Self Care: How do we identify our real needs and finally get them met?  

June 29, 2021

Glennon Doyle:

Hi, everybody. It’s Glennon. Welcome to We Can Do Hard Things. Thank you so much for coming back. Today we’re talking about self-care. But we’re gonna talk about deep self-care, inner self-care. So much of the self-care we see sold to us everywhere is just about the care of our outer shell, right? It’s self-care as manicures and skin cream and massage and all of that. And I happen to love all that stuff, but that’s not the self-care we’re talking about today because that kind of self-care, it’s like if the only way we ever cared for our car was to, like, shine the hood, right? There’s a whole other self we have that is on the inside that we ignore so often.

And, and often the kind of self-care we’re sold, which is just about the outer shell, is really more about other people’s experience of us instead of our own experience in our body, right? And a lot of that kind of outer shell self-care feels more like meeting the world’s needs for us than meeting our own needs, okay? So today, we’re not talking about grooming or appearance maintenance. We’re talkin’ about gettin’ beneath the hood, because there is an inside of us that needs care, for many of us that desperately needs care.

Today, we’re gonna talk about how to return and care for that true tender inner self that we’ve likely been abandoning forever. Let’s wake up the inner self. Let’s invite them back to life with the promise that from here on out, we’re gonna take good care of them. Let’s get started.

Okay, sister, we are talking about self-care today. And everybody has a different definition of what self-care is. So, tell me what self-care means to you.

Amanda Doyle:

For me, self-care is meeting your needs. And the problem is that many of us don’t really know what our needs are, much less how to meet them. So, we’re just throwing darts at the wall based on what the marketplace offers us as self-care and performing triage when things get really bad. And there is plenty on offer since the self-care industry is currently, like, a $450 billion industry. And so, we do this instead of taking the time to know ourselves enough to know our needs and making the incremental life adjustments that actually meet them, or maybe that’s just me. But-

GD:

No, it’s not just you. So, if we’re constantly looking outside of ourselves, for what self-care is, first of all, that’s so ironic, right? “World, tell me what I need.” But if we ask the world what we need, the world will always offer us commodified versions of that kind of help, right?

AD:     

Right. And when you think about it, and any need that you have, ideally you should be able to look to the proposed solution and be able to draw a direct line back to the need, but I don’t think that many of us are doing that. I think we’re just kind of looking at what the world offers as self-care, thinking if we add enough of that, we should feel taken care of. But I, but we’re not taking the time to identify the need, and then actually to figure out what exactly that would be and see if it’s working.

GD:

Correct. So, it’s like, “I must still feel alone and angry and, and lost, because I just don’t have enough candles and manicures.”

AD:

Right, right. And, and then you feel doubly worse, because this, “I already had all the solutions and I still have a problem, so there must be something super wrong with me.”

GD:

Yeah. And it’s so interesting how all the, the “solutions” that the world offers us that has to do with self-care are some kind of break from your life, some kind of escape from your life, right? Something that you do to get away from your life as opposed to what you and I have found true self-care is, which is always, like, dealing with the hard thing in your life. Like the peace-

AD:     

Well, making a life … right.

GD:

Yeah, the peace is, like, the reward for going through, dealing with the hard thing. The peace is not a fake thing that you use to take a break from your life often.

AD:

Right, right. The peace, the real self-care is making a life that you don’t have to escape from on an emergency basis…

GD:

Yes.

AD:     

… all of the time. Um, I think that, I mean, I’m so interested in this episode, because I feel like on a scale of one to 10, historically I have been a solid one at self-care. And you, to my view, are right about a 10 in terms of how you take care of yourself. So how do you, how do you explain how you arrived there?

GD:     

Mm-hmm. Well, I would say that that is an accurate description of the second half of my life, right? I mean, the first half of my life, I was a zero at self-care. I was an addict, which is the ultimate escape from life as opposed to dealing with life, right? So, um, so you think a candle is an escape from life? Imagine 79,000 drinks a day, right? That’s what I was trying to do is just escape my life instead of deal with it.

But this thing happens with people who allow themselves to break, right? So, years and years of addiction led me to several rock-bottom moments, which anybody, most people who have been to those places see them as this humongous blessing for many reasons. But the reason for me is that when you hit rock bottom, it’s like, and surrender and you’re very lucky, because you have resources around you who will help you at that moment. You enter these spaces, which might be, you know, AA or it might be therapy, or it might be whatever it is you use in that moment to grasp onto, which teach you how to be human. Okay, this is a blessing of rock bottom that only people who have a break in their mental health receive, because tragically we don’t teach people how to be human.

