The Guilt, Grief and Grind of Self-Care

If self-care is so good for me why isn’t it easy?

 If you struggle with keeping up with or even starting to prioritise your own wellbeing it would be understandable to ask this question. In fact, I’d be lying if I hadn’t wondered the same thing myself at times.

Images on social media and in magazines can make self-care look effortless, always pleasurable and even glamorous. I’ve often seen someone say something along the lines of: ‘I learned that I had to fill my own cup before anyone else’s and since then I’ve thrived.’ We then don’t hear anything about the transition.

If you are someone who finds self-care difficult, seeing picture perfect, incomplete depictions of self-care regularly can be confusing, depleting and even trigger further feelings of guilt and insufficiency.

The truth is that, for some, self-care can trigger feelings of guilt grief or both. And because you might be so unused to it, it can feel like a real grind before you can start to enjoy it, appreciate it and feel the benefit. 

It isn’t unusual to feel guilt at the mere mention of prioritising yourself and your wellbeing if you received messages, at any point in your life, that this is selfish, wrong, risky, unbecoming or unfeminine.

It is possible that you first received the messages in childhood that prioritising yourself would rock the boat or be inconvenient or unloving in some way. It could be that prioritising others was important in maintaining the equilibrium or even survival of your family.

Societal norms tell us that women should be always kind and thoughtful of others and this can be heavily baked into family dynamics. The little girl who felt pleased when complimented for her kindness and selflessness can become the overwhelmed woman who may feel that she has lost herself somewhere. If you’ve become the woman who always intends on booking the massage or taking Friday afternoons off, but you never do, this might resonate with you.

Many women feel guilty if they don’t put other people first and disregard or diminish their own needs or wants. Even then you might still feel guilty that you aren’t doing enough.

The grief you find when you try to focus on taking care of yourself can be complex, surprising and confusing. It could be that when you finally stop you realise the things that you have missed out on over the years. This can feel uncomfortable and it might seem easier or more desirable to ditch your self-care plans.

You might grieve for the child who worried constantly due to having to look after family members or you might grieve for years of innocence and play that never were.

You might grieve for the years spent surviving and not living. The travelling you didn’t do because you felt guilty about the idea of leaving. The time you have spent overthinking or trying to please others. The times when you waited to see what someone else wanted to do rather than making your own dreams happen.

It could be that there’s a sense of grief or loss due to the relationships you have built around self-sacrifice. It could be that you realise the relationships aren’t what you thought they were or you may even decide to end the relationships. There can also be a sense of loss when you realise some people preferred you when you overgave.

When you finally start to shed the identity of being ‘the strong one’ there can be loss in that too and you might grieve that loss because it is the identity that you’ve known for so long. Not only that but that identity might have helped you survive the environment that you were in at the time.

Perhaps most significantly you might grieve the loss of the person you didn’t become due to the burden of responsibility that wasn’t yours to take. I love being a counsellor, but it took me a long time to get here, and I grieve the versions of myself that I didn’t explore due to my early mistaken beliefs about my role in life.

Let’s focus for a moment on what this guilt and grief might masquerade as. Guilt and grief rarely announce themselves. Instead they disguise themselves as:

‘I don’t really need a break.’

 ‘I’m being lazy.’

 ‘I’ll do the self-care thing next week.’

 ‘There are other, more important things to spend money on.’

 ‘Other people need me.’

I don’t think it’s talked about enough that if you are someone who isn’t used to prioritising yourself and your wellbeing, it can be a grind to finally start to prioritise yourself. After all, when you break the habit of a lifetime and try and set routines that benefit you it can feel wrong or unnatural. It’s like trying to brush your teeth with the opposite hand or driving a car with a gear stick when you’ve always driven an automatic. It takes time to get used to the new routines and it certainly takes time to be with and process any residual guilt and grief. 

When we begin practising self-care, it often doesn’t feel rewarding straight away. Instead, your body and mind may respond with, ‘this feels weird’ or even, ‘this feels wrong.’ New routines often become enjoyable only after repetition, once they begin to feel familiar and safe. We enjoy a song more after hearing it multiple times because it helps your brain predict the melody, creating a safe, rhythmic wave of satisfaction. Similarly, doing the same swimming stroke, guitar scale, or recipe over and over shifts your focus from clumsy mistakes to smooth, effortless flow. Learning new wellbeing routines and rituals is no different.

If you are working on your relationship with wellbeing, it’s important to exercise self-kindness but the problem is that if you are someone who has rarely considered wellbeing before, that self-kindness might not come easily. That’s why it might seem easier to revert to the old habits of diminishing your own needs.

There’s a missing stage in this puzzle that I hope might be helpful if you’re someone who struggles with prioritising your own wellbeing and it’s another word beginning with G. Grace. 

I don’t mean grace in the religious sense. I mean the grace of slowly discovering that caring for yourself doesn’t need to feel like an act of rebellion anymore. What might that grace look like in real terms?

Grace might look like recognising that your nervous system has become accustomed to busyness and self-sacrifice and experimenting with ways to help calm your nervous system.

It might look like realising that this is difficult to go through alone and finding a counsellor who you can work with to slowly but surely explore the patterns and how you would like things to be different in the future. Or you might have a friend, partner or family member who you can talk to.

Grace might look like understanding that your own wellbeing journey isn’t going to look the same as a curated Instagram version. It may be about embracing the fact that it isn’t a fast or seamless process. Sometimes self-care isn’t peaceful. Sometimes it’s remembering to eat properly, dragging yourself to therapy, resting when every fibre of you wants to keep proving your worth. 

There’s a chance that it might have been difficult to reach the end of this article. I suspect this because people who haven’t prioritised their own needs can struggle to engage with the idea that their wellbeing is important. If you have got this far there may be a part of you who wants to prioritise time for you and your wants and needs.

Perhaps that part of you has been quietly waiting for permission rather than instruction.

Perhaps, after all these years, she doesn’t need you to become someone different overnight.

Perhaps she simply needs you to begin listening.