Why care for self is not just about spa treatments
“The difference between comfort and nurture is this: if you have a plant that is sick because you keep it in a dark closet, and you say soothing words to it, that is comfort. If you take the plant out of the closet and put it in the sun, give it something to drink, and then talk to it, that is nurture.”
Clarissa Pinkola Estés, in Women Who Run with the Wolves
What are the differences between self-care and self-compassion? There is a sense that the one is about behaviour and the other is about regard; hence, self-care is something we do, in the form of activities or rituals, while self-compassion (or perhaps more commonly referred to as self-love) is an attitude we have towards ourselves. In this post I explore the issues I have with some interpretations of self-care in the mainstream – how it has become monetised, used as yet another form of consumerism, and even become a way of avoiding responsibility for real self-nurturing and growth. But I’ve also been reminded that self-compassion is the conviction, the fundamental self-acceptance, that is necessary to enable self-care in the first place. After all, some days you’re too down to even self-sustain, let alone deem yourself worthy of looking after.
Self-care and Self-compassion – What are the differences?
First, self-care as it is often portrayed in the media seems to be about escape. On a podcast I was listening to the other day, the hosts joked that “#selfcare” has become the perfect shorthand excuse for “I don’t feel like showing up”. Of course, right now during the COVID-19 outbreak and social distancing, self-care and introverts everywhere must be having a field day.
True self-care does entail some building of “buffer zones”, but it’s empowered and proactive – like building safe houses, rather than fleeing in desperation from a building that’s on fire. I don’t want to detract from the value of recovery, but recovery has to be built in as part of a life strategy, rather than resorted to when you’re about to keel over.
Second, self-compassion for me carries with it a sense of taking oneself (I should say, one’s Self) more lightly, whereas self-care seems to be about reinforcing the self, albeit through withdrawal and soothing rather than outward defensiveness. Yes, there is empathy in both but there’s almost more humility in the former – humility without self-deprecation. Self-deprecation is about putting oneself down, but it can paradoxically be used as an ego-supporting tactic, whether consciously or unconsciously. You might also call it positive projection – everyone else is better than me – or at worst, a symptom of victim mentality.
Whereas self-compassion is saying “I’m imperfect” and not just being OK with that but really being able to “hold” it because you know there is something larger than the self. It is recognising one’s suffering and pain, feeling compassion for it – which can even bring feelings of sorrow, but is not the same thing as self-pity, somehow, and definitely not the same thing as shame – and then taking responsibility for that, even recognising (with compassion, again) how you’ve clung to and perpetuated it as part of your identity. It’s regarding oneself like a mother looking at a child who doesn’t know any better, rather than like a jury looking at an accused standing trial on the docks.
Just remember it’s your child, nobody else’s.
Self-compassion means protecting yourself because you know the self is fallible, vulnerable. Self-care, rather, is perhaps more about protecting oneself because the rest of the world is a nasty place.
Self-compassion, or what drives true self-care, is about “coming home” – on purpose, deliberately, regularly, preventatively. What does that mean to you?
First, do you know what “home” is? Is it something that you know you can go to whenever you need, something you know nobody can take away from you? And do you make time to self-nurture, not just self-soothe?
“True self-care is not salt baths and chocolate cake, it is making the choice to build a life you don’t need to regularly escape from.”
Brianna Wiest, quoted in this post by Nepenthe
Self-Care as a (gender-biased) product
Let’s not forget that self-care is trying to sell you things, too. And in this particular market category, there seems to be more stuff to sell to one half of the population.
Society has traditionally sold women the (unpaid) role of primary care-giver and home maker, while more recently the role of highly successful career woman has been added. Maxing out on juggling both deprives them of the ability to self-nurture, to recreate and self-regenerate – in short, of a true sense of home. To compensate, women are then given a substitute that is both cheap and very expensive – the health and beauty industry.