You know, we don’t teach how, what yourself is and how you meet your needs so that you can live a good, solid life. It, I mean, I use to teach third grade and I used to think why I would sneak in these life lessons, right, into my morning meetings. But these recovery groups taught me how to human, right, taught me how to – that I had these different selves that I’d been ignoring for decades. And they were my emotional self, and they were my intuitive self, and they were my mind, and how to slowly build a life that you don’t have to constantly escape from, because that’s what recovery is, right?

So, the beauty of allowing yourself to break and ask for help is that you learn how to be human. Um, so there’s that. And then there was this moment when I, um, fell in love with Abby when I really had to put all of that to the test, right?

AD:     

Mm-hmm.

GD:     

So, I had this moment where I, you know, anybody who’s read Untamed or listen to me do the 49,000 interviews about that knows that I had a real moment where I had to decide whether I was going to return to my broken marriage or whether I was really gonna honor this self that kind of rose up and made itself known when I fell in love with Abby. And, it wasn’t, it didn’t feel like a love decision, “Oh, should I go back to Craig, or should I love Abby?” Like, that was not it. It was like, “Should I go back to my broken life where I’m slowly dying so that I don’t rock the boat, so that I keep everyone else comfortable, so that I continue to honor everyone’s expectations of me, or do I break everybody’s hearts, hurt my kids, blow up my little, on-the-outside, perfect family so that I don’t have to abandon myself again?” Right? “Do I abandon everyone’s expectations of me and honor myself, or do I continue to honor everyone’s expectations of me and abandon myself?” Right?

It felt like a life-or-death situation for me. Um, and as you know, I, uh, almost decided to go back to my broken life so that I didn’t have to rock the boat. But I had this moment with Tish where I looked at her and I thought, “Oh my god, I’m staying in this marriage for her, but would I want this marriage for her? And if I would not want this marriage for my little girl, then why am I modeling bad love and an unbrave life and abandoning self and calling that good parenting?”

AD:

Mm-hmm.

GD:

Calling that good parenting. And the reason for that was very clear. The reason for that is that I was taught, trained, conditioned to believe that a good mother, that good parenting is abandoning yourself, right? It’s just burying your needs, your dreams, your ambition, your true feelings and calling that love.

AD:

Yeah, being a martyr.

GD:

Being a martyr.

AD:

Yes. Being selfless. It’s the epitome of what … I mean, look at all the Mother’s Day cards and all of the compliments to women. It’s, “She’s so selfless.”

GD:     

Right.

AD:     

“She’s so selfless.”

GD:     

And then we wonder why we don’t know how to get our needs met, why we don’t know who ourselves are. It’s because it’s not our fault. I mean, it’s our responsibility to figure out, but it’s not our fault. It’s been held up to us as the epitome of womanhood is selflessness. Like, imagine that. Think about that. The way you succeed as a woman is to not have a self. When that is just, you know, I feel so strongly that, you know, in listening to women for so long that the way to speak to a woman is to, is to appeal to her need to love well. Women wanna love well. They wanna love their people well. And, and I just have come to the idea that we cannot love our people well if we do not have a self. If you, you cannot say, “I love you,” if you don’t even know who that “I” is.

AD:

Mm-hmm.

GD:     

Right? And, and when we, when we pass down this idea to our children or to our partners or to the world by how we live, that love is martyrdom, then it’s just a brutal legacy to pass on. So, so that’s when I really started realizing, “Oh, I see. When I abandon myself, I am also abandoning my children.”

AD:

Mm-hmm.

GD:     

“When I abandon myself, I am also abandoning the world.” When women abandon ourselves, we do not offer the gift of ourselves to our children, to our partners, to our world. And that is abandonment of everything else.

AD:     

Yeah, you’re perpetuating what always has been if we’re not bringing ourselves to the table. Right.

GD:

Right. And when we bring our truest selves to the table, then we grant permission for everyone else in our lives to bring themselves to the table, which is all that we freaking need to do in life, right? Is to live who we are, free and true. And so, to me, to get back to your question, this moment was when I realized, “Oh, self-care is actually the best kind of others care.”

AD:     

Mm-hmm.

GD:

Right? We cannot accept any life or work or relationship or … that is less true and beautiful than the one we want for our children or our people.

AD:     

And when you put it that way, it’s actually selflessness is selfishness.

GD:     

That’s correct.

AD:     

Because it’s you don’t want to … You’re actually not paying the small price of what it costs to release yourself into the world and to make the world around you better through that, or truer at least, at least you’ll be truer if it’s not better, and instead of just, like, quietly going around serving the needs of others.

GD:     

Yeah, it’s what we do.

AD:     

It’s very interesting.

GD:     

It’s peacekeeping instead of peacemaking. Women are trained to be peacekeepers. I will not rock the boat. I will not challenge this idea that I should stay quiet and just serve my whole life. And I, so that keeps the peace. But it never makes real peace, right? Which peacemaking is challenging that status quo that keeps people quiet and hiding, right?

