“I feel selfish if I do things for me.”
You’ve said this, thought this, otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this blog post. I hear it a lot. I’ve heard it rattling around my mind too, a lot.
Not anymore.
The last time I heard this was on the “How To Let Go (And Begin Anew)” workshop last week. The process the workshop goes through enables you to understand why you’re holding on, and ways in which you can let go without guilt and shame. It empowers you to remember who you are and move in the direction of the brightest vision for your life. A beautiful person on that workshop said that they feel selfish when they focus on their needs – everyone could relate.
This blog was supposed to go out over a week ago but every time I came to it, I kept getting blocked on what angle to take, so I let it go. Giving it time and space allowed the angle to drop right into my lap at the workshop: the quick-sand question about selfishness needs covering now.
The Importance of Meaning
In the workshop I made a distinction: There’s a huge difference between “selfish” and “self-care.”
They are galaxies apart!
First glance at the definitions of “selfish”, make it hard to see how looking after your own needs is anything but selfish:
1: concerned excessively or exclusively with oneself: seeking or concentrating on one’s own advantage, pleasure, or well-being without regard for others
2: arising from concern with one’s own welfare or advantage in disregard of others
Merriam-Webster
But notice that they clearly state a disregard for others and that the focus is always on the self.
Oxford Languages defines “Self-care” as:
The practice of taking an active role in protecting one’s own well-being and happiness, in particular during periods of stress.
When you actively practice Self-Care, you ensure you’re able to function in a way that alleviates stress and cultivates your own happiness and well-being. If you’re coming from this place, you’ve time, space, energy and love to support both yourself and others. Focusing on yourself means you can also focus on others, you create balance and harmony. Let that sink in.
Stress is only good for you up to a certain point. Neglecting your needs and living in a constant state of stress contributes to mental health issues, physical health issues (your heart isn’t meant to work at that pace for that long), lack of sleep, lack of focus, poor performance, inability to solve problems, the list goes on. Your ability to meet your own needs becomes severely compromised, which means you’re unable to meet the needs of those around you in any meaningful way. You’re stuck.
Reverse The Spiral
This is how you break. This is how you lose your shit with people and with yourself. This is how you make poor life decisions and see invisible dragons waiting to catch you and eat you up. This is a downward spiral. This is not good.
Self-care involves meeting your needs so that you can consciously reverse the downward spiral before it gets out of control.
But there’s a HUGE problem: the meaning of selfish has been distorted and makes your legitimate need to take care of yourself seem like a bad, shameful thing. We’re going to do something about that, however …
It leaves me with a tall task because whatever you read here must get through a lifetime of believing that self-care is selfish.
Get The Process Going
So, as your first act of non-selfish self-care, read this blog and make notes, doodle, pause, return to it again and again – give your Body, Soul and Mind a fighting chance of absorbing this message by actively moving through the process and revisiting it until it becomes a habit. A Self-Care habit of meeting your own needs.
Given that you’re at the stage of believing, on some level, that meeting your own needs is selfish, we’re going to need to do some unpacking so you’re fully aware of how you got here…
Imagine your needs are items of clothing, the ones in your size that you REALLY need to keep warm in the cold weather have been shoved to the bottom because you keep filling the suitcase up with the clothes that everyone else needs and then dishing them out to everyone. You’ve even forgotten that your own lovely, snug-fitting thermal vests and socks exist because you’re so busy making sure everyone else has what they need.
Whenever you start to get your clothes out, someone spots you and says: “Oh, I wish I had time and money to get my own stuff like you do.” Guilt-ridden and ashamed, you shove your clothes back down and help the other person out. But you’re chuffing FREEZING. There they are, skipping around, warm and cosy, and here you are, run ragged in your hole-y summer clothes.
You’re fed up, you’re cold, you feel angry, frustrated, and you somehow resign yourself to it because it never changes.
Well, my lovely, it won’t change. Not if you keep repeating this pattern for fear of appearing selfish – you just appear miserable instead. That’s the choice you’re giving yourself: be selfish or miserable! Do you really want to live like that??
If you don’t, it’s time to get to work on this self-care process.
When you’ve pushed your needs so far down for fear of appearing selfish, it becomes difficult to:
- LISTEN to your Needs when they signal that they need your attention
- KNOW what your needs are, what they look like, how they feel, and what you need to do (or stop doing)
- ACTIVELY meet your needs without feeling guilty or ashamed about taking care of yourself
So, let’s ditch the guilt and shame, and get on with finding our way through to resilience, happiness, wellbeing and a whole lotta joy!
Step 1: LISTEN to your Needs
This is tricky to begin with because you’re not used to doing it. With time and commitment, you’ll get there.
