Self-Care Plan

Okay, so we've established that self-care is necessary to radical practice.  But how do you actually accomplish taking care of yourself with the amazing number of things we have to and want to do every day?

In my life, self-care was a joke for a long time.  As a young person growing up in an emotionally stressful home, self-care was in limited supply.  Most of the time I was helping others or staying busy enough that I didn't have to think.  So I lived on a spectrum from helping others to completing objective tasks, a spectrum of activities largely divorced from self-care.  This seems like it is a fairly common reality, particularly for women and/or people involved with caregiving.  Hence, self-care activities for the purpose of self-care alone - not for resume-building or because someone told you to or because someone required it - was not something I built into my personal habit arsenal.  I lived in this way through college.  And through my first years post-college.  Finally, I realized life was not going to slow down.  I wasn't going to "get there" - there being a fantasy land where I had a daily routine that had ample time for self-care.  Then a few things happened at once.

1. I realized I was planning for an emotional retirement that was likely to never occur.  
Suggestion: Accept that life is busy and fast because we live in a competitive capitalistic society.  If you are going to get self-care, you are going to have to prioritize it and carve time out to allow for it.  It's part of getting through this marathon in a healthy way.

2. My family and friends finally convinced me that I like self-care.
Suggestion: Try to listen to the people who love you when they say things that - if you are like I was - you hate.  Examples include, "don't work too hard," "you should go home," and "take a deep breath."  When I was a workaholic I interpreted these as being related to competition (i.e. they wanted me to stop working so I would be easier to beat) or that they just did not understand my work ethic (i.e. they couldn't understand me - adolescence, anyone?).  Eventually as I learned to trust, I believed them and I took a break.

3.  I realized that when I participated in self-care, I was way less anxious.  I could do my work with less stress and less fear of failure.  
Suggestion:  Try it.  See how you feel after taking a whole day or a whole weekend off.  Or taking off enough time that you feel like you can work again.

So clearly I had a battle even getting to the point that I was willing to admit that self-care was a real thing and was not going to prevent me from finishing all of my tasks.  Now I approach self-care like I approach most of my life as a budding social worker: through assessment, treatment planning, and progress assessment.

University of Buffalo has my favorite tools for making a self-care plan.  It takes into account the many facets of the individual: mind, spirit, body, work, emotions, and relationships.  It also helps you prepare for emergencies when your self-care bucket is empty and your stress bucket is over-flowing.  Check it out here: https://socialwork.buffalo.edu/resources/self-care-starter-kit.html.  

The only thing I've added is a worry/ re-frame t-chart.  Do you have worries that come up all the time and you find yourself and your friends/spouse/support system talking through a million times?  I do!  I'm trying to avoid this anxiety deja vu by writing out my worries and worst-case scenarios and then writing a response to myself to help me re-frame the situation.  Here's an example:

Worry: I will get a poor grade on this paper.  

Re-frame/ Response:  Number one: no one cares what grades you get anymore.  No one will ever see these grades.  Number two: you work your best when you are fearless.  Be fearless.  You might get a poor grade.  That is good practice for paper rejections.  Just write.  Believe what you've always believed - that you have important ideas that will help people and you need to get them out.  This paper is a small step on the road to being able to do that.  You can take the step, and you can miss a step and still get to the destination.  It will be okay.  Just write something.  

So yeah - a bit corny, but definitely what my husband would say if I asked him.  Which I have.  Many times.  And he's tired of repeating it.  So writing it down will help both of us.

Last step.  Share your plan.  Share it with your partners in life, so they can remind you about it when you are stressed or feeling guilty about taking a break.

Take care,
Kess

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.