The Origin of the term self-care is unknown, but I have used this term since 2006 toward any effort that enables me to return to a state of functionality when I face setbacks or excessive stress. SELF-CARE is the acronym for that process of evaluation and correction. SELF-CARE is about owning your psychology. In this article, we review the various scenarios that prompt your self-care.
The term SELF-CARE is a framework, process, and system. The benefit of using this system is that you will increase the likelihood of your success, reduce a toll on your health, and improve your relationships. The use of a journal requires a method to be useful, SELF-CARE is my method of organizing information into a journal for a variety of purposes. Over 18 years, I can see the changes that have followed me.
Your school, professional training, and likely your family did not teach you how to practice self-care. When you face uncertainty and painful disappointment, it’s up to you to figure out what to do to recover and learn from the situation. My use of a journal with SELF-CARE allowed me to work through these situations using narration, planning, and focus. SELF-CARE became my partner in growth.
As we look around, we see people at various levels of maturity. There is no exact way to determine how this growth should happen for you, though this growth is necessary for you to experience the best that life has to offer. Maturity is mostly ignored in how a person finds their peace of mind and success as a practice. There are no guarantees in life except for death and game (taxation is a form of game). With this understanding, we need to manage our own maturation process or let life teach us lessons the hard way. This is your decision.
Most people are left to find their own path in life. Rarely do people discover their real talent and receive the support necessary to achieve their full potential. The process to identify your unique abilities and then develop your skills to master your purpose requires a process of effort. It takes determination to persevere and avoid temptations to build your brand. You must invest in yourself to do this effectively.
Self-awareness is the key to SELF-CARE or any personal development program. Consider the consequences if you fail to identify the right goals for your fulfillment. Looking back later in life, wouldn’t you regret dealing with situations carelessly or thoughtlessly? We need to reflect, and it helps to have a point of view. When I faced difficult situations, SELF-CARE provided the framework for evaluation and effort.
What Does a Framework Provide?
Cultivating self-awareness is an important thing to do, but this is easier said than done. To manage your capabilities and energy to their best purpose, you need to focus. Concentration is hard to develop when distractions offer a better short term payoff with dopamine and serotonin. Some of these distractions are found in entertainment and from the influence of sophisticated marketers. It takes discipline and a clear sense of direction to keep our motivation high and the momentum in favor of a better long term result of a life well-lived.
The three most important resources available to you are time, your mind, and your health. It takes effort to make the best use of these assets. Both mind and physical health are synergistic and respond well to athletic training which improves coordination, endurance, balance, and flexibility. Making time to develop these qualities requires organizational skills and your genuine interest in improving overall wellness.
The SELF-CARE approach to personal development uses time management to ensure that you can stay on top of your commitments, priorities, and well being. In adopting SELF-CARE as a practice, you use journaling to manage effort through the practice of mindfulness.
Self-Awareness
The ability to see ourselves and observe our thoughts, personality, character, and values is one distinguishing characteristic that separates us from animals. Some psychologists argue that
self-awareness is perhaps the most important attribute of a mature and fully developed human being. Psychological disorders often accompany a lack of emotional development beyond a child-like mindset. The practice of
SELF-CARE provides the ability to observe and guide how we behave and treat others through a journaling process. In this effort, we can correct attitudes that do not fit our broader objectives, values and the kind of person we decide to become.
Situational Awareness
Pretext, context, and subtext guide the assessment of a situation from a SELF-CARE standpoint. These three dimensions define a way of looking at our situation at any given point in time if we want to assess our place in the environment, or how to handle opportunities that surface in an unexpected challenge.
The
pretext is our unknown motivation of how we arrived at a certain place and time. Why are we in a certain situation? Being unaware of our true nature, we can be blind to the real motive behind our arrival. When we choose to drift through life, our ego leads the way and we need to be aware of this fact.
The context is the situational awareness for that moment. The subtext answers the “so what now?” question as to what to do with a situation.
