The Trap of Self-Care

[On learning about massacre in Kandahar while standing before the beauty of the Newfoundland shore] “These words seem incommensurable and I struggle as I try to hold them together. The first feels “profane,” filled with human tragedy and the mind-numbing sugaring that comes with mortal, embodied existence in a violent, polarized world. This world presents me with the fragmenting reality of human conflict—destructive rage that I simply cannot metabolize—and in reaction to it I feel myself shutting down, closing up, dissociating, leaving my body: the essence of a traumatic response. The second world feels sacred, beautiful, boundless, and eternal, opening into an ineffable mystery that soothes the soul—into what Rudolf Otto (1917) called the numinous dimension of human experience. And when I open to this larger reality, I can feel the “knitting up of the raveled sleeve of care” (Macbeth, 2.2:35–39) of my day-world anxieties and troubles; yet there is a haunting loneliness to this beautiful and impersonal world. There are no people in it, except myself. How do we manage to live a full life between these two worlds?" -- Donald Kalsched, Trauma and the Soul

I think about the concept of self-care omnipresent into today’s positive psychology. Self-care is necessary because of the brutality that surrounds us and penetrates us through news and experience. And yet, we cannot hide, we cannot retreat into a blissed child-like state. Self-care needs to be a temporary act, or a partial act that never blinds us to today’s call to action. 

What does it say about us when we run into yoga, massages, young-adult novels, and other form of pampering? How are we seeing ourselves in this if not as children in need of protection? 

I believe there is actually a child in us that needs protection: the child that represents our potential, our joy in the now, our connection with nature and what is magical about it. And yet, we are not completely children. We are heroes, and crones, and villains. We need to listen to those voices, too. As heroes, we need to move in the world and fight with honor. As crones, we need to listen without judgment and live as examples. And we always, always need to acknowledge our Shadow, the villain inside us, to keep on acting ethically, so that we understand the forgive the Shadow in others and promote a common living that is truly human.

I’m not against Self-Care, but I caution against it becoming a never-ending stop that does not help us and does not help the world.