I have had conversations with many of my clients about asserting the boundaries they need in order to live a happy life that is not diminished by the unhealthy demands of others. Often my client will remark that they need to be more selfish, and hardly anyone wants to think of themselves as selfish.
Self-care is the term I am most familiar with for properly looking after oneself in order to live a happy, healthy life. I am struggling to find an adjective that would be a more positive substitute for selfish. The only thing that leaps to mind is self-caring, which feels very clumsy. I need to be more self-caring. I need to care for myself more…
I wonder why English has no commonly used word for looking after yourself adequately? I wonder if other languages have anything we could take as a loan word? If you know of anything, especially if it rolls off the tongue then please let me know.
Ok, so I have just done some crowd thinking with some friends/colleagues and come up with nurturing! I think it’s a pretty good fit, but isn’t specifically to do with the self.
Hopefully it sounds more permissible to nurture one’s self than to be selfish. Being able to give yourself permission to act in your own best interests without considering yourself to be a bad person. If this were plotted somewhere on a spectrum, then being a total doormat, always putting others’ needs before your own would be at one end and being utterly self-absorbed would be at the other.
In order to strike a healthy balance I suggest prioritising your needs but not your excesses.
And we need a lot; money, food, water, exercise, shelter, safety, love, acceptance, belonging, stimulation, joy, self-actualisation! It is true that many people neglect to look after all of these needs for fear of being seen as selfish. Hopefully, by thinking of these things as basic necessities of nurture, more people can create the time and mental space that they need to thrive.
So when are we being selfish? How can one tell? When we are nurturing ourselves we are doing what is adequate. When we are being selfish we are acting to excess. Excessive time spent on anything that leads us to neglect our relationship to the world around us and the people in our life.
I can feel this short blog post wanting to become something much bigger, so I will stop for now. Hopefully it will be thought provoking. All the best.
Will.
Will Farmer Counselling 