Without situational awareness, you are more likely to commit errors in judgment and apply the wrong efforts. The worst-case scenario is when you panic or freeze up, incapable of doing what is necessary. This will lead to accidents and casualties. With a discipline for planning, mindful thinking, effort, and self-control raise your situational awareness. Deciding how to orchestrate your role in a situation is the key.
Identity Crisis
One of the most problematic sides to underdevelopment during the formative years is the
identity crisis that occurs when a person comes to believe they are incapable of taking care of themselves. A lack of trust, independence, and motivation to change keeps them trapped in an adolescent stage of maturity. Feeling inadequate and alienated from the larger collective of people we identify with is a difficult situation.
The progressive effort we manage through SELF-CARE allows us to build trust and confidence with objective facts because we get out of our heads and work through daily challenges using effort. Professional Help may be necessary to help you deal with these issues if a condition persists beyond a tolerable or functional level. Self-Awareness allows you to recognize ego issues leading to an Identity Crisis.
Relationship to Parents
Counseling starts by reviewing an individuals’ formative years where personality, values, and character are formed. Brain waves and the state of mind during the formative years change from birth through adulthood years. You can be exposed to a variety of uncontrollable parenting influences and environments. The age, maturity, health, and circumstances of a parent can vary significantly during those years and adversely affect or inform the child’s worldview.
Identity politics, socioeconomics, ethnocentricity, and other factors play their part.
These variables are so broad that unless parents make great efforts to monitor and adjust circumstances to the benefit of their children, something will be off. Ideally, a person grows into a functional adult, capable of further maturing and growing over the course of their life. This happens when we learn to parent ourselves with self-awareness, compassion, and encouragement. This usually does not happen.
My practice of SELF-CARE enabled me to outgrow the hangups that come from a complex childhood. Imagine helping your parents with lingering issues in life as I have been fortunate to do. It is immensely rewarding to help your parents heal from their problems as I have.
Status & Hierarchy
It’s difficult to say exactly when a person becomes aware of their self-image, but during the pubescent or adolescent years, another important aspect of your self-image is formed. The timing and extent of your sexual maturity can impact how you relate to your peers or age group. Being self-conscious can be a source of a developmental challenge that carries forward in life. It is important to recognize when such
patterns affect us.
From a SELF-CARE standpoint, we are all original, while status is a matter of perception. Being recognized for the love we share and receive from others makes life both fulfilling and meaningful. You are the source of this love, but your ability to express it depends on how well you can take care for yourself in the first place. You cannot effectively take care of others without this capacity in your being.
Setbacks
Being exiled, banished, or dismissed can be a source of ongoing emotional crisis. In a more common scenario such as divorce or financial setbacks, a person is seen to fall from their status or societal placement.
SELF-CARE allows you to identify your situations and work through situations to overcome these traumatic experiences at each stage of the journey to heal, overcome, and grow stronger.
Self-Esteem is influenced in large part by status and hierarchy for most people. From a
SELF-CARE standpoint, your self-esteem is based on your self-awareness and the appraisal you hold for yourself. The opportunity for you in setbacks is to audit your attitudes, behavior, beliefs, personality, character, and expectations. To upgrade your self-esteem you must apply a higher standard that accounts for your respect. SELF-CARE enables you to upgrade your life from the inside out by identifying the source of your problems and working through them with effort.
Growing Pains
Growing pains are typically associated with progression where the outcome is generally understood and desirable, but the exact form of changes is unknown while you are going through the process. An example is how you will face more difficult tests and scrutiny advancing to an upper class at school. Another example is when as a business person you need to scale your business to serve more customers. The more difficult question is how you can transform to become your ideal self when it is up to you to decide who that will be. Growing pains can also occur when you are unsure about the next level from voluntary changes that you adopt to fulfill your potential.
Closing the divide between the persona you display and the actual being inside you is also growth. You can measure this by the trust you establish in your own decision making. For example, making decisions without the need for validation and tolerating uncertainty. Over time, your goals will be more challenging, and the time to recover from setbacks less.
