I’ve been yearning to write about my experience with self-help for awhile, and this week happily came across this video by Kati Morton, LMFT: I Have a Real Problem with the Self-Help or Self-Care Industry.

(By the way: I have some freewriting questions for you to wander within at the bottom of this email. This is just the set up).

What I especially love about Kati Morton’s video is her observation that shame can stop our ability to engage in self-care. That said, I actually had a different experience.

I know that a few of you have been on my mailing list for awhile, and may even recall that I used to run a blog called The Positivity Project. It feels like a different life. In this blog, I documented my experience working through various self-help strategies in order to illustrate in real time whether or not they were effective. I thought I was running an experiment, using myself as the guinea pig.

Here was one of the main issues with this ‘experiment’: I thought I was broken and I believed that self-help would not just support me, but fix me. If a strategy didn’t work, I never really believed there was something wrong with the strategy. I always turned it around to signal some sort of deficiency within me.

I was secretly frantic in my need to be fixed and to do away with the sensation of chronic anxiety that was rumbling along below my awareness.

Meanwhile, as my failures to make self-help work began to accumulate, my shame also grew. In response I pressed on the gas. I made a list of all the behaviours that self-help called healthy and I tried to do them all, every day, all of the time. I burnt myself out trying to practice self-help perfectly and in doing so, demonstrate my worthiness for transformation.

So now I'm wondering if there are times when shame stops our ability to engage in self-care, and other times when shame creates an urgency, a need to find a self-help guru, routine, or strategy that is 'the' answer, the balm that will save you.

I stopped writing the Positivity Project blog in 2017, and began the difficult task of prying myself away from that industry and its accompanying belief system. In my final reflection post (which I’m quite proud of), I wrote this:

"I’ve learned that to be a consumer of self help — to be a ‘self-help junkie’, as I once described myself— depends on the stability of a belief that (if the industry is to remain profitable – always, more and more profitable), I wasn’t actually meant to shake. This being, a belief in my own inadequacy." (full post).

If you resonate with anything I’ve said, I have a freewriting practice I’d love to offer you.

Freewriting Exercise
Your Relationship to Self-Help and Self-Care

The choreographer Twyla Tharp writes that “rituals help to clear the fog of self-doubt.” Try setting a timer for 5-15 minutes and offer yourself a mindfulness-based ritual that feels right to you. This will be your entrance into writing.

I invite you to spend 3-5 minutes wandering within each of these freewriting questions. I love the word wander because it seems to give permission to be slow moving, to linger, to luxuriate in a moment in time. What a beautiful way to approach writing and reflection.

Freewriting Questions:

1. What within you is asking for nourishment?
   

2. If you were to give yourself what you need, how would your body (or your thoughts, your judgements) respond?

3. Where do the reality of your breath and the whimsy of your dreams meet?
   

4. What questions do you have about your relationship to self-help and self-care? Wander for questions. When you find one you like, write it down, and then wander for another.
   

5. Answer one of your questions in as many ways as you’d like.
   

Where do you go from here? Try taking the material you’ve gathered from this freewrite and turn it into a poem, a letter, a story. Explore the process of making something out of your reflections.

Don’t take this invitation too seriously. Have fun.

COMING UP:

Finding Authenticity - 6-Week Writing Workshop  
Mondays, March 13th - April 24th (no class April 10th)
from 1-3pm PST (Online) | REGISTER

Psst: I designed this workshop because I find the word authenticity to be so confusing and overused. If you do too, I’d love for you to join us! I wrote a recap about this series for those curious about where our opening conversations may lead.

More Workshops:

1. FREE WORKSHOP: Write a poem that explores belonging 
   Hosted by CreativeMornings
   Details: Monday, March 13th from 9-10:30am PST (Online)
   

2. Develop a Writing Ritual
   Join a writing group and set aside intentional space for creativity

   Details: Mondays at 5:30pm PST OR Wednesdays at 1:30pm PST (online).

Questions? Email [email protected]

with warmth,
Christine Bissonnette