Rebloged from my friend Samantha Brennan’s Blog: Fit Feminist and (almost) Fifty. Thanks for the opportunity to Guest!
I have a sedentary job. In that way, I am not unique to the millions of others who spend far too much time sitting still in an improper posture. About 10 years ago, I started a very slow crawl out of my consistently sedentary ways and into something that approaches an active life.
Lots of the time, I don’t get to see concrete results of what I do. When I see my personal trainer, it’s all about the results. We create baselines and track progress. I am accountable to the goals and expected to reflect on them occasionally. It’s very structured.
Psychotherapy can have the same sort of structure. People who come to me with what we might call smaller or more compartmentalized sorts of problems need that structure to keep on track and be efficient about the work. I’m alright with that.
A friend of mine who is a therapist in Kitchener/Waterloo came up with a wonderful idea that, in her own small way, addresses the gaps in service for First Responders (Police, EMS, Firefighters) and Canadian Forces Personnel. While these folks notionally have access to psychological service through their employers, the ethos and stigma associated with asking for help makes it difficult to obtain what they require.
I wrote a post a few years ago about This Time of Year and I thought I would re-post because I still really like it.
Warning, it ‘aint your average Christmas Happy.
This Time of Year, is weighted with a nearly inconceivable number of expectations, traditions, possibilities, hopes, tragedies…it just doesn’t stop. It is exactly that weight (and its impacts) I wish to discuss.
Today I want to talk about the importance of ownership in relationship. By relationship, I mean all sorts, intimate, business, parental, friendships, even enemies for that matter. By ownership, I mean identifying and communicating the role we play in an event or relationship interaction.
A client today reminded me that self-care is all well and good but if you are spending your time knitting and doing yoga instead of eating and sleeping, the knitting and the yoga will not do you much good.
Self-care has to start from basic needs and work up, out and along from there.
Tonight, in honour of NaBloPoMo (National Blog Posting Month for those who don’t know. Look it up. It’s real), I decided to write on the slipperiest, most difficult task known to human relationships. How do we express, handle and navigate big emotions when discussing difficult topics?
What does suffering have to do with joy? It may seem a silly question. After all, suffering is the thing we are trying to get away from and joy is a place we’d like to get to. So other than being apparent opposites, what have these two concepts to tell us about each other?
I have found myself using the phrase “Self Care” frequently lately. Mostly I use it when I am writing to the administrators of the employee assistance plans I work for, asking for authorizations for sessions for new clients. I say things like “client has insufficient resources for self care” or “client’s self care is minimal”. I thought it would be a good idea to describe in more detail what that means and why it is important.
I realize that there are t-shirts with titles like this but I couldn’t think of anything better. I was going through my private Facebook pictures and realized nearly everything I post has something to do with my dog. That got me to thinking about how important she is in my life and how many good things she brings. Sharing that seemed like a good idea.