AD:     

I feel like the … I want you to tell a story from Untamed about the kids on the couch, because I feel like when we … Since the ultimate compliment for a woman is that she’s selfless, I feel like girls are conditioned. They see that and they’re conditioned very early to start looking everywhere else other than inside of them-

GD:     

Yes.

AD:     

… for what their needs are. So can you just quickly tell that story, because I feel like it’s-

GD:     

Yes.

AD:     

… kind of microcosm of everything.

GD:     

Yeah. So, this is a moment when I was really searching for how I lost myself, right? And I, um, as always, was looking out into the world for examples of this phenomenon. And Chase was having a bunch of friends over, uh, to watch a movie and I stuck my head into the room, and I said, “Is anybody hungry?” Okay? And I will never forget what happened next. So, all of the boys that were in the room, without taking their eyes off the television, they all said, “Yes.” Okay. So, you see what happened there, sister, they heard a question, they went inside their bodies, they got an answer, they said it on the outside, so they completely nailed this Q&A. All the girls did something completely different, okay? So, picture this. They’re all silent at first. No one says a word, none of the girls. And then, every single girl in that room, I think there was about five, each took her eyes off the television and started looking, where? You’ll never guess.

AD:

At each other.

GD:     

At each other’s faces. Okay. So just pause right there. Pretend this is happening in slow motion because that’s what it felt like, every single girl, to find out if she inside herself is hungry, starts looking at her friends’ faces, okay? And then, in some kind of wild, silent, mental telepathy, all the girls, dee, dee, dee, dee, dee, dee, dee, dee, elect a spokes girl silently, somehow, because this braided girl in the corner looks over at me and she says, “No thank you, we’re fine.” You know that right? You know that. “Oh, we’re fine.” We will “fine” ourselves to death, right? We will starve to death, physically, emotionally, mentally, spiritually, we will starve to death and say we’re fine. Because that’s what the world tells us to say, to smile and say we’re fine. So, in that moment I thought, “Oh, okay. That’s right, that’s how I forgot how to know what I need and want when I learned how to please.” Right? Because in our culture, boys are often taught to look inside themselves, in every moment of uncertainty and speak their need. And little girls are taught, in every moment of uncertainty, which, what is life if not just one endless moment of uncertainty, right? To look outside themselves. Not for desire, not for need, but for permission, for consensus.

AD:     

For consensus.

GD:     

Yes. Yes. Right? So that’s, it feels so frustrating but it’s like, oh, it starts so early, but, but what’s helpful to me is that since you can see that conditioning happening as a process of looking outside of ourselves, that has to mean that there’s a way to deprogram ourselves from that. If it can be done to us, we can undo it.

AD:

Mm-hmm. It’s so wild, it reminds me of this article I was reading recently where they said how many women die every year for choking on food, because when they’re choking in a restaurant, their first instinct is to not make a scene, just to run to the bathroom or outside, and then they can’t get help and then they die. So, we literally die of politeness by the not wanting to stay in the room to get help and I think that happens 1,000 times in emotional ways, and, you know, we excuse our needs from the scene, don’t get the help. And then, it, it just for me.

GD:

It’s so perfect.

AD:

I was like, “Oh, that’s life analogy right there.”

GD:

It’s so perfect, think of, wait, wait, just stop for a second, I know we need to move on but like think about that, like, put that scene in slow motion. Why does she get up from the table? She doesn’t want to disturb her family with her choking to death, right? She does want to disturb her family; she doesn’t want to…

AD:     

Be embarrassed.

GD:     

Be embarrassed, right? She doesn’t want to cause a scene. She doesn’t want – she’s looking weird – when you’re choking, I imagine you don’t look pretty, right? So, she excuses herself to have her needs, whatever needs she has met in the bathroom alone, and then she dies there and doesn’t cause a scene.

AD:     

Right, like she-

GD:     

And then she abandons her family completely.

AD:

Mm-hmm. Right. That didn’t work out so well.

GD:

No.

AD:

That selflessness ended up not being a good look for everyone involved.

GD:     

That’s right.

AD:     

Here’s something else I’ve realized that just in the past, um, few months I’ve been trying to work on it. I believe that we think if we don’t take that time to identify our needs and to meet them that we can just opt out of that part of life. If we’re being selfless, but we’re just, we’ve decided that’s not a big priority for us, we’re just gonna do without that for this season of life, this whole life, whatever it is. But the thing about needs is that they demand to get met.

GD:     

Mm-hmm.

AD:

So, they will get themselves met, whether you’re doing the work or not. And so, it will either be through a way that benefits your life or destroys your life to some extent. So, I think that if we come to the place where we really realized there’s no opting out of this process.

GD:     

So, give us an example of that. What was an example of not getting your needs met in a proactive way, so you destroy yourself in a way of getting that need met?

