really deal with it. In recovery I learned that I needed to grieve over what I had lost in the past but that before I could even grieve over it I needed to let myself feel how it had felt. Because at the time I couldn’t let myself feel any of it – that’s how I survived – but the time had come for me to stop hiding the pain of it from myself – it was time to let myself actually feel the pain of what I had gone through. I learned that we need to release our pain. It needs to go somewhere and for me it went as I wrote down my story – every detail as well as I could – first just the barest facts and then, as part of a healing process, how I actually felt in those terrifyingly dark moments when I was being abused. You may find other ways to do this – telling a therapist – using art – but you must find a way to get what you have been holding onto for so long out into the open somewhere other than in your head. In recovery I learned that words have a great power to heal and I began to use positive affirmation to start to replace all those memories with new ideas – things like You are Beautiful - Despite what you went through, you are okay. I began to allow myself to believe those words. I had children then – amongst them, three little girls and one morning, as I watched my youngest girl sleep I pictured what it would have been like for her if she had been abused in the way I had at her age. It began a profound process where I spent some time imagining how it would have been for each of them, at their varying ages, if they had been abused as I was. I imagined what I would say to them, how I would comfort them, how I would work to rebuild their sense of self and worth afterwards. It was a deep and intense process but I began to realise what I had always longed to hear but never had. I‘m sorry that happened to you. It’s not your fault. You didn’t make any of it happen. It was not about you You are not bad. It was about him. You are beautiful You are going to be okay What words would you whisper to yourself? How would you encourage your child self, knowing what you do now? Now, imagine how you would feel now if those words had been said to you back then. Take a moment to allow them to seep in to who you were as a child and imagine how you would feel if you had grown up with those words instead of the memory of a secret you were too afraid to tell and a nightmare you had to walk alone. In recovery we can tap into a transformation that allows us to heal as if it had never happened. We can literally begin today to whisper those words to our child heart that has waited too long to be told what it is so desperate to hear and we can say it over and over and over again. We can release what we have held on to and allow this new image of our self to become who we are. ♥ ~ Sue 7/6/2017 0 Comments Using AffirmationThe use of affirmations to help us make positive changes in our lives is such a huge thing right now. Everywhere you look these days you see positive statements about things – it’s often very uplifting, but some ‘affirmations’ can also be very cheesy and banal and sometimes downright false! Affirmation, the actual word, comes from two Latin words ‘ad’ meaning ‘to’, and firmare meaning to ‘make firm’. Essentially then, affirmation is about making things clear. At its core, based on its aetiology, it is a declaration, a firm statement about what we believe and hold true and rely on in our lives. But is every positive statement you see something you want to hold as a firm and reliable truth for your life? The thing is, there are affirmations and then there are affirmations! For an affirmation to be really effective it is essential that it is believable. Here is why. When we try and repeat something in our conscious minds that sounds good but is a bit of a stretch, if we don’t actually find it to be credible and reasonable, our self-talk will constantly sabotage its capacity to sink in. It’s hard enough work persuading our self-talk to remain in tune with us about things we believe. We haven’t a hope of convince ourselves of wildly unbelievable things – we are rational human beings and for the most part if it is a big stretch from what we really think, we won’t be able to hoodwink ourselves. And nor should we even try! I believe in the power of affirmation to bring about significant changes in our lives. I believe in it as much as I believe in the sun’s capacity to rise each day. I know it is a powerful tool for changing deeply entrenched false thinking and negative ideas. But I believe with all my heart that to really harness the power of affirmation we need to make our affirmations grounded in reality and to do this they must be reasonable, reachable and believable. The affirmations I have personally found the most beneficial, and continue to use the most frequently on Recovering Your Life and promote, are worded in terms of Just For Today. You may have seen these on the Facebook page or the iPhone App. On the Facebook page I post one each day that relates to the theme or topic for the day. I have always found this style of affirmation more helpful personally and I know that for many of us change can be very daunting, even if we really want it, and to make the things we are working on a little more manageable, then thinking in terms of doing them just this day is more of a possibility. For all of us. I believe we can try a new way of doing things just for today. We can think a different way just for today. We can try harder just for today……Focusing on change just for today then is reasonable and at the same time reachable. As well as these, I do find other affirmations useful too, especially ones we might write for ourselves. This is an amazing way of keeping our affirmations grounded and believable. When I write affirmations, I always use the personal pronoun….. it is always about what I can do. But I especially find the use of I will very powerful and influential as it connects us to our choice centre – it reminds us that to make new choices we must use our will. Do avoid the use of words like should, could, ought to……these imply judgement, and expectations and these do not help us to make changes. I will, I can, I am….these are much more powerful forms. If the idea of positive affirmation seems a bit ‘out there’ for you, but you are willing to give them a bit of a try, start with listing your positive qualities. Think of an element of your strengths rather than your weaknesses. For example, when feeling like you can’t keep going through a hard situation, try this: I am a strong person, I have endured much harder things before and because I have, I know I can again. Focusing on things that seem incredible to us will not achieve the results we might hope for. But if instead we focus on believable, reachable and reasonable - grounded-in-reality things, we will likely have much more success. |
AuthorSue Parry-Jones is a trained counsellor, a social worker and survivor of abuse. The content of the blog is both personal and sound. The words are relate-able and widely appealing to those struggling with survival from abuse in their own lives. More and more we are appreciating in our society that abuse affects a number of people’s lives and as more people are beginning to openly discuss what they have endured, so there is a huge need for encouragement and hope in the form of texts that deliver clear and concise yet real input. THe words shared here are honest, real and heart-felt. Archives
February 2018
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