Conceptualizing self-care and self-love

I've been noticing more negative feelings in myself recently, like sadness, impatience, and irritation. Something that I've taken from one of Sharon Salzberg's guided metta meditations that I've been trying to incorporate into my life is the strategy of, when you notice that it's difficult for you to extend loving kindness to others, to first try to extend it to yourself. This is a big part of the reason why I've been revisiting the idea of self-love and self-care.

Self-care is something that I'd never really tried to define for myself. In the past, I've associated it with things like doing sheet masks, drinking tea, and taking time off of school and work, without really thinking about what those things were trying to accomplish and whether they were even effective ways to care for myself.

My friend Nicole introduced me to the Internal Family Systems model a couple weeks ago, which is a style of therapy that "combines systems thinking with the view that the mind is made up of relatively discrete subpersonalities, each with its own viewpoint and qualities"[1]. I've been listening to an audio book to learn more about IFS, and I've also noticed this theory naturally appearing in other areas of my life.

The model that we all comprise a "true self" and other various parts has been helpful for me to use in thinking about how to care for and love myself, even if I'm not applying it in a strict sense.

For instance, although I would like to eat more healthfully, I often find myself overeating and/or eating food that I know won't make me feel good (like candy). In addition, I am often not mindful of my physical needs, because I spend most of my time in my head and not in my body! Something that I've found really motivating and evocative is to focus on extending love and care to the part of me that is just my physical body. A prompt that I implicitly use is "what are stereotypes of things that bodies like?". Some things that come up are: stretching out, being hydrated, being clean, eating whole foods, getting enough rest. When I want to perform those acts of self-care, I visualize my true self taking care of my physical body, much as I take care of my plants.

Doing this makes me feel as my true self is a parent taking care of their children. And I think it's amazing that my perception of self-love is associated with how much I explicitly demonstrate that taking care of myself is important to me. This understanding has helped me explain why using luxurious skincare products makes me feel self-love—the fact that some part of me willingly spends the money to buy these products is a way that I reinforce my self-value to myself. In other words, I'm worth it! Ideally in the future I will rely less on money and material goods to communicate self-value to myself, but I think at the moment it's an effective love language.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

No man steps in the same river twice

I love this quote, and here is the full version: “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man” (Heraclitus). In the past, I fixated on the “[for] he’s not the same man” part of the quote. I thought, every time I face a challenge, I’m benefiting from all the past work I’ve done and all the experiences I’ve had. Each moment, a new me is born, and this is the me that engages with the world anew.  More recently, the “for it’s not the same river” bit has become more salient to me. As I wrote in my ( senior thesis ) solo show, “ I thought I found myself over my gap year, I thought I had grown self-confidence, and had learned how to love myself. It’s funny which lessons you have to relearn over and over. Life is so weird, and beautiful like that.” 💕 What those lines don’t capture is how frustrating it feels to struggle with the same thing, over and over again.  But actually, what I realized, and what Heraclitus’s quote is pointing
Read more

On binge eating and yin-yang energies

tw: mentions of disordered eating I’ve struggled with binge eating behaviors for a long time, knowingly since I was in college, but likely for almost all of my life, unknowingly. I remember when I was a kid, my mom bought me a bag of sour gummy worms, and when we got home, she put it in a cabinet where I theoretically wouldn’t be able to access it. But one day when I was alone, I climbed on a chair to open the cabinet and ended up demolishing that bag after doing that multiple times throughout the day. That was way too many sour gummy worms for my stomach and body to handle, even as a kid! More recently, I’ve been aware of how I use binge eating to self soothe—as a type of unhealthy coping mechanism that in the process of doing it, causes other short- and long-term discomforts to arise. Notably, I feel like it will be very difficult for me to deepen my self-love and self-trust if I maintain this self-sabotaging pattern. During the February silent meditation retreat here at MAPLE, I had
Read more

Systems thinking and economic indicators

I’ve been reading about Internal Family Systems (IFS) again recently, and so I’ve been freshly re-exposed to that systems thinking way of seeing. Viewing our behaviors and reactions as interdependent/interwoven, as opposed to as independent symptoms that can be individually targeted and “fixed.” For instance, the book  No Bad Parts  includes a case study that illustrates how one woman’s suicidal, manic, sleepy/dissociated, and abused parts are all occurring in relationship to one another. It can be easy or tempting to pathologize various parts, but targeting one part without an understanding of the reality it exists in—or that it perceives it exists in—can lead to an increased sense of threat and further spiraling, as the system bounces back even more intensely. In recent circling contexts, I’ve also been engaging in systems thinking in the form of the concept of leading and lagging economic indicators. “A leading indicator is an economic factor that tends to change before the economy
Read more