Ep #46: Divorce Self Care | Becoming You Again Podcast
We've all heard the talk about self care by taking a bath or getting your hair or nails done. This is all fine and good to do, but it's not what I'll be focusing on in this divorce self care episode. When we go through divorce, we need a different type of self care. Listen in as I talk about self care in terms of external and internal needs, why it's important for us to learn what these types of self care are and how we can show up for ourselves meeting all of those needs. In this episode you'll learn:
What self care really means.
The two types of self care and why they're both important to our mental and emotional health.
How to show up for yourself filling your external needs.
How to show up for yourself filling your internal needs.
What will change for you and your life once you learn to provide these kinds of self care.
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List to the full episode:
You've lived most of your marriage putting everyone else first, at the detriment of your confidence, your self esteem and feeling fulfilled and taken care of. You don't know where to even start when it comes to self care and taking care of your own needs. That's where I come in. I can teach you how to show up for yourself in the ways you need most, without the guilt or overwhelm. Your first step is scheduling a time to talk to me and we'll come up with your individual plan. Click here to schedule your free discovery session with me.
Featured on this episode:
Interested in the Divorce Betrayal Transformation? Learn more here.
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Full Episode Transcript:
Welcome back to Becoming You Again. I’m your host Karin Nelson. I’m a certified divorce confidence coach and this is the podcast where I teach you how to reconnect with yourself, create emotional resiliency and live a truly independent life, so you can have an even better life than when you were married.
Hi! Welcome back to the podcast my friends. How are you all doing? Today I have to say is just a little bit bittersweet for me. Today is the first day of school in our area and so it’s the first day back for my son who is a senior in high school this year. His first day of his last year of traditional school. It’s a little sad, I gotta say. It’s amazing, right? It’s amazing, but also sad. And today is also the first day back for my daughter who is in her third year at university (yes she made it back from Germany. She has had, she had an amazing summer there) and I’m so glad that she is back and also wow, can I just say how time really does fly. Oh, it’s so amazing and wonderful and beautiful and I love that my kids are growing up. And it’s so fun to have them at the ages that they are, but wow. Time really does fly. So what is going on in your life? Did your kids go back to school? Are they done with school? Have they moved out? I know this podcast has a wide range of listeners so there’s probably the whole spectrum of kids and ages and new beginnings this time of year going on. Tell me what is happening with you. Come to Instagram @karinnelsoncoaching and DM me and let me know. I would love to hear.
Well today’s topic is one that I think you’re really going to like – not because I’m going to tell you to take more bubble baths or plan a girls night out or go get your hair and nails done (although I wouldn’t say no to more of any of those things, okay). But I think you’re going to like it because I’m going to be talking about self care in a way that maybe you’ve never thought about before. And I love opening your mind to new ideas and new thinking that maybe you haven’t thought about. Maybe you have and totally great if you have and maybe you haven’t so I hope this opens you up to new ways of thinking which is always fun I think.
Alright so when I think about the idea of ‘caring’ for someone what usually pops into my head is a mom with a baby or a child. Right? So of course there’s going to be thousands of ways to think of caring but this is what initially shows up in my head. Because when we have a baby that baby has needs. It needs to be fed, and it needs to helped to fall asleep sometimes, right? And we need to carry it around from place to place, and we need to clothe it and bathe it and love it and snuggle it. We need to help soothe it sometimes and we need to pay attention to it and we need to stimulate it and protect it and we need to provide this care for this baby because of this point in his life that cannot do those things for itself. It does not know how. Right?
So I use this example because I think it’s a really good illustration of what care can mean. Because what caring or care really means is meeting our needs or the needs of someone else. Because as human beings we have needs. Some of those needs are external and some of those needs are internal. And I believe that when it comes to divorce self care that our number one job as women is to get really good at meeting our own needs, both external and internal. Our job is to show up for ourselves providing exquisite self care. And that is what I am going to be talking about today.
So let’s talk about what that means in terms of external and internal self care. External self care or fulfilling your external needs are what most people think of when we talk about self care. Things like taking that time out for a bath one evening or scheduling a haircut or getting a pedicure. Maybe reading a book, or going for a walk. Meditating, having a night away from the kids doing something that you enjoy like going to a concert, or having a girls night or getting dinner and drinks. Those are external things that help to meet needs of ours in certain ways. These things usually feel really good and are relaxing or fun. They can help us recharge our batteries as women and mothers.
This kind of external self care is really important, don’t get me wrong. Especially after divorce because for many of us we put any kind of self care on the backburner. When I was going through my divorce I realized that I hadn’t bought myself new clothes in a really long time. And not even new clothes but I hadn’t bought myself a new pair of jeans in years. Yes years, pleural with an ‘s’ years. I had pants that I had had for so long that my thighs had rubbed holes from wearing them and instead of spending money on myself to buy a new pair of jeans, I bought iron on patches that I used to mend the holes because I told myself that the money that I would spend on a new pair of jeans needed to go to the kids or to like food or something for the family instead. That is how unworthy I thought of myself and my needs. And it was how unwilling I was to allow myself to take care of me and my needs while I was married. So if you are neglecting your external needs and if you have been neglecting them for a long time like I did, right now is your opportunity to provide yourself with some of this external self care. Pick one thing that you need or that you desire or that you want and make it happen for yourself. Because you are worthy to show up for yourself in that way. No one else is going to. You need to take the first step and do it for yourself.
And I don’t really want to spend too much time on the external self care because I know we’ve all heard enough about how to take care of yourself, how to show up and give yourself some self-care. And I promise you the majority of the articles or the podcast episodes or the YouTube videos that you will find out there will be coming from this space of external self-care and it’s important but I want to talk more today about caring for ourselves from that internal perspective. Because if you have neglected yourself from an external self-care perspective, I guarantee you have also neglected yourself from an internal self-care perspective. Okay.
So what does internal self care even look like? This is where you take care of yourself mentally and emotionally. Right? This is where you learn to meet your own mental and emotional needs and this can show up in a lot of different ways. But I believe that the internal self care is the most important of external and internal when it comes to self-care, right, because sometimes other people can help meet our external self care needs. Maybe somebody will give us flowers or take us to dinner. Or we might teach a class and get lots of compliments. Or we can receive a present or have friends come out and go out with us and those kind of external needs can be met, however the internal self care can only be met by us. We are the only ones who will ever be able to fill these needs and if we don’t learn how then we will always have a void of emptiness inside that we are trying to fill up with external means, even though this internal self care is always an inside job. Always.
So what are the internal needs that we need to have met and how are we going to show for ourselves to fill those needs?