If I say, “take care of yourself” you will likely think about safety, good health practices and good exercise. These are all physical things. You know in your gut if you are eating and drinking properly and your muscles tell if they are getting enough exercise.
But what about our emotional or mental selves? How do we take care of those? Usually, not well. When things go bad in life we seldom lay the responsibility where it belongs, on ourselves. Rather, we tend to blame things that we believe are outside of ourselves, such as schedules, the weather or other people.
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People have their own ideas and may want to persuade you to do things their way. But you have the right to decide what you want to do.
Blaming someone else for how you feel is a useless and dangerous form of stress. You may not like how other people behave toward you, and you may not agree with their feelings or ideas, but you can’t blame them for how you feel. Your feelings are created by your beliefs and your ideas, nobody else’s. You might be foolish enough to accept someone else’s ideas and beliefs without thinking through how realistic they are, but that is your decision.
The dangerous aspect to this form of stress is that you often convince yourself the other person is responsible for how you feel. You then decide to punish or hurt them because of your belief.
This is the root of many forms of serious spouse abuse where one partner assumes the other partner has to be held responsible for his happiness.
Taking care of yourself involves acknowledging anger, but also the thoughts and feelings that are behind that anger. Anger is often only a symptom that you aren’t dealing with something well and often reflects overtiredness, frustration and unrealistic expectations.
Peter Griffiths is a mental health counsellor based in Prince Albert, Sask. He can be contacted through his website at www.sasktelwebsite.net/petecope.
