- I wanna talk about something
that's been on my mind for probably years,
and I've mentioned it briefly in livestreams
and probably talked to some of you on Patreon about it,
and things like that,
but that is my issue with the self-care industry.
And I also wanna get into self-care and shame and trauma
and why those two can almost,
it like fights against each other
and it can make it really hard
for us to take care of ourselves.
But we'll get into that secondary.
The first part is my issue with the self-care industry.
And honestly my biggest gripe is the fact
that we are told through marketing,
and I mean that goes on social media,
that means that we have other influencers telling us,
you know, we should buy this workout gear,
we should join this wellness group,
we should buy this supplement, this book,
this whatever, right?
There's a ton of self-care, wellness-type companies
out there who make probably billions of dollars
off of telling us that in order to take care of ourselves
we have to spend a lot of money.
And I find that really frustrating because we both,
I mean, you and I, we already know
that most people with mental health issues
aren't able to get help because they can't afford it.
I also can tell you
that insurance companies don't wanna cover it.
And I see both sides of this.
As a clinician, they wanna pay me $70 an hour on average,
sometimes less.
Spoilers, I spend about 20 to rent my old office per hour.
It's about 20 bucks an hour to rent it.
I also have to have malpractice insurance.
I also have to pay someone to do my billing.
You can see where it gets really difficult
for a therapist to make a living.
And also then $70 per session, even with insurance coverage,
that's my co-pay on my insurance right now
to see my therapist, $70.
That's a lot of money.
It becomes incredibly difficult
for people to get the help that they need.
About half is the percentage that studies show,
about half of people with mental health concerns
aren't able to get the help they need because of cost.
So then we're told, "Oh, well, if you can't do that,
"then you should do this to take care of yourself."
And that costs even more money.
Like, this marketing scheme to kind of tell people
that this is what you need to do to take care of yourself,
for me, especially when I was like a broke college student
or when Sean and I were just starting out
and broke again, that it makes that, like, health
that I personally so desperately strive for unattainable.
And I want you to know that self-care doesn't cost anything
and it shouldn't even take that much time.
Like, some of the basic ways
that we can take care of ourselves,
and I use the term basic not as a put-down,
just as sometimes we just have to keep it simple.
Are you taking your medication
that's prescribed to you regularly?
Are you taking a shower regularly?
And when I say regularly, I mean like every other day,
every three days.
That's about as many as I'll let my patients get away with
because a shower can be life-changing
when we're struggling with depression or anxiety.
It can be almost like, I don't know,
it's almost like it washes off some of the difficulties
that we're struggling with.
We can feel birthed anew.
I've heard from so many of my patients
and viewers over the years
how life-changing a shower can be.
Have you eaten in the last three to four hours?
You need to eat regularly.
And also balanced meals.
I didn't say healthy.
For any of you with eating disorders,
don't let your brain tell you that.
That's not what I'm talking about.
I'm talking about are you eating vegetables?
Are you eating carbohydrates?
Are you eating proteins?
Are you eating fruits?
Are you eating a variety of food?
There's nothing good or bad.
But are you doing that every three to four hours?
Are you drinking enough water?
Are you moving your body some?
Like, if getting out of the house is hard
or stressful or anxiety-provoking,
can we walk around within our home?
Maybe we vacuum as a way
to almost like kill two birds with one stone.
We're cleaning our home and we're moving our body.
I don't think that exercise or body movement
has to be this like strenuous, intense thing,
but it's helpful for our mental health to move it some.
Even stretching helps.
So doing something that meet your body where it's at.
But those are just some of the basic ways.
And then a huge one that I think...
Sean and I just went to L.A. to see friends
and collaborate for work,
and I didn't realize how isolated I'd become
and how much I'd craved that, like, authentic connection
with people who've known me for like more than 20 years,
which is crazy because I still think I'm like 24, ha.
But I'm not, right?
I'll be 40 this year,
and I didn't think I needed it as much as I did.
And so if you haven't had connection
with someone who really gets you,
not like, "Hey, how's the weather?
"Good morning," like stuff with people we don't really know.
If you haven't had that real connection,
I encourage you to seek it out.
