Real Self Care Takes Time To Learn

Real Self Care Takes Time To Learn

Dec 01, 2023


It can take a lifetime to learn how to really take care of ourselves.

If all we ever experienced as a young child was neglect, projection and narcissism from our primary care-giver then we too will embody these qualities and habits towards ourselves and sadly recreate the very self-harming behaviours we received back then.

They can become our unconscious default position whenever we’re faced with a choice about how to proceed, how to spend our time and what we need to do to best support ourselves.

As adults we CAN learn how to put ourselves first and to meet our needs rather than always putting others first or actively doing things which cause us further suffering.

But we can go along for a while doing this then something triggers us and we revert back to neglecting ourselves again, we slide back into a default of neglect and harm.

We let ourselves down, take our attention off ourselves, put someone else’s feelings first or want to please another, particularly close family members where these old patterns are deeply entrenched and unconscious. We can also do this with regard to the animals in our care, always putting their needs above our own in an unconscious repetition of the neglect we are only all too familiar with.

And of course, those of us working in the helping professions can put our clients’ needs before our own too at times, this is always a big risk and something we have to be ever vigilant about.

This is one area I’ve found that the horses in particular seem to focus on in sessions or even just during daily interactions with them ourselves. They seem to be very alert and sensitive to any element of self-neglect they detect in people, and my experience has been that they consistently encourage us to take better care of ourselves, to avoid causing ourselves further pain, and to be really put our needs first.

So if this resonates for you, please know you’re not alone, and that it can take a lifetime to learn how to truly put into place good quality self-care and to keep ourselves and our well-being in mind.

It’s an ongoing process, filled with both positive, healthy actions, and those not so good actions as we stumble and fumble our way through the tangled web of slowly healing these old patterns.

©Angela Dunning

Image by Main and State Stud Marbach, via Pixabay

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