Enter the Ego
Insecurities from growing pains or setbacks can trigger an egoic response where a person tries to reclaim their confidence by shielding themselves from being vulnerable with a defensive posture and attitude. If left unchecked and played out without fear of consequences, regrets from bad episodes will linger in the subconscious as cringe-worthy experiences. Learned early in life, these lessons can actually shape character with humility and the motivation to grow with compassion.
The entertainment industry provides a valid SELF-CARE study.
You Ego can provide a useful benefit by allowing you to respond to a negative situation if you apply it effectively with mindful awareness.
Pushing Limitations
Left unattended or without correction, the ego can continue to spiral out of control. We see this often with people that are pedestalized for their talent, money, or popularity. The same goes for children that lack accountability for their behavior. In both cases, being idolized or idolizing the self gives license to behave without fear of consequences. With irrational fear at the driver’s wheel, the outcome is an inevitable crash or an authority intervention to enforce boundaries. When we accept this behavior, we also fail to enforce our
boundaries.
From a SELF-CARE standpoint, knowing the error of one’s ways from a logical or rational standpoint is not the issue. At some point, feedback tells us that certain attitudes and behavior are unacceptable. What is lacking in most people to change is their lack of discretion and self-control. Rising above the temptation of letting fear take control because we don’t know what to do requires perspective and self-awareness. For some, this means to experiment to find the limits to determine where the boundaries are for them.
Breakdown
Mental tension that leads to physical dysfunction is a breakdown. Tension itself is not the issue. A certain amount of tension is necessary and can lead to a breakthrough. A gifted artist struggles with creative tension to express their emotion. Similarly, a dedicated inventor uses tension to focus on the problem they are looking to solve. Breakthroughs are often the result of successfully resolving these beneficial tensions. The breakdown that requires SELF-CARE is where a person is disconnected from themself and dysfunctional.
Self-loathing, abuse of substances, and escapism reflect an attitude of lacking self-respect, self-esteem, and ultimately, self-awareness. How does this happen? In Losing track of behavior and correcting the ego, we allow fear and its defensive persona the ego to take over until there is a conclusive end to the terror. Eventually, the breakdown is a form of submission where a person can find peace.
Wake Up
A breakdown is not necessary to wake up. We need to walk our path in life alone, as mentioned at the outset of this article. With support, encouragement, and training, we still face the contests and confrontations in life alone at the moment of truth. Building ourselves up to face these challenges requires we make a conscious decision in favor of discipline to
invest in our success over distraction. In doing so, we can meet opportunity with the presence of mind necessary to overcome limitations, relinquish fear, and fully develop to our potential.
If breakdown forces you into submission and retreat, a higher mind needs to intervene and gently wake you up with some hard truths. This figure will need to serve as an honest and compassionate advocate for better choices. You can serve as this person for yourself by developing this higher self. Otherwise, someone else will need to step in and assure you that you are valued and capable of more. Viewing this narrative from a SELF-CARE standpoint, we can pinpoint exactly where we went wrong on the path to an eventual breakdown by reading this article from the bottom up.
Assuming that there is no break down in terms of complete physical or mental dysfunction, the challenge is how to optimize and make the most of your time and available resources. A methodology enables you to see your effort, your priorities, and commitments toward your purpose. We must do this for ourselves, or we become codependent on others in an unhealthy way. SELF-CARE is the platform that I have successfully used to optimize my life, heal, and rebound from setbacks, so I share this system with you toward the same objective.
You may ask yourself why I would provide this methodology to you for your benefit. I will share a secret with you that hopefully, you will discover to be true for yourself whether you use SELF-CARE or any other platform for your personal development. I found healing in my life when I helped others heal from circumstances worse than mine. In your personal circle of family, friends, neighbors, or living creatures, there will always be someone or something that suffers and struggles worse than you do. Help this person or creature with a gesture of compassion to see what I mean. You will wake up to the greater meaning of life through this effort.
