When Self Care becomes Dysregulating

"Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself. You are a child of the universe no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here."

From the poem "Desiderata" by Max Ehrmann

Today I am sharing some insights about self-worth, self-love, and authentic self-tending that I hope may be supportive.

These themes have been profound challenges for me throughout my life, and as I begin to actually understand what it means to embody my own inherent worthiness, so much transformation has and is happening on so many levels.

I think it took me the first 30 years of my life to even begin knowing what my own needs were, to recognize that it's okay and normal to have needs, and to know that there is nothing wrong with me for having needs.

Knowing this, I began the process of cultivating an internal sense of safety, which is something I wasn't even aware that I was lacking for most of my life.

I had a dysregulated nervous system and very intense anxiety as a child, adolescent, and young adult with no other experience for comparison to understand that what I was feeling internally wasn't normal, and that I really needed help.

I started experiencing physical symptoms as a child such as bloating, constipation, and chronic fatigue. I had a binge/purge eating disorder for about 6 years between adolescence and young adulthood. And then as an adult, I struggled with a 15 year journey of chronic musculoskeletal pain, chronic fatigue, irritable bowel syndrome, tinnitus, and endometriosis... to name a few...along with pretty intense, ongoing anxiety and depression.

It has historically been a struggle for me to trust my own body. I will tell more of my story of living with chronic pain in future newsletters. There is so much I could share. But one piece that has helped me to cultivate internal safety, and therefore significantly reduce my symptoms, is to tend to myself from a place of honest authenticity.

It seems rather simple. However, in my experience, authentic self-tending has become rather profound as it has transformed from a concept in my mind to an embodied experience. (Two very different ways of understanding something.)

What do I mean by authentic self-tending?

For me, it started with knowing that simply by being a human...simply by existing, my experience matters. This was the beginning of the journey of embodying my own inherent self worth.

This embodied knowing has shifted my experience of tending to and caring for myself from a place of thinking I should do something, to asking myself "What do I actually want to do right now? What would actually, genuinely help me feel better in this moment?"

These questions may seem so basic to the majority of people who are connected to themselves, to their emotions, to their needs, to people who have secure attachment and a sense of inherent self worth, competence and confidence.

But to someone whose relational existence as a child was that of being teased, ridiculed, emotional neglected, and bullied, being connected to a sense of truth within myself was alien to me.

My experience as a kid was that of needing to frantically keep up with everyone else because nobody was meeting me where I was. Simultaneously, my primal brain learned that people, in general, are unsafe. A dilemma formed in my psyche at a very young age.

There is so much information in the world of mind/body healing from chronic pain about safety reappraisal, which is essentially exposing yourself to the uncomfortable sensations while simultaneously being resourced enough in safety to relate with your symptoms in a different way from your patterned, automatic reactions of fear, despair, anger or avoidance to your pain.

And in my experience, I have not been able to experience that safety without first really grasping that I am a human who deserves basic respect and dignity. That I too am a human who deserves to have her needs met just as much as anyone else.

This has provoked a LOT of grief to rise from the depths within me up to the surface to be processed. There are still some chunks of grief down there, churning at the bottom of the well. I am doing the internal work now of holding a wide enough container for myself that when the layers of grief are ready to come to the surface, they are being held with compassion and care from my wise adult self in a way that I missed as a child.

This has also provoked a lot of honesty in many of my relationships that were formed when I was in a place of under-valuing myself, and enabling others to do the same. I have had to let a some relationships go. More on that topic later. (There's a lot there).

I have been drawn to healing modalities from bodywork to embodied movement to somatic therapy to spirituality to meditation to journaling to dancing, etc, etc etc. These are all great practices. And I have many times been caught in dysfunctional loops with these practices.

It's not about the practice.

It's about how you are relating to what you are practicing.

I have used many "self-care" practices as a crutch for when my nervous system is dysregulated...trying to urgently transform the way that I feel in those moments when I feel terrible.

Essentially, I weaponized the very tools that were supposed to help me because they were used impulsively to avoid feeling uncomfortable.

Honestly, I'm still in a process with this sometimes, and I have to really slow down, check in with myself, and ask if this way that I am embodying this practice right now is a state of being I want to be cultivating.

If the answer is no, then it's time to really pause. There's usually something deeper that's asking for my attention, and those are the hardest moments to actually slow down. Sometimes those are the moments when I need my partner or a friend or a therapist so that I am not alone. Those are the moments when there is some emotion that needs to be felt that I'm having a hard time accessing.

Those are the moments when I have begun to ask the question:

"How can I authentically tend to myself right now?"

And it's in these moments that I remind myself of my own inherent worth, remembering that I deserve to be cared for, just as much as any other living being who is suffering.

This is has not been an easy recognition, because being woman, growing up low-middle class, and suffering with chronic illness in this society has been anything but validating or affirming.

Nevertheless, with a lot of courage I meet myself right where I am, in the best way that I know how in any given moment. And it requires dropping back into a deeper sense of space and capacity, a relaxing of the urge to do something about the way I feel.