AD:

So, I think, I mean, in the sobriety episode we just did, that you’ll either get your higher named met to, you know, um, set a boundary in your life that you need to meet, or you will just compulsively numb…

GD:     

Mm-hmm, right.

AD:

… and accept that as your life. Or you will, you know, really work to identify what you need from your worthiness or belonging need, or you’ll overspend your life into chaos and you’ll actually end up with many more problems.

And, actually, that reminds me. I read recently that psychologists are starting to identify this relatively new epidemic that is happening, that is called Revenge Bedtime Procrastination. Which to me, I’m completely one of the people who are involved in this. But it describes the way that people who are starved for any free time or leisure time in their life, they make up for it at nighttime, by scrolling, scrolling, scrolling, looking at their phones just for hours on some kind of activity online when they should be sleeping, so they’re sacrificing sleeping, and we’re doing this en masse because a deep part of us knows that we deserve and need some time just for ourselves, but we’re accepting this shitty consolation prize of this scrolling for hours at night when we should be sleeping. And instead, we are actually getting less of what we actually need.

GD:

It’s so interesting, it’s like if you find yourself like a toddler defiantly getting what you need. Like, if you are a 45 year old woman and you find yourself, “Well, I need,” that like behaving like a toddler, trying to get a need met, that’s a sign that you’re not getting that need met in a grown up way that you actually have the right to do, right? Because you are grown up.

Okay, let’s talk about the ways, because when you think about self-care this is one of the ways that I think about it. Uh, if I don’t know what something means, I try to think of the opposite of it, right? So, if you’re going to care for yourself, none of us know what that means. So, what’s the opposite of that, what’s the opposite of caring for something? Abuse, neglect, abandonment, right? Abuse, neglect, abandonment. If we are abusing ourselves, neglecting ourselves or abandoning ourselves, we know we’re doing the opposite of self-care, right?

AD:

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

GD:

And the tragedy of that is that it’s, women, little girls are trained to abandon their emotions, right? I mean, one way we definitely do not take care of ourselves is that we don’t take care of our emotional lives, our emotional selves. We don’t tend to our emotional selves and that is because we are trained not to, right? I mean, I was a third-grade teacher, I was also a small child, that was a girl, so I know that I was constantly taught, smile, be accommodating, be pleasant, be pretty, don’t be angry. If you’re mad at somebody just be nice about it, right? Other people’s comfort, don’t make her sad, other people’s comfort is more important than yours, right? So, don’t hurt someone else’s feelings even if it means abandoning your own feelings or self, right?

You, you have this when you’re a little girl, you have a certain amount of emotions you’re allowed to feel and they usually include pleasantness and gratefulness. Um, those ideas are feminine, right? But the ideas of anger and jealousy and sadness and envy and heartbreak, these are not, those are not for feeling, those are unfeminine, those are uncomfortable for the world for a little girl to show, right? And so, we don’t, we learn to, we learned that if we feel angry or jealous or whatever that those are not… That doesn’t mean there’s something wrong out there that’s not information for us to use. That means that there’s something wrong with us. Right?

AD:

You just have to bury it, just bury it, and show something more palatable to the world.

GD:     

That’s right, and then we wonder why later, we don’t know how to tend to or care for those feelings inside of ourselves. In fact, we know, anger, envy, jealousy, heartbreak, all of these emotions are so important, they give us such good information about who we are and what our boundaries should be and what we’re meant to do in life. And often, I’ve learned to think of the comfortable emotions as just recess. Those are just the breaks, like, the uncomfortable emotions that hit us, that hit me, they might be uncomfortable, but those are the lessons.

That’s where I learned the most about who I am and what I meant to do. And for the first half of my life, I numbed. Well, let’s talk about like, what, what do we do, right, when we don’t deal with these uncomfortable emotions? Like, what does that look like for me? It looked like allowing myself to be gaslit for my whole life, right? Like, “No, you’re, you shouldn’t be angry, that’s weird. Like, you’re too emotional. You’re too much. You’re too whatever, like that’s not, that’s a ‘you’ problem.” Right? That’s not a sign that something’s wrong out here that’s a sign that something’s wrong with you. I just over time felt that like. “Oh I’m crazy. It’s not them, it’s me. It’s not the world. It’s not the family. It’s me, like I have a problem, I need to go to therapy.”

You know, I’m so desperate for, for women. I’m all for therapy but also sometimes you don’t need to go to therapy, you need to go to the polls. You need to go to the voting booth, you need to go to your dad and say this stuff, you need to like… So that’s why the refrain of Untamed is, “You’re not crazy. You’re a goddamn cheetah.” That’s a very important thing for me is it’s the, it’s the resistance of the, the gaslighting of women constantly, in their families, in the world, that says your anger means you’re crazy or your anger means there’s something wrong with you and often it just means there’s something wrong.

