National Alliance on Mental Illness

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Lure Yourself Like a Lover

 

Art Gallery Bangkok

Art Joy by Marie Schem

 

Self-Care Tip #88 – Win yourself over.  Be a friend to yourself.

Dr. White works with mostly women in primary care medicine.  She tells me that her women so often come in tired, overextended, and they say they don’t feel good.  She wonders why they think they can run 2 full-time jobs (parenting and employment) without suffering for it.  Her counsel is to down scale.

My patients do so much better when they are working part-time.

Christie, a mom of 3 who works full-time, tells me tonight,

It’s hard.

That’s not new news but nor is it small news.  How many of us nod when on the subject of self-care.  We sagely stroke our chin yet are nowhere to be found on the list of topics of interest.  Do we even get pleasure out of taking care of ourselves?

I think there’s a misperception here.  The hard part is not doing the 2 jobs that Dr. White’s patients work.  It is working our own person.  Maybe if we found more pleasure in caring for ourselves we would.  Maybe if we connected that caring for ourselves is the minus-1 to the starting point of caring for others.  We can get hooked.  We can.  But it won’t be the same for all of us.   Any way you turn it though, we have to make it sticky, linked to pleasure, and making sense.

Question: Is there anything specific you can think of that contributes to self-care being a positive thing in your life?  Please tell me your story.

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Connect With Others to Get Friendly With Yourself

Self-Care Tip #81 – Connect with others.  Be a friend to yourself.

So you have bought into the famous, “You are not alone” stock.  After 2 months on psychotropics (medications for emotional illness,) you finally have an interest in people.  You are at least a little motivated and less afraid of things that move.  You don’t feel like you are the reason for original sin and more often than not, you think happiness might be more than what shopping can offer.  What is this strange and unfamiliar sensation?  And what to do with it?

It is time to connect.  Many of us get to the point where we no longer want to hide, we don’t hate ourselves, and we don’t hate others.  We get to the place of showing our under-belly just a little to the big wide world and are shocked that the only thing we feel is the wind as everyone is rushing by!  Just when we start wanting what we spent so much time hiding from, we seem to have forgotten how to connect with others.

It is no secret.  America is culturally impoverished.  We have little of cobblestone streets to meander down, dressed in clean clothes after a days work, checking up on neighbors and gossip.  We have few degrees of activity between full throttle and dead/no heart beat.   Come now!  How to connect in a world where our parents expected us to pay rent when we turned 18years old?

If you find yourself in something of this situation try on one of these basic tools and see what fits.  You can’t expect them all to.  So if you strike out a few times, keep on!

1.  Volunteer – for example, and in no particular order…

2.  Meetup.com – an awesome site to find people interested in what you are interested in.  e.g. book clubs, skiing, small business, Italian

3.  Support groups

4.  Write!  Although this at first thought may appear isolating, it is not necessarily.

  • Blog!  🙂
  • Journal

5.  Toastmasters

There is so much more.  Please let me know your thoughts and I’ll keep adding to this list!

Self-Care Tip #81 – Connect with others.  Be a friend to yourself.