Like I know, again, we had to travel for it,
and that's an expensive thing,
but hopefully for a lot of you
it just means, you know, making a call,
maybe hopping on FaceTime, or getting in the car, right,
things that we can hopefully do
with a really low amount of money.
But those are just some things that I want you to know.
Are you practicing self-care?
And they don't have to cost anything,
and they don't have to take a ton of your time.
Because otherwise I feel
like we're just setting ourselves up for failure, right?
If I'm already on a wait list to see a therapist,
or I know I can't afford it yet,
and so I'm trying groups and whatever,
and then I'm looking out for other ways
to take care of myself,
I don't want you to think that means
you need to spend $100 on a pair of yoga leggings,
join some crazy wellness center and pay 150 bucks a month,
or buy these expensive supplements,
or these, you know, crazy programs.
I don't want you to feel like that's what it has to be.
There are so many other ways
for us to get our self-care needs met
by simply taking care of ourselves and our space.
One of the things that helps me, just a side note,
is if I start to feel really overwhelmed
and it's hard for me to focus, I clean my space.
Now that doesn't mean always my whole home.
That usually is like my desk.
That means it's like when I feel overwhelmed,
it's cluttered.
It has like tons of different cords and headphones
and I have like...
You know, everything just feels in disarray.
Receipts, mail that I don't open
'cause who even cares about mail these days?
You know, there's just a bunch of stuff everywhere
and I start to just feel overwhelmed by it.
And once I can clean that space
I can focus again and I feel better.
It's almost like a breath in.
I'm like, "Ah, I feel so much better about things."
So find some simple tools and techniques to help you
that don't cost any money and don't take that much time
so that it's something that, you know, you can do regularly.
Like for me, you know, showering, eating, drinking water,
those are things I do each and every day
and it helps me be a better me.
It's not perfect, but that is self-care.
Don't let anybody tell you
that it has to be their specific product,
'cause trust me, I even get bombarded with these things
as a mental health professional online.
They're like, "Try this and share this."
And you don't need to spend any money, okay?
Taking care of our basic needs is self-care.
Now the second piece that I wanted to talk about
was something I was talking with a member of our community
probably about a month or month and a half ago
at this point, and she was sharing
how she's told all the time, 'cause she's doing trauma work,
how hard it is for her to engage in self-care behaviors.
She's like, "I know what it is.
"You've talked about it.
"I know what they're called.
"I get it, but I can't do it."
And at that point I realized
that this was because when we suffer from trauma,
for those of you who don't know, when we suffer a trauma
or repeated little t traumas that build up
into PTSD-like responses,
that usually comes with some element of shame.
And shame, if you don't know, is when we feel
like something's like inherently wrong with us.
Anybody else ever felt like,
why does this shit keep happening to me?
Is there something wrong with me?
Like, am I just like a, you know, like a fly strip
for like trauma and dysfunction?
It can start to feel like that,
and that belief that something's innately wrong with us
is where shame comes from.
Now if I think for a second, I'm like, first of all,
I've known shame-trauma connection for years,
but then I didn't make the connection
that, well, then when I tell somebody,
"Oh, build up a resource.
"Take care of yourself.
"Do some self-care to soothe your nervous system
"so you don't get dysregulated and dissociated,"
or whatever comes along with their PTSD,
that that might not be possible
because they think something's wrong with them.
They don't think they're worthy, right?
We can spend our whole lives,
if we had childhood trauma
we can spend our whole lives thinking that we're terrible,
disgusting, lazy, stupid, worthless, broken, all that stuff.
And so when someone comes and tells us,
"Well, be nice to yourself.
"Do something loving," we're like, "Hm, no.
"I don't think I...
"I don't know how."
We might have never had someone show us
how to love ourselves or others,
and we also might think something's innately wrong with us.
And so I wanted to just talk about this
because I think, first of all, it's been overlooked by me,
so maybe it's been overlooked by you.
And hopefully you're like me, you had this aha moment
where you're like, "Oh my god, that's why it's so hard."
Because I cannot tell you the battle I feel
with my trauma patients year after year
with this self-care piece.
It's so difficult for me to motivate them
and to get them to believe that they're deserving.