AD:

And it’s just data. I mean, for, for I think it’s just a missed opportunity if the, if the effort is to know yourself and lead a peaceful productive life full of joy if you, if you understood early that resentment and jealousy were in fact, just very helpful for you to data points to say, “Oh, when I’m feeling resentful and jealous, even though it comes out as I don’t like that person, actually, I’m just, I’m just super annoyed that they’re always posting their Fri-yay, you know, pictures of date night.” I think I don’t like them but actually I just know that I need, I would like to have a Fri-yay in my year.

GD:

Yes. Just one Fri-yay.

AD:

Just a. Just a Fri-yay. But that…Helpful.

GD:

Helpful information.

AD:     

It’s just helpful instead of just being…

GD:

shameful. Helpful instead of shameful, not shameful, envy not shameful. Helpful. Pointing us towards something that we… a need that we need to meet in our own lives, right?

AD:

And that self-care thing, if we, if we’re able to see why is this emotion rising up in me? What is it telling me about me as opposed to what is it telling me about that person that has exactly on the other end of it?

GD:     

Exactly. And P.S., that’s just something we can teach people. That’s just something we can teach children, that we can teach little girls, that we can actually… Okay, so we’re gonna wrap up this conversation with this. What I really feel like this constant abandonment of our emotions. The, the result of it. The consequence of it is that we lose self-trust, okay? Because if we had a friend that came to us, and every time she said, “I’m in pain,” we ran away. We grabbed the booze we left we, we said, “I can’t deal with this,” and we ran. Or we buried it, we told her to bury it, we told her to numb it, we told her… We would not have any trust with that friend anymore, right? Because in her most vulnerable moment, we were constantly leaving. And yet, in our own most vulnerable moments, we are always leaving ourselves, right? Every time that, that, the vulnerable emotions like fear and envy and anger and heartbreak come to us, we bury it, we pretend it’s not there, we deny it, we deflect it, we numb it out, those are all forms of abandoning ourselves. And we learn over time that we are not people who will stay with us, that we are alone when things are hard, right? And when we stay with ourselves, we earn our own trust, and we become women who know that we will stay with ourselves. We don’t even need to keep panicking about whether other people will abandon us because we know we will never abandon ourselves, right?

AD:

I want to know this, how do you, if you’re starting from zero, because again, see aforementioned level one, how do you start building your tool chest of go-to self-care? How do you do that?

GD:

Okay, so you mean, if we’re not going to just go the mental health crisis route?

AD:     

Well, I mean, for people who are, like, I do think that this higher level stuff is very important because I don’t think you’re ever going to meet a need if you don’t identify what your need is. That’s huge. But I think for, you know, my self-care’s occasionally, I’m going to need to run away from home because I don’t have this arsenal. That’s a terrible word to use, but I don’t have this tool chest of self-care tools that I can turn to in the interstitial moments where things are not good.

GD:     

Okay, yes, okay. So, all right, one of the things I think we can do to, to get even to the need is to learn to stop abandoning ourselves constantly, right? We have to figure out how do we stop abandoning ourselves constantly. Here’s an idea you know, sister, very well. My chart. My poster that I keep on my office wall that on one side, has a list of what I call “easy buttons” and on the other half is a list of what I call “reset buttons.”

Okay, so the easy buttons are things that I have historically done in my life to abandon myself, okay? These are, you know, you remember those easy buttons from the Staples commercials where somebody would just hit this red button and you would just be transported out of our, your painful situation and be in this pain-free existence. So, what I have learned over my life is that, when I transport myself out of the pain, out of what Pema Chödrön calls the hot loneliness of being human, that I miss all my transformation, right? That everything that I need to learn about my own needs, about myself, to become the next version of myself is inside the hot loneliness. How do I stay inside the hot loneliness?

Well first of all, you don’t abandon myself. Things on that side of the list are booze, binging, online shopping. I’m like, thinking how honest I want to be on this list. I mean, I also, you know, just crazy online shopping. I mean, I don’t even have to buy the thing. I could just pour stuff into my cart. It’s so weird.

AD:     

Yeah, yeah.

GD:     

It’s so weird. One time, Abby actually, thought I wanted all the stuff in our cart, and she … It was a terrible day. I was like, “No, no, that’s not stuff I want. That’s just … What is it? I don’t know.”

AD:

That’s just my… That’s my shitty …

GD:

Shitty consolation prize? I don’t know.

AD:     

Yeah.

GD:     

Um, also I have this thing that’s on the easy button which is, I have this, like, weird … If I really want to abandon myself, but I can’t … I have this thing where I just eat a ton of carbs and sugar, and then go to sleep.

AD:     

Mm-hmm.

