Please allow me to take a moment to give my honest opinion on the trend of self-care… I think it’s ridiculous ? I’m sorry if I’ve offended you, but please let me explain.
The times that I’ve heard others explain self-care, they were explaining the idea of “me-time”. A moment to do whatever they wanted without interruption from the outside world.
That’s well and fine until this idea is used to defend periods of neglect. There was a time when a close friend of mine expressed the idea of self-care as doing things her way for as long as she felt necessary regardless of how it affected me. Ouch!
I guess that my point is, when is self-care toxic? Are there times when it’s causing harm to the world around you in order to make you have a moment of peace?
For the last six months I took a different approach to the idea of self-care. Instead of hiding away to do an activity that would only give me a moment of peace. I decided to do something that would give me a life time of peace. And even better, it would bring peace to the world around me.
My husband and I were encouraged by close friends to do a six month class called Freedom Session. We were skeptical. They explained that this course changed their lives for the better. We figured it couldn’t hurt. But I had no clue if this class would actually give me the peace I desired in my life despite it’s frequent moments of chaos.
This class was nothing short of torture. It felt like anything but self-care. My husband and I were broken up into different groups. The groups that we were placed in was the group we had to open up with about our darkest secrets.
The nature of the course was to go into our past and bring up memories we didn’t want to relive. Bring up ideas and habits that was causing damage to ourselves and those around us. The goal was to be free of being products of our present and past circumstances.
I didn’t think I would actually experience freedom. I could imagine the Chanelle I would like to be. But I couldn’t imagine this Chanelle coming to fruition only six months after the start of the program.
Tonight was our graduation from Freedom Session. I am actually shocked to be on the other side. I wanted to give up so many times. I thought the facilitator of my small group would give up on me too. I didn’t expect to graduate. I expected to fail and was prepared to justify my failure.
Yet here I am. I am experiencing a peace and self-love I have not experienced before. I feel absolutely content. It took a lot to get here. A lot of forgiveness. A lot of moments of being honest about my struggles. Honest about the ugly sides of me that I didn’t want anyone to know.
The most amazing part of this journey was to have been paired up with someone called a sponsor. This person, we had to sit with and open up about everything we had to deal with in Freedom Session. We had to reveal all our dark secrets and all our hurts and embarrassments.
This sounded absolutely terrifying to me at first. But because I was reading out of my work book, that helped. Also, this sponsor had taken Freedom Session before. She understood what I was going through and was so understanding and accepting of every part of me. Even the parts of me that I felt mortified to tell her about.
This is my version of self-care. Taking the time and doing the work to not only make life easier on myself, but to also make life easier on the world around me.
Because I took this course, I can garantee I am a better wife. I feel I am a better mother. I’m no longer feeling ashamed of my self constantly and comparing myself to others. I’m so happy with who I am, the way I am and my circumstances.
This came from dealing with my past and present issues. Not from taking a moment to hide away and do whatever I feel like doing. And believe me, most of the time while doing Freedom Session, I definitely did not feel like doing it.
But I am so overwhelmed with joy concerning the work that has been done in my heart and soul, through this experience. I needed this.
So I urge you to take a moment to really question your method of self-care. Is it something you want… Or something you need?
