Good for Me, Good for You
Gloria Sandford, LMHC
If something is truly good for me, it is good for everyone around me. Doing the next best thing for me actually opens up the doors of opportunity for myself, and others. Doing what is good for me doesn’t necessarily mean doing what I crave or desire, but doing what I deeply need. So often I hear my clients tell me that they feel they are being selfish when they take time to play, rest, or work on a passion project. It feels selfish because we have all been told from our childhoods that loving others means focusing on them before ourselves, meeting the needs of others before we attend to our own. This just doesn’t work. We end up getting burnt out and worn out and unable to help ourselves or anyone else. The old metaphor of putting the oxygen mask on myself before helping someone else never . . . gets old. It’s just so true. When I work to meet my own needs, I am in better shape to meet others' and to support them in meeting their own.
I recently found some worksheets from my first grade year. I was asked to come up with a solution to a problem that I was having. My problem was that I had been fighting with another girl over who could play with my favorite doll. I listed options that I could use to solve the problem, including: asking for help, talking about it, or just giving the other girl the doll. At the end of the worksheet, it asked what I thought was the best solution. I said: "Give the other girl the doll.” Next to that sentence, I had drawn a picture of me with a sad face beside the other girl with a happy face holding the doll. This solution was not good for either one of us. Both of us had a need to play—and a need to learn how to do it together.
It has taken me a long time to realize that making myself sad for someone else is never a good solution. Now, as an adult, I can use the intuition of my inner child and ask for help and talk about my problems—these are great ideas that lead to what is truly good for me. Identifying what I need, and getting help to get those needs met, has never failed to succeed. Sometimes, we have to shed the narratives that we hold about what it means to put the focus on ourselves. Taking good care of myself is taking good care of everyone around me.