GD:     

It’s like cereal, or I don’t know what it is. But it’s like, I know that if I don’t want to feel, I can just eat a ton of sugar, and it’ll make me so tired, I can go to sleep. Anyway, those are the, those are the easy buttons. They help me abandon myself. They also are things that I always feel worse after doing. I feel kind of better in the short term because I’m numb, and then worse afterwards. That’s how you know that it’s an easy button.

On the other side of the chart, I have my reset buttons. These are the things that help me stay with myself, right? Not abandon myself. And it’s so wild, because they’re all the most simple things on earth, like drink a glass of water. Take the dogs for a walk. Take a break, read a chapter of a book. They’re all the most simple, basic things, but they’re little ways that help me believe that I can process things, that I can stay with things, that I don’t have to run away. They’re self-care. They’re real self-care.

AD:     

Right. And I think things too, that we don’t think about as self-care are having the hard discussions, setting a boundary, RSVP’ing no. We don’t think of those things as self-care, but I think that they are. And I, I think that those are a lot of the self-care, because that goes back to the “What kind of life will I not need to escape from?” It goes back to “What kind of week will I not need to escape from? What kind of day will I not need to escape from? And what kind of relationship will I not need to escape from?” And by making those boundaries, making those decisions in advance, you actually will have less to escape from. And that’s setting yourself up for …

GD:     

Yeah, the real, the hard thing about this is that real self-care is the hard things. Real self-care is being the Joan of Arc of your life. It’s like, looking at the battle that you need to fight in this and this and this, and like, going straight towards it. And then, peace is the result of doing that hard thing, right? It’s listing all the ways that your needs are not getting met, and one at a time, dealing with it.

AD:     

Right.

GD:     

Right.

AD:     

And just before we go, I just want to, on the other part that you talked about with the girls and the couch, and here’s the feelings you’re allowed to feel, we do the exact same thing to boys.

GD:     

Oh, yes!

AD:     

I mean, we do. We give them a range of emotion that’s about an inch wide and say, “Here’s all the emotions you’re allowed to have. Anything else is deeply uncomfortable to the world, deeply inconvenient to the world. Now, good luck with your self-care.”

So, I just want to say that that is actually, if you think about it in the reverse, how that kind of selflessness is selfish in us. Think about the trauma and pain in the world that has resulted from the toxic masculinity that has resulted from men being selfless and only being allowed an inch worth range of emotions.

GD:

We should dedicate an entire episode to boys and how they’re conditioned. But something really interesting happened when I told this story on a male podcast to a male podcast host. And he said, “No, no, no, the boys aren’t going inside themselves either.” And I said, “What do you mean?” And he said, “Boys are trained to be certain and to be hungry.”

None of those boys was going inside themselves. The reason why you heard from them immediately is because their conditioning is every bit as strong as the girls. And that they immediately knew they had to be hungry, they had to be loud, they had to be certain.

In fact, some … I think in Liz Plank’s book, she says that, like, in any given circumstance, little girls will eat less in front of their male peers than they need, and little boys will eat more than because they’re trying to meet a conception, right? So, boys are trained just as severely as girls to abandon themselves.

AD:     

And I feel like so much of what people, for people to truly believe that it’s a, it’s a leap for a lot of people. My selflessness is what makes my world go around. My selflessness is what makes my family function, my community function. But, and they may have a hard time stepping into, to your truth that it’s actually, um, better for those around us. But just for a second, think about … I think there are people universally accept that toxic masculinity, which is men only being able to express this very narrow range of emotion has resulted in very terrible things for the world.

GD:     

Yes.

AD:     

If that is true for men, then isn’t it quite possible that it is also true for women? That allowing us this toxic femininity, which is this one-inch range of emotion actually has had and is having very negative effects on our world.

GD:     

Yes. Amen. It’s almost as if so many of the world’s problems, come from people so desperately trying to adhere to these ideas of toxic masculinity, or toxic femininity, that a solution could be to let go of any ideas of gender. And what it means to be a woman or a man at all. And that what we should really be doing is looking at the whole realm of human possibility. And instead of saying, “How do we make this a girl or this a boy?” Just saying, “How do we allow each human being the full experience of being human?” Let’s come back with some hard questions.

All right, we’re back with some hard questions.

AD:

Our first question is a voicemail from Sarah.

Sarah: 

Hi, Glennon and Sister. My name is Sarah, and I cannot tell you how much I enjoyed and was moved by and inspired by Untamed. I tell all of my friends. My question is, I’m in a season of life where I have two young-ish kids. I have a nine-year-old and an almost five-year-old. And I am blessed after teaching high school so long to be able to stay home with them. My question is this, Glennon, I cannot figure out how to take care of myself. I know how important, I keep hearing how important, especially during COVID. Everyone says self-care, self-care, you’ve got to take care of yourself, you’ve got to make time for yourself. I can’t figure it out.

