Every month or two a group of us meet for a conversation club. When the group is in sync an hour seems to go by in seconds, and the event becomes a high point of my earthly existence. People from a variety of backgrounds have attended and we try to choose a topic of general interest. In our most recent meeting we discussed self-care.
Before extolling the benefits of self-care, we listed ways we have seen it abused. Arpad, a Hindu from Kashmir, mentioned people applying skin products in the name of self-care only to find that in the long term these products cause damage to their skin.
Next a Baháʼí named Kent, from Michigan but living in Waterford, pointed out another dangerous parody of self-care: the trend for college students to protest views in any way different from theirs. Students will even call these different views “toxic” and ask that the staff or classmates who hold them be removed from campus so that nobody feels “threatened” or “harmed.” It seems clear that the interaction patterns on social media fuel this overreaction. Our consensus was that too much fragility kills public discourse and could obviously not be true self-care.
Self-care, we agreed, must make us more resilient in the long term. I brought up the neuroscientist Rachel Yehuda who has studied epigenetics–traits you inherit because of your parents’ environment and behaviour. In studying the children of Holocaust survivors, Yehuda found that some were disempowered through their knowledge of their parents’ trauma, but others became more resilient. The latter is obviously preferable. The best self-care results in more resources, not fewer.
Nobody in our group had experienced trauma at the level of Holocaust survivors, yet all of us have either gone for therapy or know someone who has. The question is, does therapy actually make us more resilient? A recent article in the Atlantic entitled “Plenty of People Could Quit Therapy Right Now” concludes that therapy has become a luxury for privileged Westerners. Someone in our group wondered if there are no better ways to spend 100 dollars than on hour-long navel-gazing sessions, especially when we have neighbours who don’t have enough money for food and shelter.
Yet the comment from Shika, another (barefoot) Hindu in the group, was also true: we cannot heal others until we find healing. Hurt people hurt people, goes the old adage. We will fail to bring true and lasting help to others if we ourselves carry open wounds. How can we show forgiveness and compassion to others if we cannot extend it to ourselves? In airline safety parlance, passengers should fasten their own oxygen masks before assisting others.
An itinerant German who had joined us for the day observed that Jesus said to love our neighbour as ourselves, and it follows that we cannot love others if we don’t know how to love ourselves. St. Paul seems to consider some measure of self-care inevitable: “No one ever yet hated their own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it.”
“Acquire inner peace,” said the Russian mystic, ” and thousands around you will find their salvation.” How best to find that inner peace can be discussed at length, but what is not up for debate is the necessity of doing so. As Christians we sing about being poured out like wine/upon the altar of God, but how can we be poured out if we are never filled? We heard from different members about how they recharge their batteries, everything from crafting, jogging, and watching Netflix by the fireside to–among the more devout–leading youth camps, 5-minute meditations, and daily prayer.
Additionally, several people testified to the usefulness of therapy (despite the negative assessment of it a few minutes earlier). A Catholic named Dela said that in her home country of Cameroon a kind of therapy happens naturally because neighbours have an open, honest way of communicating. Keeping your front door closed during the day, a practice we take for granted, would raise suspicion in Cameroon. In contrast, we in the West often put on our best face when we have problems, and we tiptoe around others when we sense problems in their lives. Dela reckons this way of relating is one reason we need therapy in the first place. Still she does not dismiss therapy. After all this is our sociological ferment, and therapy just might offer a solution to the mess we got ourselves into.
Mentally, I also noted the importance of not romanticising the past. History is replete with people who were psychologically unstable in ways that their embodied community, however much of a boon it was, could not support them.
Triggers, trauma, toxic people–all buzzwords in today’s context, but are they helpful? Do we need to dwell on our problems or can we just “get over it, snowflakes,” as one preacher once admonished his congregation. Well-intentioned advice perhaps, but it is no secret that unaddressed pain can only come back to bite us, rearing its head among the third and fourth generations. The father will eat sour grapes and their children’s teeth will be set on edge, quoth Jeremiah of Anathoth.
In the end, I boil the conversation around self-care down to one word: wisdom. My hunch is that to be human is to experience trauma. However, that trauma exists on a continuum from extreme to mild, and this calls for discernment to know which situations require deep healing work and which ones do not. Therapy is hardly warranted, for instance, when a colleague did not greet me warmly enough when I arrived at work, or when someone else’s post gets more likes than mine. But what if someone was neglected or harmed by their parents and now begins to act out the same relational patterns with their children?
Turning self-care into a god is narcissistic and cripples us into a life of tragic inaction but we do ourselves an equally great disservice when we ignore our past wounds, or worse still inflict them on the people closest to us.
The Book of Proverbs makes strong claims about the role of wisdom: God “has founded the earth by wisdom” (3:19), and “getting wisdom is the wisest thing you can do” (4:7, NLT). As another passage in the wisdom literature puts it, “There is a time for everything” (Ecclesiastes 3:3). Wise people know there is a time to care for others and a time to care for ourselves, realising also that somehow, mysteriously, the two are inseparable. Likewise, there is a time to do the deep work of introspection and personal healing–even when it includes the brutal act of naming ways people have wronged us–but there is also a time to let it go and move on.
Wisdom, according to Proverbs, “crieth aloud and uttereth her voice in the street.” In an increasingly complex world, embracing that wisdom is the ultimate act of self-care.
