Do We Have a Responsibility to Do Self-Care in Relationships?

This week on the podcast we discussed whether self-care was a relationship responsibility and - if so - how we go about doing it. We started with the fact that self-care is very challenging in our current world. It’s either put forward as quite a banal form of pampering which doesn’t require any self-reflection, or it’s put forward as ‘self-improvement’ which suggests that you need to perfect yourself and give yourself a hard time unless you’re doing all the different forms of self-care on top of everything else. We think of self-care more as Audre Lorde spoke of it - as a political act that’s essential, both for surviving these tough times, and for ensuring that we’re part of the solution not part of the problem. In relation to our close intimate relationships, practising self-care is often seen as selfish. Like it would be better to give all of ourselves to our close people and not need to look after ourselves. We talk about how this approach can lead to burn-out, resentment, and having nothing left to offer. Not self-caring is a bit like keeping going when you have a cold - you risk staying ill for longer and passing on the cold to others. We also talked about the phrase ‘you can’t pour from an empty cup’ (or is it jug?) Self-care can help us to be more aware of our relationship patterns and to address them, rather than sliding back into them in ways that can hurt you and other people. However, we can use the ideal of self-care in relationships in more negative ways. For example, we may use it to avoid dealing with issues with other people - just withdrawing into ourselves to cope with difficult things that crop up. When the issue is a relational one it’s important to deal with it with the other person rather than avoiding that in order to avoid being around their difficult feelings or our own vulnerability. You can read more about how to do self-care on Justin’s website, and in Meg-John’s zine on the topic, and their recent blog post about identifying relationship patterns.