At least until very recently, you didn’t see men needing to recover from being men with spa treatments and stuff, right? True, they pay money for other recreational things, but it’s predominantly women who have been targeted as needing “maintenance”. This maintenance extends from the labour of health, beauty and grooming in order to look good, to emotional labour, first in the form of daily worrying, caring and self-censoring and then in going to psychotherapy, which men don’t traditionally prefer to do either.
I’m not knocking therapy for anybody – we all need it; just not necessarily the variety that has a word like “retail” tagged onto the front of it. Treating yourself is nice, but let’s acknowledge that it’s still consumerism (a bizarre form of it, marketed as recovery from our capitalist reality with more capitalism).
As a generalisation, one thing women are mostly very good at which doesn’t necessarily play into the hands of industry is maintaining our emotional health through relationships. Social support – specifically, having relationships with other women – and the resilience that it builds is a vital component of true wellbeing (on the topic of “collective care”, see this post also).
At worst, the self-care industry could be seen as a form of decentralised pacification, providing a safety-valve predominantly for women, offering them numerous ways to pay money to take care of themselves, both in order to stay sane and maybe even to give them the impression that it’s society who cares for them.
They say you can’t pour from an empty cup. Yes, and we know it’s in society’s interest for your cup to be full. Or maybe just full enough that you don’t question why it’s being continually drained.
Truth: Nobody else is going to do it for you (never mind that they want you to pay)
I once watched a TED Talk on the meaning of work-life balance, and a key point that stood out for me (which I’m paraphrasing) was this: You must remember that corporations are inherently designed to get as much out of you as they can get away with. It’s in their nature.
Corporations, as we see, have started to become more proactive with respect to looking after employee wellbeing holistically, and are starting to pay attention to mental health as well as physical. But they are still a system, and systems are always stronger than individuals.
In his book Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari says that the success of the human species is based in part on our ability to imagine shared concepts and entities, which then enabled widespread cooperation. Countries (national identities, rather), the Church, and corporations are such examples. If you think about it, your company is an entity that is separate from – including, but greater than – the people who work there, its equity, its office furniture and so forth. But actually, it doesn’t really exist. It’s an entity that’s acknowledged by a brand and some sort of trading licence, which also doesn’t really mean much if nobody agrees on its legitimacy.
Where am I going with this? The entity, the system, somehow has a life of its own, which is both personal (we identify strongly with the company’s brand) and impersonal. We invest it with this life, collectively upholding and maintaining its rules and processes, but even though it’s not one concrete thing, it’s still external to us. And therefore it can get away with anything because we can externalise our willingness to comply and behave in a certain way, onto It.
Why do we burn out? Because Company Culture, because Rat Race. I’m not saying these things aren’t real, but we are the ones who give them power.
My stories of self-compassion
In 2018 I was miserable. To give you one illustration, my brain was waking me up before my alarm every morning with, among other nebulous worries, infuriating dream-visions of spreadsheets. Apparently, my unconscious mind was projecting my anxiety into a compulsion to keep “filling in” endless cells. Appropriately – and I’m only seeing the idiomatic link now – I was, at the time, “filling in” for a colleague in operations management who was on maternity leave. My days were more or less solid anxiety, as I had to take care of logistics as well as high-level planning and design.
My evenings would sometimes involve stepping in through the front door and immediately lying down on the kitchen tiles. There was other stuff going on in my personal life other than work stress. I think I cried most days.
The above is, of course, filtered to highlight the worst, and I can’t remember now how long it went on for but it wasn’t forever. But the point is that I was suffering from anxiety and, I think, depression (the two hold hands, quite tightly). I say I think depression because it’s always an approximation. I was going to therapy and talking through the issues, and a few things came out which ultimately led to a (short- to medium-term, I can now say) drug prescription.
What were those things? First, that I was “high functioning” – I was feeling horrendous a lot of the time, but still getting out of bed and going to work every day. I was also in the habit of doing things to manage my energy, like exercise, eating well and seeing friends. When I did those things, I felt better; I was able to lift myself out of the mire.
Second, we established that there were several clearly external variables that coincided with the onset of my symptoms, and therefore that it was somewhat safe to assume that this shit wouldn’t go on forever.