I am bouncing from one kid to the other. I am bouncing from one activity to the other. I am bouncing from one thing that I need to do for my husband, to a child. I just can’t figure it out. Can you please help me? Thank you. Love you, Glennon.

GD:

I mean, I think about when I had, when I was just dripping with babies. It’s just so freaking hard when they’re little. Like, part of me wants desperately to demand that, that people who have young children are more militant about their self-care. And the other part of me just wants to say, “You know what? Forget it. Like, you can’t. It’s just, it’s survival mode. Just make it … “

Because part of me thinks I didn’t even figure out really how to care for myself until the kids were older. But that’s not actually true. So, here’s how I survived. When you have small children, you are in the role of your life. Like, everything’s a role. I’m a mom, I’m a mom, I’m a mom, I’m a mom, mom, mom, mom, mom, mom, mom.

Like, everything, you’re just a machine of caring for other people’s needs. And I think the way I survived was that I made sure that I had a moment or two, or longer, every single day where I was in my soul and not my roles. That’s when I started writing.

And sometimes, I could find eight minutes a day, seriously. But it was just a flash during the day where I remembered my soul, right? And everybody has different ways of doing this. I mean, for me, it’s writing, for sure. Reading and writing. But some people, it’s “This one friend, when I talk to this one friend, that’s my soul speaking, not my roles.” Right?

For some people, it’s a quick dance in the kitchen. For some people, it’s I don’t know, I don’t know what it is for you. But you have to. It’s the “There She Is” moment that people talk about from Untamed. That was never about Abby; that was about a flash, when I saw myself again, right?

AD:     

Yeah.

GD:     

So, I just think that, you know, the fact, that women keep the world running, it’s beautiful and wonderful, and it’s also tenuous and scary. You know, because if we get lost in our roles constantly, then we have nothing to hold onto when those roles change. So, I would say to Sarah, find something throughout your day that you commit to every day, that you remember your soul.

AD:     

That’s so good, because if the steps in the last section were reconnect with your soul, that’s how you’re going to figure out your needs, then that’s going to help you figure out what meets your needs. It’s like, if you have really young kids, it’s just a don’t lose touch with that first step.

GD:     

Yes.

AD:     

Like, remind yourself you have a soul. You have a soul; you have a soul.

GD:     

Yes. And maybe you don’t figure out your soul’s needs while they’re little. But you just remember that you have one. That’s all you have to do.

AD:     

And if you do that, if you just remember you have one, you’ll be light years ahead of most people by the time your kids turn 10.

GD:     

Amen. Amen.

AD:     

Oh, gosh, okay, our next question is from Nick.

Nick:   

My name is Nick, and my question is about burnout. As a teacher in this current pandemic, I know myself and all of my other colleagues are wicked, wicked burnt out. And my question is, how can we best handle the situation when we aren’t able to stop the thing that’s burning us out? There’s been a big focus on self-care and doing what we need to handle the stress. But when that stress keeps coming every day and you can’t stop it, how can we deal with that situation? Thanks.

AD:

Oh, that’s so good because it feels like Nick is in this situation where he’s saying, “I know what my need is and I know what could meet that need, but that’s not an option. And instead, they’re throwing all this extraneous, ‘How about this thing instead? How about you have this other self-care that’s more palatable to us than the actual meeting of your need?'” Which I feel like happens all the time.

GD:     

Right.

AD:

But don’t you think just Nick admitting it’s not working is part of it, and if he could get with his other teacher colleagues, which God bless and keep all of you during this incredibly … just as an aside, the teachers have been such heroes. They have reimagined the entire educational ecosystem.

GD:     

Yes.

AD:

In about two weeks’ time, figured it all out, are holding up the whole sky for all of us. God bless them. But do you think just getting together with your colleagues who are doing the same thing and just, if you could at least have an agreement and an acknowledgement of each other and how that what is happening is horseshit and isn’t compatible with your needs, that that would be a step

GD:     

Yeah. I mean, listen, I was a teacher for a very long time, and I know teacher meetings. I know the meetings, okay? I know all of the things we discuss at those meetings and how many of them could be pushed to another time. I would love to see Nick lead something with his fellow teachers, just saying, “What’s not working?”

I think, like, we all think we have to have a plan for what will work better if we’re going to even bring up what’s not working, and I don’t think that’s true at all. Like, I think there’s … Liz talks about this idea that, that the “not this” phase is very important, okay? So, like, in a relationship or in a job or in the world, the time where we just come together and say, “This isn’t working and here’s why.” Like, we look at our life and we say, “I don’t know what, but not this.”

I think it would be very cool for Nick to just ask for a not this moment and, like, all of the teachers start brainstorming about what is not working for them in this moment. And I don’t know if the result of that is just more connection and less aloneness, none of which can hurt. But I do think that we have to allow space. You know, before we deconstruct or reconstruct, there is a moment of just not even creative, but just a pouring out of what’s not working. I would love to see teachers be able to do that.

