Ep 208: Pretend v. Real Self Care | Becoming You Again Podcast

Exhausted by trying to check "self-care" off your already overwhelming to-do list? You're not alone. In this episode of Becoming You Again, I’ll dive deep into the distinction between what most of us have been sold as ‘self-care’ and what actually nurtures our wholeness after divorce. 

Join me as I break down why these surface-level approaches are merely "pretend self-care" – temporary distractions that never address your deeper needs for support, boundaries, and reconnection with yourself. Real self-care isn't a noun (a product to buy) but a verb (actions that truly support you). It emerges from within rather than being prescribed from outside sources.

Real self-care changes your relationship with yourself and your relationship with others on a fundamental level rather than leaving you feeling temporarily better but ultimately unfulfilled. 

In this episode you’ll learn: 

• The key differences between pretend self-care (product-based) and real self-care (decision-based)

• How authentic self-care changes your relationships while pretend self-care leaves you feeling resentful

• Reconnecting with yourself by asking essential questions about your relationship with yourself

• Learning to trust yourself again by developing intentional, individual support systems

If this podcast resonated with you in any way, please take a minute to follow and give me a rating wherever you listen to podcasts.

To schedule your complimentary consult with Karin click here.

Make sure to follow and rate the podcast on your favorite podcasting app.

List to the full episode:

Grief and trauma are the two biggest struggles women deal with as they go through their divorce. It's highly likely that you are experiencing both and don't even realize what you're feeling. I'm here to tell you that it's okay for you to grieve your marriage (even if it was shitty) and it's normal to be experiencing some kind of trauma (which is essentially a disconnection from yourself - your mind, body and soul). I can help guide you through the grief in all of the forms it shows up so you can heal. I can also teach you how to ground yourself in healing so you can ease through the trauma. Schedule your free consult by clicking here.

Featured on this episode:

1. Interested in the Divorce Betrayal Transformation? Learn more here.

2. Are you lost and confused about who you are after divorce? Don't worry. I've got 51 Ways to Get to Know Yourself Again. Click here to download.

3. Want to work first hand with Karin so you can stop worrying about what your life will be like after divorce, and instead begin making it amazing today? Click here to schedule a consult to find out more about working 1:1 with Karin as your coach.

4. Haven't left a review yet? No problem. Click here to leave one.

Full Episode Transcript:

If you're a woman going through a divorce and you are just tired you're tired of being told it's your fault, you're tired of being made the bad one, you're tired of believing that you've ruined your life and your kids' lives Then Becoming you Again, this podcast, is for you. This is the podcast where you learn to step into your power as a woman in this world. Where you learn to step into your power as a woman in this world. Where you learn to reconnect with your wholeness, your integrity, and you bring into alignment your brain, your body and your intuition. You learn to trust yourself again. You are listening to Becoming you Again, episode number 208, and I am your host, karin Nelson. Welcome to Becoming you Again, the podcast where you learn to step into your power as a woman in this world, where you learn to reconnect to your wholeness, your integrity and bring into alignment your brain, your body and your intuition after divorce. This is the podcast where you learn to trust yourself again and move forward toward a life that you truly want. You are listening to Becoming you Again, and I am your host, karin Nelson. Welcome back to the podcast.

My lovely, lovely ladies, I'm so glad you're here. As always, you know me. I love this podcast. This podcast is one of the favorite things that I do besides working one on one with clients, but this podcast is so much fun because I get to talk about all kinds of things and it's truly one of the joys that I get to do on a weekly basis. So I'm so glad when you come back, I'm so grateful that you're here today. I'm going to be talking about self-care and I think this is a pretty important topic and I say that about literally all of my topics, because I do think they're all important, but I think this one especially. We get confused a lot of times about all the different kinds of self-care are out there and sometimes it can just be like this added thing to our to-do list that we feel like we're just not measuring up and we don't fit it in. So I'm going to teach you some distinctions between pretend self-care and real self-care that I hope will help take that mental load and that thing that one more thing that you have to add to your list off and really help you reconnect with your true wholeness.