And I just didn't, I just didn't see it.
I didn't feel the connection.
And so my goal now, and hopefully this is helpful
in your own process, if you find yourself,
if any of this is resonating with you,
my goal is to talk more about, you know, shame
and our relationship with ourself.
Because instead of working on our coping skills
and our self-care,
which might be unreachable at this moment,
it could behoove us
instead to work on those bridge statements.
I know they're tedious, I hate them just as much as you do,
but they're incredibly beneficial.
And a bridge statement is when we've been talking trash
to ourselves day in and day out,
shit talking our experience, our beliefs,
our thoughts and our feelings, where we're at in life.
We can't just all of a sudden be like, "You know what?
"You're lovely and wonderful and I think you're great."
We can't make that jump.
That "fake it 'til you make it,"
statistics and research show it doesn't work.
So how do we get ourselves to not be faking it
and to actually be making it is to use bridge statements.
We're building a bridge between these two extremes.
Negativity, shit talking, you know, I don't know,
ice cream and lollipops amazing, right,
like happy go-lucky island, right?
We have to build a bridge.
And so each one of those like slats
that we're gonna put down to put this bridge together
are things like, "I'm open to the belief
"that I could in the future maybe talk nicer to myself,"
or, you know, "I'm gonna believe Kati a little bit
"that maybe if I don't talk such trash
"I might feel a little bit better, maybe."
These kinds of maybes, possiblies, "I'm open to"
is not positive, but it's not negative in the same way.
And trust me when I tell you, you will feel the difference.
And so instead of focusing our energy
on, "I need to take care of myself.
"I need to do these nice things,"
maybe instead we focus on these bridge statements,
meaning that we have to acknowledge
the shit talking that's happening.
Are you telling yourself day in and day out
how horrible you are, how not worth it you are?
If that's the conversation that you're having,
of course you're gonna continue to believe it
and not be able to engage
in any of the healthy coping skills and self-care
that's gonna get you through the trauma work.
We're gonna have to start with those bridge statements.
I also think there are like self-care or coping skills
that maybe are accessible
because we don't have to really do anything nice
for ourselves per se,
and that is that full body shake I've talked about
where we really shake out.
What it does is it gets that queued-up energy.
If anybody's ever had anxiety or PTSD,
you know that like on-edge feeling, being really jumpy.
That comes from that trauma response having no outlet
because we probably go into freeze, right,
that dissociation, that more comfortable space.
Well, that energy doesn't go away and it courses through us
and we feel very hypervigilant.
So a way to kind of purge that energy is to shake it out,
stomp our feet, like shake full body, like whoo!
Feels crazy, actually beneficial.
And it's not necessarily a way of showing yourself love
or doing a bunch of self-care.
It's more about regulating our nervous system,
and maybe that reframing will make it accessible.
Just throwing it out there
because I feel like that one might be one that we can do.
But find some ways and feel free to share in the comments
some ways that you can offer yourself
this important component of coping and self-care
without letting shame stop it.
And I'm sorry that I never thought of this,
I never recognized this kind of, I don't know,
I don't even know what to call it.
It's almost like they just cannot coexist.
It's like they're butting into each other
and one's not allowing the other.
And I will brainstorm some other ways
to circumvent it and work around it,
but really that conversation with ourselves
is going to be key.
Noticing the shit talking that's happening.
What are the negative sentiments
that we're telling ourselves day in and day out?
And then can we argue back
with something that's more believable?
That maybe, you know what, maybe Kati's right,
maybe this kind of talk isn't good for me.
That's a bridge statement right there again.
And again, it doesn't have to be positive,
it doesn't have to argue directly back,
it just has to be open to the possibility
that it could get better.
Anyway, those are my thoughts about this.
I've been, you know, trying to find my own way
through this self-care world
and like what that means to take good care of me
and to show myself that I am worth it
and I can take up space, and it's hard.
So if you're struggling, you're not alone.
I think unfortunately it tells us when
you spend a lot of money we need to love ourselves,
and that might not be something accessible.
So I hope this helps you know that you're not alone
and also maybe offers a few tips and tricks
to get you through.
Have a wonderful rest of your week,
and I'll see you next time.