AD:

And that’s true, because when you’re saying not this, it becomes an in-, a validation of your individual need. You’re not saying, “I’m not a strong enough person, so I can’t handle this.” It validates you individually, and then it also collectively helps you, whether it’s in a relationship or in a work situation like Nick’s, it helps you to clarify your core values.

GD:

Yes.

AD:

If you’re all agreeing not this, that core value that you’re deciding on will help drive eventually what is.

GD:

Yes. And it’s what you talk about so beautifully in the CareTicker episode. It’s also making the invisible visible. Right? It’s, you know, I, as a teacher, got really annoyed actually with everyone constantly talking about how we were heroes and never doing crap to help us. Right? Never paying us more, never giving us more time, never taking care of our actual needs, just patting us on the head with all the hero talk, right?

AD:     

Yes.

GD:

So, a resistance of, “No. Here’s what we do.” Get together. “Here’s what we do. Here’s how many hours in the day. Here’s how we’re holding up all the sky.” You know, and just doing that step. To me, it’s the Naomi Osaka model. It’s, like, “Not this. I don’t know what.” And it’s actually not my entire responsibility to figure out how to make this work, but it is my right to say, “Not this.”

Let the world figure it out.

AD:

Yes. That’s good.

GD:

Thank you, Nick.

AD:     

Thank you, Nick.

We have another question, and this is from Serena. “I want to stay with myself, but I get so tired of me. Is it ever okay to quit?”

GD:

Oh, I love this question. Can I take this one, ’cause you know that-

AD:     

Please do.

GD:     

… quitting is my spiritual practice. First of all, I love that her name is Serena and that this is her question. I don’t know. Something about Serena needing some serenity from Serena’s own self.

AD:     

Oh, I love it.

GD:

Um, okay. Yes. Okay. I love this. I get so unbelievably tired of myself. Okay? And there are many reasons for that. One is because I’m, my job is to constantly talk. I’m so sick of hearing myself process and talk.

Number two, I am exhausting. Just being, living in my head is a lot. It’s a lot.

AD:     

As Abby says, “You’re exhaustive.”

GD:

Oh, I am exhaustive. That’s so sweet. And also, I have no escape, because I have no booze, but whatever. I have no … whatever it is that people take the edge off, which by the way, that saying is even so problematic, right? Like, I just feel like we need our edge. Our edge is what gets shit done.

Okay. Um, but, but yes, I get tired of myself. And, over and over again, people will ask me, “How do you not quit?” especially with Together Rising, because that’s intense work, right? Like, “How do you constantly look at the world and, and keep doing this and never quit?” And the answer to that is I quit all the time. Quitting is my favorite. Like, quitting is my spiritual practice. I am so committed to quitting. Every single day, I quit.

So, I wake up in the morning and I care the most amount about everything, okay? I drink all the coffee. I get so fired up. I care about people. I care about the world. I work my butt off to do all of the things. And then right around, I don’t know, 5:00 sometimes, 6:00 sometimes, Serena, what I need you to know is I stop caring completely. I do not care. I do not care about the world anymore. I do not care about the people. I do not care about the pain. I do not care. I do not care. I stop caring. I drop out of whatever’s happening. I eat the food. I sit on the couch. I do my trash TV. I care the least amount. During the day, I care the most amount. During the night, I care the least amount. And that is how I survive life. Right?

I consider quitting not as a break from creation, not as a break from creating, but as an essential part of creating. Right? As just as important as showing up is not showing up. Okay? So, to answer your question, Serena, yes. Quit. Embrace quitting. More quitting, not less. Quit every day. Quit every damn day, Serena.

AD:

Never stop quitting, Serena.

GD:

Never stop quitting. 

Alright, what’s the next right thing? What’s our next right thing? I would like to suggest that we keep our next right thing simple here. We’re going to think of some way during the day that we recognize our soul outside of our roles. What’s something we could do each day where we’ll say, “There She Is”?

I would love to hear those from Pod Squad, by the way. What are those things? I also think for people who want extra credit, make your reset button and easy button list. Start thinking about what ways you abandon yourself and what little things that you can do to stay with yourself. That sound good?

AD:

Sounds so good. Sounds so good.

GD:

All right.

AD:

And if people need help with the first one, reconnecting with your soul, we have gotten a lot of incredible feedback that people have been able to reconnect with the playlist for our Fun episode. So, go back and listen to that. People who have been unable to connect with their fun self or their self at all are finding a lot there that they’re remembering their reconnecting.  So that might be a place to start if you don’t know where to begin.

GD:

Awesome. And this week, this week, when, um, it feels really hard to care for yourself, you just keep telling yourself, “We can do hard things.” See you next week.