Supporting Yourself in Every Season

Hello, I'm so glad you're here with me.

We are talking today about how you can support yourself in whatever season it is that you're finding yourself in. I am personally in the middle of our summer, and three of my four kids, instead of being in school, are at home more of the time.

Some of them have been in day camps here and there, but there's a lot of time that we have together, and it's been demanding more of me. And I've recognized that I actually have not been supporting myself in the ways that I need. So, if you identify with that, because it's also your summer, and you have kids out of school, or perhaps you just say, you know what, in life in general, I'm not supporting myself the ways that I need, then stick with me. We're going to talk about what you can do to help yourself out. Now, years ago, I struggled with supporting myself all the time.

I would go, go, go. I would give, give, give, and I wouldn't take good care of me. It actually meant my body started to shut down and demanded that I had to look at it, and I had to pay attention to it because I literally could not keep going.

And you may have already gotten there yourself.

Hopefully, you never have to get there, but it was a buildup. It was a buildup because of the way that I used to live as a child, and throughout my life, I learned to take care of everybody else at my own expense and not to consider my own needs. And so, here we are, summertime, and I reflected and recognized recently the old me, and I realized the only reason I'm feeling much more stretched is because I actually didn't create extra pockets of time for me, for self-care, for the needs that I have, even though the demand on me is greater.

So I'm putting out a lot more, but I'm actually not taking in more. So look at that exchange. That actually doesn't make sense. If I am giving out a lot more, I have to fuel myself in ways that allow me to keep expending that energy without feeling an extreme deficit, even a minimal deficit. Overall, I'm happy to be able to report that I am emotionally regulated a lot of the time, that I'm actually not living extremely exhausted and on the edge and living out of stress responses.

I'm enjoying my summer. I'm enjoying my time with my children. I'm taking the naps when I can and where I need to, but overall, I'm feeling the pull. I'm feeling the lack of energy, the lack of creativity, even just an overall feeling of extra fatigue. And a part of that is, yes, my sleep is interrupted because of my baby. My days are more involved. There's more demand. But like I said, take into account whatever season you're in, if the demand is greater on you right now, are you actually bringing in more resources for yourself to be able to put out as much as you're being asked to put out?

And if not, what can you do about it? I'm purposely pausing because we have to be able to consider what can we do to help ourselves out if we recognize, you know what, there's a deficit here, then how can we supply ourselves with what we need? It could be really practical. We could be creating a pocket of time, a half an hour or an hour or 15 minutes to move our bodies to close our eyes, to bring in some help. Maybe you can outsource something that you're doing right now. Consider your life, your circumstances.

And if there's one thing you walk away with after our time chatting, is that I want you to be able to practically do something to help yourself. Let's not just sit here and talk about it. Wonderful. But taking action is where the change begins.

It's where we actually create resources for ourselves. So the healing journey has allowed me to be authentic in this season, to show up and be the mom that I really want to be, the person I want to be for myself. But it has meant I'm not seeing friends like I would because I don't have the extra energy to put into more relationships. And I love my friends.

I am very happy to have friends. But it does mean I have to expend energy in relating that I don't feel like I have right now. So that's one of those things that I'm just not doing in this season. That doesn't mean I haven't seen any friends this summer. I've gotten my kids together with some friends. I've gotten together with some friends, but not as much as I usually would. And being strategic is important.

And I'm not sitting here trying to say like, oh, I've actually mapped this all out and purposely not connected with friends. No. But when the times have come where I thought, oh, I haven't seen so and so in a little while, we usually get together every few months. I'm recognizing that, you know what, it's okay if we don't see each other right now.

Because for me to add one more or six more things onto the calendar is going to stretch me beyond how I want to be stretched right now. I am already stretched. And I'm stretched to a point where I say, I don't want to stretch myself more. So I've learned some of these ways, these ways to take care of myself because of the healing journey. I'm actually functioning tired, but not living exhausted because I know I must get sleep where I can.

So taking a two-and-a-half-hour nap was super important for me this week because I lost extra sleep a couple nights. Not just the sleep I normally lose because I'm feeding my baby through the night, but my older kids being awake for different reasons and me being awake with them will impact me the next day. And I can only go so far without needing to recharge before I recognize I'm not better off for anybody, not myself, not for those around me if I don't take the care I need. So what do you need to do to take care of yourself and how can you practically do that? Here I am with that question again, because it's important to consider because it's necessary.

Our bodies and our psyches need us to be the kind, loving, wise adult that will say, hey, do you need a break? Do you need some space?

Do you need a nap?

Do you need some water and some protein, something nutritious, something that will allow you to recharge? What is it that you need? If you can offer that to yourself, you are on the right path.

You are on the path that is taking you where you want to go. When we were kids growing up, we needed a caregiver to notice our needs and to respond to our needs. Now some of us had that some of the time, some of us had that all the time.

And there are those of you that never had that or, you know, had it very minimally. OK, my extreme words may not be fitting into place here, but you get the gist of what I'm trying to say. No matter what your early experiences were, it's now we have the opportunity.

It is our chance to take care of that little kid we once were by taking care of the grown adult that we are today. Our inner child lives on within us. And our present self needs us to give attention to who we are so that our past self is able to receive healing as a byproduct. That is a lot of the work that I do with the clients that I work with. It's a lot of what you probably hear me talk about.

I'm extremely passionate to help us to heal our inner child by taking care, good care, of the adult we are today. So as you reflect on the family you grew up in, the environment that you were raised in, or that you spent a lot of your days in, maybe it wasn't home, maybe it was somewhere else you spent a lot of your time. Were your needs being noticed? Was somebody coming to support you and meet you in your needs?

And how do your experiences from early on reflect how your present-day living is? Do they mirror each other? Are they starkly different? What are some of your condition patterns that you recognize, ah, I'm still living out this condition pattern. That could be something that's serving you or something that is actually no longer helpful. We will reenact our earliest experiences on repeat until healing comes in.

And then as we experience healing, then we can change what once was to something different. And we can actually feel like we are empowered to decide whether we want to reenact what once happened or do something different. So to be practical, to give you an example, maybe a reenactment of what once happened is you get to bed too late.

You wake up exhausted the next day and you're frazzled and stressed throughout the day because that was what was modeled to you by your parental figures. And then that was what you started to also do.

So you started to live because as kids, what we observe, we do. That's why that saying, Actions speak louder than words. I mean, words are impactful, of course, but what we observe, we absorb.

And it could be you are recognizing, you know what, this is a condition pattern and it's not serving me. It's not helping me. I want to do something about it. And then you start small. You say, okay, so if I want to actually get more rest so that I'm less stressed and frazzled throughout the day because there is a direct correlation.

Of course, there's much more involved than just sleep, but sleep is a big factor. How can I serve myself?

Well, I'm going to start to go to bed 15 minutes earlier each night. I'm going to start to go to bed 30 minutes earlier each night. Start small and then build from there. Figure it out, get a nap, wake up a little bit later if that serves you best.

You figure it out, but there is a way to create incremental changes that build upon each other that overall create change that you then can find is lasting change because you continue to practice it on repeat. And a practice becomes a lifestyle. So I hope that you are able to consider things that we've touched on today and come up with a small game plan.

Something that is able to be implemented even today, even starting today, and see where it takes you. I hear one of my kids crying, so I am going back to the demand of parenting in the middle of my work. And here we are, we're in it together. We're in it together. And let's take care of ourselves as best as we can in the middle of it all.