Okay, so how many times this week have you been scrolling through Instagram and seen an ad or a reel has popped up where you've been on TikTok and you get like this you know, you see a video about this new planner and that planner is just going to make your life so much easier. It's going to take all that stress away. Or that facial hair shaver that shaves all those fine hairs on women's faces as they get older. Or, um, trying to think of ones that, like, have popped up in my feed lately. Uh, like that, that lotion, that essential oil infused lotion that's going to help your cellulite disappear but it's also going to calm you from that essential oil standpoint, or anything like that. Right? If you're like me, I get these kinds of ads all the time and it's all touted from some kind of self-care standpoint. It from some kind of self-care standpoint Step into self-care and manage your schedule so you'll have less stress. Or step into self-care and keep that face and body looking young at all times, so society will accept you and you'll fit in and you'll feel good about yourself. You can finally love the way you look again, right?

But here's what I hope you'll start to see throughout this podcast and as I talk more about this I hope you'll start to see that this type of self-care and I'm putting that in quotes. You know me and I love my air quotes this type of self-care, this is pretend self-care. It's like putting a bandaid on a bullet wound, as they say. Right, and I'm going to talk in more depth in just a minute about why it's pretend and why I can label it with that word pretend. But I mentioned these examples because I want you to start to pay attention to how invasive these types of self-care products there are out there in our daily lives and how they are so surface level that they really don't even touch the actual needs and the actual wants that real self-care can and will provide for you. And I'm going to give you examples of pretend self-care and real self-care. I'm going to talk about them both. So don't worry, you're in safe hands, I got you. But let's jump into this pretend versus real self-care.

Self-care On the surface and in our modern day society it is marketed as wellness or taking a moment to treat yourself right, treat yourself the way they say it in Parks and Rec in those few episodes. And this can be anything along the lines of like taking a hot yoga class, getting a pedicure, going for the massage to help you relax, or taking a hot bath with a chilled glass of wine. I want to be very clear here. There is nothing wrong with taking care of yourself, with treating yourself, with having more options for yourself in terms of wellness. Nothing wrong with that at all. Do that as much as you want.

But the problem I see with defining these things as quote unquote self-care is it isn't actually caring for yourself in the deep, connective sense. It's very surface level and, depending on your stress level, especially when you're going through a divorce, it can be so high through the roof, right? This, like I said, just may be one more thing that you feel like you have to add to your to-do list. You're just going to end up beating yourself up because I didn't do that. I really was going to take a bath tonight and I just didn't get around to it because I'm exhausted and all I want to do is like go to bed after this long day of mental load, stressful load, physical load, emotional load, all of the things. And it's just one more thing that I can't fit in, and now I got to beat myself up about this too.

So no, we're not going to do that anymore, and it's why I like to refer to this kind of self-care as pretend self-care, because when you participate in this type of self-care, all of the time you still feel let down, you still feel unsupported, you still feel like there's a missing something. It's because there's no real intentional support or care that's going on for you, that is long lasting. That is getting to the core of what you actually need, and so what you're going to learn throughout this podcast is to move beyond the pretend self-care and to step into the truer self-care, which is the real sense, which is actually caring for yourself and knowing the difference between the two, so that you can show up in the way that is supportive and functional for you. Real self-care is learning to do things that support your own self-preservation. This is going to look like setting boundaries, implementing self-compassion and asserting your power using your voice. So I'm going to give you a couple of ways that you can start to differentiate between pretend self-care and real self-care.

Pretend self-care is typically recommended from outside of you, so, like it's the ad, it's the person, your neighbor saying, oh, you should just go get a massage. It's the whatever right. It's coming from outside of you. Whereas real self-care is a need that you recognize from within, pretend self-care it's a noun and it usually is some kind of wellness product or some kind of activity or maybe even just a product that you buy like clothes or pants or something like that. Real self-care that is a verb and it is made up of decisions based on your self-trust and your intuition.

Pretend self-care. It actually doesn't do anything to change your relationships and it often will leave you feeling resentful, it will leave you feeling neglected, it will leave you feeling used in the long term, and real self-care actually can help change your relationships. It actually can help you feel the power in your own life to get your needs met while supporting you through the process. So here's some really good examples of real self-care. I already mentioned a couple, but I'm going to mention a couple more.

