180. Self-care, self-comfort, self-love & what we have learned from our mothers

Simple on Purpose | Intentional Living and Parenting

Sometimes we can find ourselves reaching for a bowl of chocolate, scrolling through social media, or checking out for the night, and call that self-care. But that is really self-comfort and only serves to numb the discomfort instead of fixing it. Self-care is tuning into ourselves and finding out what we need to do to care for ourselves. Listen in as I discuss self-care and self-love, and how that has changed over the years since our mothers were young. Main topics: The difference between self-care and self-comfort Meeting our needs and our capacity (window of tolerance) Accepting cheap substitutes to meet our needs What we think it means when our needs are going unmet The culture of moms meeting their needs, is it intuitive? What we learn from our mothers about self-care and self-love Why the term self-love feels challenging. Related links: Self-care assessment Is self care the answer when motherhood sucks? (blog post) Understanding how the window of tolerance impacts your stress in motherhood (episode) How to find confidence in being the mom you are (episode) Being a mom on purpose (it is not about happy, obedient kids) (episode) 67. Making motherhood harder than it needs to be (Mom Martyr) The highlight reel of moms talking about self-care and meeting their needs Simple Saturdays email (sign up here) Instagram (message me on IG) FULL TRANSCRIPT (unedited) We're gonna continue on with our series about meeting your needs. And I want to talk more about self care and self love and how this is about it. But it's also not about it. The whole series, meeting your needs, I don't think that is one that I would listen to if I saw that title sounds kind of weird to say, but I think many mums might feel this way you see something on meeting your needs, and you might think, I don't need that things are fine. Or there might be some resistance, because you're kind of worried is this another pitch for that self care, self love, do face masks in the bath, treat yourself, you deserve it love yourself, you're amazing. We are a little bit worried about where this is going to take us. Because I think some of us know that. That self care, self love cannot be an entire approach to living. There's parts that are so helpful, for sure. But the approach needs more to it, it kind of feels like thin ice over water. But we need that iceberg. Underneath we need that iceberg of values and beliefs. We need awareness, validation, radical acceptance before we move into self care and self love. So as I move forward with this topic of meeting your needs, I want to approach this topic from the work I've done with moms of all ages and stages all over the world. And that's the approach of addressing the overwhelm the stress, the expectations, the mental load that moms are under. Because this overwhelm it feels like a threat to us on a base level. And when we add in a reduced capacity to deal with that threat, you have yourself a chronic stress response. And that's what we're commonly operating from. That's why we need self care and self love. But at the at the core of it capacity is what's important. Capacity is one I want to talk about. For someone to feel capacity, they feel like they can do they feel capable, they have met their basic needs, so that they can move forward with dealing with things and feeling capable. Think of how capacity impacts you in your daily life. Think of how you show up in motherhood, when you have slept well, or have had a nourishing meal or when you've just gone out for a walk on your own and it felt really restorative. Or you've just met up with your besties and had some great laughs. But how often are we really giving ourselves the resources to restore and maintain our capacity, I would say the opposite often happens that we spend more energy scrambling to deal with our lack of capacity rather than we spend building it.