Your Needs are always with you. Always. However, as you grow their voice is drowned out by the noise around you: your family, the culture you grow up in, your education, your friends, place of work, the media, and so on. You look to what other people are doing, to what you believe is expected of you, to what you understand will keep you loved, liked, and a respected team player. And yes, this goes for many people who reckon they’re independent thinkers/do-ers – that niggling feeling you have indicates that there’s likely some needs hidden somewhere!
This isn’t a bad thing – it’s a survival instinct – everyone’s just trying to do what keeps them “safe”.
But what’s right for them isn’t necessarily right for you. Only YOU know what’s right for you, and only you can tap into the needs that you have within…. but you must be able get through all the external noise and listen out for your needs internally.
When you get to the end of your tether meeting everyone else’s needs but your own those parts of you that need something, let you know about it. They often manifest as anger, frustration, or sadness, because they can’t be heard, and can’t get their need met.
You often push away these feelings and reactions because you “shouldn’t” feel like this: It’s selfish and reflects poorly on you. But your need will build anyway, and get more and more frustrated, angry, anxious, fed up, and so on. It might even burst out in a tirade somehow somewhere.
If this is happening: LISTEN. A Need is trying to communicate with you via these feelings and reactions – if you don’t listen it has to shout louder (more frustration / anger / guilt / shame / etc). It saps your energy, eats up your brain-space, and ultimately stops you from effectively meeting the needs of others anyway!
You either allow this cycle to continue, or you turn inward and start listening to that Need.
Step 2: KNOW your Needs
Once you’ve started listening, you can begin to understand. Listen to your Need as though it’s a real human being. Give it time and space to help you understand where it’s coming from, if it’s trying to protect you or help you to grow in some way, and what you could do to help meet that need. Sometimes it’s something you need to stop doing!
Now it may be as simple as having some time out / rest / relaxation. Other times it may be as big as acknowledging that you need to leave a job or relationship because it doesn’t meet your needs. Perhaps you need to lay off things that stop you listening to your Need and meeting it, such as alcohol, comfort eating, over-working, over-playing, for example.
It may be a need to do things differently, to find more ways to laugh, to spend time in nature, and learning from it.
At first, it helps to sit with the Need as long as you’re able, so you can get down into the detail. Writing down or recording what comes up is an effective way of capturing the things your Need wants to share. This will enable you to consider what action you could take to meet the Need.
Step 3: ACTIVELY meet your needs without feeling guilty or ashamed about taking care of yourself
Still got selfishness, guilt, and shame issues about meeting your Need? It’s hard to shake them. The difference now is that instead of just feeling crappy and not knowing why, you’ve made yourself fully aware of what’s going on and ways in which you can deal with it. Be kind to yourself.
It’s likely that there’ll be a few ways and means of meeting the Need that come up. It’s up to you what you try but try something. Baby steps is always a good way to start – no point putting unrealistic pressure on yourself because that will only add to those feelings of guilt and shame that you’re shaking off.
In fact, feeling guilt and shame is sometimes a good indicator that you’re on the right track! Ask yourself why you’re feeling it: is it because of what other people will think? Has that selfishness thing come up again? Are you trying to seek someone’s approval? Are you afraid that you’ll be pushed out, ridiculed, etc?
These are hard questions to face but honesty with yourself is always the best policy. When it comes down to the bare bones of it if you answer yes to any of those questions, do you REALLY want to live your life according to people who make you feel like that?
When guilt and shame rear their ugly heads remind them that there’s no way you can meet anyone else’s needs if you don’t meet your own. That you’re doing this for the good of all. It may involve tough actions and decisions, but with love as your guiding principle (loving your Self as you love others), there’s nothing to feel guilty or ashamed about.
What Happens Next?
The simple act of meeting your Needs in these ways creates a balance and harmony within you that is makes it harder and harder for external circumstances to shake. You no longer see it as the responsibility of other people to meet your needs, only that they are respectful of them (if they aren’t then leave them to it – without the guilt and shame – they’re on their own journey). Occasionally you might catch yourself slipping off-balance, its normal, but now you can more easily and quickly find your footing.
Does this mean that life is all plain sailing? Not at all. But as explored in my “Moving Through The Negative” blog, you now know how to move through these things by stepping back, observing your reactions, allowing yourself to feel, listening to your needs as they speak to you through those feelings, and then meeting your needs in the ways that you can.
As ever, this is a process that will take time and conscious effort to make a reality in your life. If you’re struggling, I’m here to support you so let’s have a cuppa and a chat because I can absolutely help you accelerate this process if you’re ready to live your life with more ease, balance, harmony, joy and fun! You are not alone.
Love and blessings
Jx.
Support For Your Own Journey
The Thought, Activity, Track of The Week Post for 31 January is a great place to support you a little further with this journey.
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Love & blessings, Jax.