How to take exquisite care of yourself

This is not a post about self-care as such. It’s about much more than that. Not that I’m dissing self-care. As a psychologist, I do think it’s vitally important. But for most of us, traditional self-care practices aren’t enough.

Let’s cover off what we mean by self-care first and then we’ll push beyond that.

Self-care is what we do to look after ourselves. Here are some examples:

• Healthy eating

• Exercise

• Relaxation

• Sleep

• Meditation

• Mindfulness

• Being in nature

• Gratitude

There are plenty of others, of course, but you get the idea. They can all contribute to better wellbeing, which is great.

But there’s a difference between taking care of ourselves, self-care, and taking exquisite care of ourselves.

What’s the difference? Well, I feel like our biggest struggle as human beings is managing our thoughts, feelings and behaviour.

When we have self-care practices, like those listed above, we often have more capacity to deal with what happens in our life and navigate our thoughts, feelings and behaviour more successfully.

If we’re stressed, run down, overloaded or all of the above, we often have very limited capacity to deal with what’s going on.

So yes, to self-care helping us to increase our capacity. But, and this is a big but, self-care practices don’t necessarily help us to navigate our thoughts, feelings and behaviour more successfully.

If we want to thrive as writers, with all of its incumbent challenges, and we want to create works of significance, whether it’s for entertainment or deeper realisations, then we need a way to understand ourselves, others and, even our characters, better.

We need a framework, a system, a methodology.

Fortunately, I’ve got one for you. Read on…

Back in the post on How to understand yourself better, I spoke about one key aspect of this framework and now we’re going to build upon that.

To begin, here’s a summary of that post:

• You are not a single unitary personality

• You contain many parts within you. They are like characters in your inner world.

• These parts hold emotions, beliefs and behaviours

• These parts get activated from time to time and when they do, they express these emotions, beliefs and behaviours.

• You are not a part. You are not an angry, critical, overwhelmed or anxious person.

• You simply have highly active parts of you that are angry, critical, overwhelmed or anxious.

Please go check out the full post if this is not making sense. Hopefully it will after you read it!

All right, moving on, what does this mean for our lived experience?

It means that if we want to navigate our thoughts, feelings and behaviours more successfully, we need to learn how to work with our parts.

There are quite a few traditional approaches to dealing with our thoughts, feelings and behaviours.

• Common approaches to dealing with our thoughts go like this:

  • Catch a thought and if it’s unhelpful, change it, challenge it, reframe it, think differently.

• Common approaches to dealing with our emotions include:

  • Being with an emotion, feeling it and allowing it to pass, rather than supressing it or being overtaken by it.

• Common approaches to dealing with our behaviour are:

  • Setting goals, identifying our values and changing our habits to align with our goals and values

Many traditional approaches to dealing with our feelings, beliefs and behaviour don’t provide a fully integrated way to navigate all three together. Instead, they tend to focus on strategies to deal with one or the other, as listed here.

That doesn’t mean that they don’t appreciate the interconnection between all three. For example, if you change your thinking, then it is possible to change how you feel and behave. But, not always.

And that’s the problem. We’re complex beasts and we need a more sophisticated way to deal with all three, together. And we do. It’s called parts work.

We work with our parts.

As mentioned earlier, our parts contain and express thoughts, feelings and behaviour so that means that when we work with our parts, we’re working with all three.

Here’s an example: Let’s say we’re angry.

• We might be thinking, ‘That’s not right! That’s not fair!’

• We might be feeling, yes, angry, enraged, tight in our body, reactionary

• We might then behave by lashing out, yelling, throwing something

If we follow along with common approaches, we’d either try to:

• Change our thinking so we calm down

• Be with our anger in a safe way, for example, leave the room

• Yell out into the void, rather than at someone or punch a pillow rather than someone else

These can work, but not always, and more importantly, there is a better way.

Parts work is about recognising that our angry part has been activated and it needs our attention.

Here’s some more info about parts that’s super important:

Our parts are always trying to help us. Always.

There is never a situation when they’re not trying to help, when they’ve gone rogue and are serving some other agenda. They are always trying to help.

Now, the way they try to help us might not feel helpful at all. When an angry part floods our system and we think, feel and behave in all of the ways described above, that doesn’t always feel constructive. Instead, it can seem incredibly destructive.

But let’s see it from the angry part’s perspective. Someone is doing the wrong thing, a situation is unfair, and they need to defend us, they need to protect us.

That’s how they’re trying to help. They’re trying to defend and protect us.

Here’s another very important bit of info about parts:

We never want to try to get rid of our parts. Never.

Our parts are a valuable resource within us. They have our best interests at heart. They want to help.

It’s just that sometimes, as we’ve seen, they help in ways that aren’t helpful.

But here’s what happens if we try to get rid of our parts: They don’t go away. They get more active, more vigilant. They try and help even more.

That means that over time, we get angrier and we get angry at the little things and not the big ones where our anger is more deserved.

If you’ve ever tried to contain your anger in certain situations, it can build up until you erupt, which often, isn’t pretty.

Instead of trying to get rid of our parts, we need to attend to them, we need to look after them, we need to care for them.

That’s how we take exquisite care of ourselves.

In future posts, I’ll go into this in more detail but for now, here’s a high level overview of how we can take exquisite care of ourselves:

• Notice what you’re thinking, feeling or doing. Awareness is important.

• Recognise it as a part of you.

• Bring some curiosity or compassion to that part of you.

• Ask the part to give you some space to be with it instead of overtaking your entire system.

• Notice how the part lessens, calms down or de-intensifies.

There is a lot more we can do in parts work but these are some beginning steps. I promise, I’ll explain more fully in future posts.

But for now, we’re coming into a different relationship with our parts. We’re recognising that they exist, that they’re here to help and that we can look after them.

That’s the beginning stages of taking exquisite care of ourselves.