Yesterday on The Anxious Morning I talked about why my occasional rants aside, self care is important. Today I want to talk a bit about why I sometimes rant about self care and how that concept can become problematic.
Before I go on, I just want to be perfectly clear about something. I do not get to judge when you need to rest or take care of yourself. Nobody gets to judge that. Only you do. Only you can feel what you feel and know what you know about yourself. This is important. I cannot give you exact instructions on how or when to engage in self-care. I can tell you why you should, and what the pitfalls are, but in the end you are in charge of all of that.
When we are driven by avoidance which itself is driven by baseless (but real) fear, we often develop a curious and unexpected super power. Anxious people often become galaxy class masters of rationalization and self-deception. We quickly cultivate amazingly effective strategies for convincing ourselves that we’re not avoiding anxiety or running from it. When we do an exposure on Tuesday, then take all of Wednesday off, we’ll call it well deserved rest, a mental health day, or a “me day”. We will sometimes latch on to that most clickable of all online mental health devices … self care.
“I’m not avoiding! I know I’ve only left the house once in the last four days but … SELF CARE!”
I get this. Really, I do. If you give an agoraphobic a choice between doing another exposure and taking a self care day to lay on the sofa, disordered anxiety and irrational fear will choose “self care” 8 times out of 10. Even when that day off is the 26th day off in the last 32 days, an anxious person driven by the desire to feel safe will argue passionately that they need to listen to their body and engage in compassionate self care.
Sometimes we DO need to do that. See yesterday’s edition of The Anxious Morning for more on this. But remember the part a few paragraphs back when I said that you are always in charge of this stuff? Well that comes at a price. That price is the willingness to be brutally honest with yourself about your motivations and what drives your choices. You get to declare a self care day whenever you need one, but you also have to accept responsibility for rationalized avoidance when it rears its head from time to time.
When the idea of self care (and even self compassion to some degree) gets used as a shield to protect and justify avoidant behavior, then it has gone off the rails. You may not even be aware that it happened. You may never have intended it to happen. But we all know how powerful anxiety and irrational fear can be. They’ll take over and make everything about retreat and avoidance, then convince you that retreat and avoidance are the right thing to do.
Left unchecked, anxiety and fear will turn self care into food, gorging themselves and sucking the air of your recovery progress.
This is why I often rant the way I do about self care and the misuse and misappropriation of the term. I’m not picking on anyone for wanting to rest, or even for wanting to feel safe and comfortable. But when anxiety and fear are partying at your expense and running through your liquor cabinet while you’re just trying to find your cat, somebody has to be willing to turn on the lights, unplug the music, and end the party before the whole house gets trashed.
I guess sometimes, I’m that person. I’ll shut down the anxiety party when it needs to be shut down.
What a buzzkill, right?
98. When Self Care Goes Off The Rails