Self-Care is Radical

The other day I was driving and heard a radio commercial for a pharmacy's urgent care clinic.  It insinuated that you just don't have time to get sick and if you go to their urgent care you'll be back to picking up your kids from soccer, making dinner, and rocking it at meetings lickety-split.  I'm concerned about this framing.  It wasn't, "oh no, too bad you're sick, we can help."  Instead, it was you don't have time to let your body go through an inevitable and natural process that is picking up a bug.  This pharmacy echoed what we are being told from so many angles: you do not have time for a break, you need to be working.  And if you're a woman, you need to be making sure that everyone you care for is sticking to it too.

This all-in worker is not a new American ideal.  In her 1977 landmark work, Men and Women of the Corporation, Rosabeth Moss Kanter describes this person as the "ideal worker" (not by her own definition, but by that of the corporation culture).  The ideal worker is a person whose whole focus is on work.  They work hard at work.  They bring home work.  They think about work in their spare time.  A lot of their social time is work-related.  They are okay with their vacation being interrupted by work or not taking a vacation at all.

Kanter discusses how in the original corporate culture this meant that women really couldn't be ideal workers and attempted to exclude them from the market.  Predominately white middle- and upper-class women did unpaid labor for their family and for their husband's corporation (e.g. organizing charity events and networking socials).  Women did all this so their husbands could be ideal workers and not worry about things like chores or children. Corporations believed that women could never be ideal workers because they wouldn't be able to avoid thinking about or actually helping their children, aging parents, or community efforts.  Hence, they largely excluded women from being a part of corporations and when they were included, it was in positions that were routine and time limited (i.e. not requiring an ideal worker).  Clearly this is only one corner of the market and excludes many groups of people, but Moss Kanter's work was one hint to the bind we are in as corporate culture takes over everything - including social work, education, and other women's fields.

This corporate culture is not designed to make sure people have lots of emotional energy.  So it's not designed for social workers.  It is up to us to re-claim the fact that we need self-care to do our work.  It is also up to us to acknowledge that self-care is the only way we will have space to connect with others, to critically analyze our situation, and to be creative.  Not prioritizing self-care is one way, I believe, that the corporate take-over of the helping professions prevents us from focusing on macro-issues.  Working on macro-issues requires consciousness-raising and organization which means time, space, and relationship-building.  These cannot be done by the "ideal worker" in the sense of corporate culture.  

So self-care isn't about being selfish or not doing your best as some organizations and corporations might lead us to believe.  Self-care isn't just about healing from trauma, vicarious trauma, or compassion fatigue (although it is those things).  Self-care isn't just about re-charging so that you can do more work (although it is that too).  Full and complete self-care is radical.  By taking space to reflect, to think, to create, to learn, you can consider how you want to commit your energy and how to stay true to our ethical code.  Learning about topics and participating in activities unrelated to work can open new ways of thinking about work-related problems.  This creativity is what we need to crack the tough problems we face in the helping professions.  Becoming more robotic will not help us help our clients raise their own consciousness and find solutions.  Becoming all-consumed by one topic will not let us exercise our creativity to consider ways to break down power differentials.  Being so consumed by our work encourages linear rather than circular thinking.  In this way, self-care allows us to explore radical solutions to our broken systems and our societal problems.  It allows us to feel like the smart, capable people we are.  

Self-care is a radical goal in our "work work work!" society.  It is also extremely difficult to pull off with so many people and problems - about which we care deeply - competing for our limited time.  I look forward to writing a few posts about how I'm trying to commit to self-care so that I can be a better social worker and a better all around person.  Hopefully, we'll hear some other ideas here as well.