Third, that I did have “stuff” to deal with – but that it sometimes becomes hard to even start dealing with it when your default settings are far below optimal.
So, by going on anti-depressants, the first act of self-compassion was relinquishing some responsibility for my symptoms. My closest friend, who has been on medication for years, compares it to a Type 1 diabetes diagnosis: you don’t blame somebody for their insulin being out of whack, so you won’t tell somebody it’s their fault that their serotonin reuptake, or whatever other chemicals are involved, is off balance.
The reality, or mine at the time anyway, is that when you are depressed it is too hard even to tell yourself you’re doing OK. Your brain doesn’t believe you. Your brain feels like it has no skin, no barrier between itself and the outside world – or maybe between itself and the inside world, come to think of it, because that’s where all the terror really lives.
Yes, I probably had/still have cognitive-behavioural issues or patterns that led to the vicious cycle of maintaining the anxiety and triggering the depressiveness. But you can’t get to those patterns until you make it safe to do so. It’s like trying to get to the control panel of some machine that’s gone crazy. I’m a little wary of carrying this analogy further, because it implies having to “subdue” the whole machine, hit reset or “standby”. Although, actually, that’s kind of what SSRI’s do, without being a literal kill switch. They damp down everything. They don’t stop the machine, but they do contain it. For a year I felt like I was in a bubble that made a lot of the “noise” just sort of bounce.
My second experience with self-compassion was perhaps the start of a realisation. It was at a Tibetan Buddhist seminar in Kathmandu.
“You have to take care of yourself.”
The translator spoke these words in the middle of one of the teacher’s transmissions, and my ears pricked up. The “have to” for the first time sounded like a meaningful imperative, not a self-admonishment. And it made sense in this way:
We’re all the same. Not only that, but – if you believe in karma – we’ve gotten here after millennia of repeating the same patterns of striving, projecting, clinging, and suffering. We’ve been through thousands of lifetimes, lived as thousands of different sentient beings. Every being on this earth could once have been any other being, from an ant to a CEO. And every being at one point has shown kindness to us.
So, you have to take care of yourself because compassion is compassion – for every being and everything. If you vow to treat other humans, animals, even ants, with compassion, why not yourself?
I remember a specific moment that triggered self-compassion. It was on a morning of the course when I was battling to get my head around relatively new teachings – teachings that I thought were at times opaque and at times simple, repetitive, even infuriatingly so – while at the same time noticing how much I (an aspiring mindfulness practitioner!) was struggling to even concentrate in the first place. Try as I might, as I listened to this enlightened master teaching us about impermanence, I kept getting distracted by thoughts of – wait for it – what I was going to have for lunch or dinner. Yes: I was preoccupied with food.
Eventually this brought me to tears of frustration. Aside from my efforts to understand the teachings, what was up with this food fixation? The seminar offered us a delicious lunch every single day, I had money, I had the ability to buy whatever I wanted, there were plenty of places to eat. I had nothing to worry about in the way of self-preservation, and yet my mind was still obsessing over basic comforts?
But with my petty frustration came that sense of almost-pity, which I think is close to the heart of true compassion. It’s recognising one’s own weakness, and the silliness of whatever the circumstances may be, and then the OK-ness of putting it into perspective. The perspective in that instance was a very broad, existential and particularly Buddhist one, that of realising the endless and inevitable suffering, clinging, and frankly stupid mucking-about of all beings.
But what it all boils down to is looking at yourself with profound empathy, even some almost-pity, but – most importantly – also with the motivation never to desert yourself, realising that you’d never do that to yourself any more than you’d desert a defenceless three-year-old child who’s just trying its best and doesn’t know any better.
And, hopefully, we can realise with strange certainty that it would be pointless to try and desert yourself, not just because it would be self-defeating but also because it would be ultimately impossible, because self is an illusion – everything is an illusion.
In a corollary and paraphrasing of the words of Jesus, what you do to yourself you’re doing to the whole damn universe. And vice versa.
All & None of the Above 