I don’t know what your instagram ads look like but here’s a brief sampling of what mine include:
- Try this supplement to regulate your hormones so you can drop 15 pounds
- Try this energy tablet so you can have more energy throughout your day
- Buy this course of how to heal your inner child wounds so you can be fulfilled in your relationships and basically live your best life ever.
I am bombarded with supplements, courses, vitamins and programs to purchase in order to finally heal myself, find all the efficient life hacks and fix my nervous system… all promising one thing: a good life.
And y’all. I am so freaking tired. Even of my own profession, if I’m being honest, at times. Because we make everything so freaking complicated and have to do allllllll this work to be better humans who can function in a very stressful world.
We have to name our traumas and heal our wounds and create new pathways and take supplements and do breathwork and exercise and learn communication skills and identity our attachment styles and take that personality assessment and read 3000 books on self-development.
Quite frankly, I’m kind of over it, at the moment. I’m over the idea that everything has to be so complicated and that certain people have the answer to it all, and you just have to do all this work to get to the root and then, ta-da, you’re a better you.
Here’s why I’m over it… because I don’t think it has to be this hard all the time.
What if instead of obsessing about your attachment style, you focused on sleeping well every night?
What if instead of spending thousands of dollars on retreats and supplements and nervous system regulation courses, and you just started drinking more water and getting some sun daily?
What if instead of taking every personality assessment known to man, you made connection with people on a regular basis and ate some real food?
I am by no means discrediting therapy, counseling, coaching, supplements, self-development and the like, but I’m just feeling like we tend to over-complicate things from the get-go and then we feel stuck in this constant state of complication and obsession with needing to fix ourselves. Which I don’t think is really creating a *safe* space, internally, ya know? Which, I think if we just decided to start there… not with your childhood history and your emotional dysregulation and focused instead on creating a safer internal space… how much easier that work then becomes?
Because you can make yourself safe for you.
You can get off the hamster wheel of obsessing over fixing yourself and just begin to create some safety in the most basic ways.
Water, sunshine, walks, real food, connection, sleep and rest, less screen time.
I know that’s not really the sexy thing these days… it’s way more fun to talk about how your avoidant style stems from some disconnection with your mother and now you’re trying to create a reparative relationship with the boyfriend that you manifested during a breathwork retreat in the desert… and maybe that’s working for you… but I just want to offer a simpler approach.
Before the trauma work.
Before the self-help books.
Before the retreats.
Before the obsessive life-hacking quest.
So, let’s look at how safe you are making your internal world… because I honestly believe that if we rush to the complicated/deeper stuff without first making ourselves a safe and stable place, then we will actually prolong the “work” and find ourselves grasping for answers outside of our wisdom and knowing. We want to be a safe place for ourselves, so that when we engage in the heavier, harder, deeper work that we all know therapy can be, it’s not creating more stress on our tired little bodies.
*Please note that I not watering down mental health and illness to simply an issue of just needing to take a walk, however, I think that we often rush to to fixing rather than taking time to create some safety.
So what might safety look like for you? What might you need to add-in or potentially take away for your internal world to feel more stable, safe and free?
I know for me, it’s looking more and more like prioritizing sleep, drinking more water, putting my phone away at night, reading more books for fun NOT just self-development, talking to my friends in the middle of a Tuesday, power naps between sessions, less chaos, asking for help and not trying to be Iron Chef with every dinner I make at home.
Rooting for you,
Candace