Setting boundaries and I'm going to have an episode coming up in I'm not sure when, but it's in the works of some really great ways of setting boundaries. I do have a few other episodes that, if you don't know what an actual boundary is for yourself, go listen to those episodes, because it's very important, I think, for you to understand what a boundary actually is and how to use them to your own benefit. So, setting boundaries for yourself and for others, huge. That is real self-care. Letting go of guilt, huge self-care, having self-compassion. We want to treat ourselves with kindness and love and support and give ourselves grace, and when we do this, we are showing up with true self-care and asserting your power. That can look so many different ways. That can mean taking up space. That can meanerting your power. That can look so many different ways. That can mean taking up space. That can mean using your voice. That can mean saying no when you typically would say yes. That can mean letting go of people pleasing.

Asserting your power comes in so many different forms and when you know those forms and you're able to step into that, that is real self-care. When you learn how to do these types of things, that's where the real support of yourself comes in. You trust yourself to handle whatever situation you experience because you know that you will give yourself the support and the care that you need in those moments. That's what self-care truly, truly is. So you can continue to participate in pretend self-care forever for as long as you want that's totally fine, but just know that it is not going to give you the actual support and care that you internally, emotionally, mentally need in moments throughout your life.

Do you know how to set real boundaries for yourself and if you do, do you follow through with those boundaries when someone crosses it, or even when you cross your own boundary? Do you know how to diffuse guilt when it shows up? Do you allow yourself to turn the volume on guilt down or you do you let it kind of rule your life and make decisions from feeling guilt? Do you know how to have self-compassion? Do you know what that means? Do you know what that looks like? Do you know how to speak kindly to yourself, even even when things are hard, even when things are challenging, even when you've made a mistake? Do you believe that you have internal, inherent power that you were born with? That's just waiting for you to tap into? Do you believe that you are more powerful and more capable than you give yourself credit for? Do you know how to tap into your power? Do you know how to tap into trusting yourself?

These are questions that I want you to start asking yourself, because when you can answer them, when you can truly identify the answers and follow through with the answers and implement them into your life, you are going to know yourself better. You are going to feel way more connected to yourself. You are going to feel internally supported in a way that probably you never have before, which is a beautiful, amazing thing. The reality is, answering those questions that I just asked you for yourself means that you are reconnecting to you. You are reconnecting to having your brain, your body and your intuition all pointed in the same direction, and that creates wholeness, that creates connectivity, that creates an internal guide that is supportive and loving for you and your life and the direction that you want to be headed. And the reality is that your answers to those questions probably are going to look different than mine, because we are different people and we have different directions and we have different realities and we have different values and we have different priorities, and that's fine, it's all good. So I want you to ask yourself those questions, rewind it If you need to go back, write them down, ask yourself those questions and figure out what each one means to you, what each one looks like to you.

The more willing you are to get to know yourself, the better off you will be when it comes to supporting yourself with real self-care. Real self-care is all about intentional, individual support. It doesn't mean you have to live your life without other people, without relationships. But real self-care is knowing that I can support myself internally when I need it and I don't have to look to outside sources to try and fill that hole. So go answer those questions. Figure out what real self-care looks like for you.

All right, my friends, that is what I have for you today. Thank you for being here. As always, I will be back next week. Hi friend, I'm so glad you're here and thanks for listening. I wanted to let you know that if you're wanting more, a way to make deeper, more lasting change, then working one-on-one with me as your coach may be exactly what you need. Together, we'll take everything you're learning in the podcast and implement it in your life, with weekly coaching, real-life practice and practical guidance. To learn more about how to work with me one-on-one, go to karinnelsoncoaching dot com. That's wwwkarinnelsoncoaching dot com. Thanks for listening. If this podcast agreed with you in any way, please take a minute to follow and give me a rating wherever you listen to podcasts and for more details about how I can help you live an even better life than when you were married. Make sure and check out the full show notes by clicking the link in the description.