self-care is necessary: figure out your needs and the symptoms of going without

[belenen]

If I could teach every empathetic person one relational/emotional skill, it would be making self-care a priority that comes first at LEAST half of the time. Constant caretaking without sufficient rest is damaging for the caretaker, the one who is being taken care of, and the relationship itself

Comments

[dadi]

These are really, really good points and I thank you for posting them! I fortunately am in a healthy relationship for the first time in my life, where we both give and take in a more or less equilibrated way. But I am the caretaker for my parents, and setting boundaries here is very, very hard. I recognise a lot of the flags you mention, they are similar in my case. I have learned to strip my life of all those actions I really did only for the dopamine kicks or similar things, and that makes life a lot easier, the pandemic helped too. But there is always, always room for improvement!

[novestarr]

[rotating]

Love love love everything here. How simple yet incredibly smart to identify your needs, red flags, and yellow flags so clearly. My homework for this weekend will be to try to do the same for myself, and also encourage my spouse to do some similar thinking - she is definitely the strong & steady one, and I worry that I lean on her too much and she's too generous and stoic to draw a boundary.