Reading · Your Trauma Therapist

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I have sat through more self-care trainings than I can count. Graduate school, staff meetings, clinical supervision. Someone would pull up a slide with a bubble bath on it, and everyone would nod like they were hearing something new.

For a long time, I nodded too. I repeated it to clients, to staff I supervised, to anyone who looked like they were running on fumes. “You can’t pour from an empty cup.” I probably said it to people who were barely treading water just to get through a Tuesday.

At some point, I started rolling my eyes every time the subject came up. Not because caring for yourself is a bad idea. But because the version we’ve been sold doesn’t quite make sense when you look at it directly.

The implied message nobody talks about

The traditional self-care pitch goes like this: you’re depleted, you need to recharge, here are some strategies to get you back to functioning so you can keep going. Bubble baths. Journaling. Deep breathing. More water.

What gets glossed over is the reason behind all of it: so you can go back to being productive.

Most self-care messaging is oriented around output. Take care of yourself so you can better show up for others. And when you sit with that for a second, it’s a little grim. It also carries a quiet layer of shame. If you’re burned out, it gets positioned as a management problem (you failed to refill your cup) and the solution is to add more items to a to-do list that is already the problem.

Telling a depleted person they need to do more, even if the “more” is technically for themselves, misses something.

What this actually is

There’s a concept in trauma and nervous system work that distinguishes between coping and genuine restoration. Coping keeps you functional. It helps you get through. It is not the same as actually meeting your needs.

A lot of what gets sold as self-care is coping in nicer packaging. It’s designed to help you manage, not to help you want your life.

I’m not writing off coping entirely. When things are heavy, a walk outside, a slower breath, or a genuinely terrible reality TV show can move the needle in a real way. Research on mindfulness-based practices has found consistent benefits for stress, anxiety, and mood across a wide range of populations.

They’re just not the whole picture.

The piece that tends to get left out is curiosity. What do you actually long for? Not “what will help you function better,” but what do you genuinely want your days to feel like?

The pandemic accidentally taught me something useful

When I was managing a team of therapists and caseworkers through the early months of COVID-19, we were all stretched thin in different ways. We had moved to remote work fast, and conversations about staff wellbeing were constant.

What became clear quickly was that what helped one person had nothing to do with what helped another. I was pregnant, parenting a toddler at home, running a team remotely, and seeing clients in crisis virtually. My nervous system was craving silence. A colleague who was single and living alone needed something completely different. Her self-care looked like phone calls and getting out of the house. Mine looked like five minutes alone in my car between calls.

Neither of us needed a spa day.

Most self-care advice treats everyone as if they have the same deficits. That’s the first problem. The second is that it doesn’t ask people what they actually need, it hands them a list and calls it done.

What it actually means to take care of yourself

If self-care means anything, it has to mean meeting your own needs because they matter, not because it makes you more useful to everyone around you. That distinction sounds subtle, but for a lot of people I work with, particularly those with trauma histories, it’s genuinely disorienting. Many of them learned early that their needs were secondary, inconvenient, or simply not the point. Self-care pitched as a productivity strategy then makes complete sense to them, and still leaves them empty.

What I’ve started asking is simpler. What did you used to love that you’ve stopped making room for? When did you last feel like yourself? What does a good day actually look like for you, not in terms of what you accomplished, but how it felt?

One person I worked with (name and details changed) said the answer was fishing. She hadn’t been in years and couldn’t fully say why. For another, it was cooking actual meals instead of eating standing at the counter. Neither of these would make a self-care listicle. Both of them mattered.

There’s research worth mentioning here too. Positive emotions generated by loving-kindness practices have even shown benefits for people with PTSD, reducing symptoms in ways that rivaled standard cognitive approaches. The point is that this isn’t just nice in theory. Pleasure and genuine enjoyment are doing something real in the nervous system.

Some actual places to start

If you want to figure out what you need, a few things worth sitting with:

Think about your best days. Not your most productive ones. Your best ones. What was in them? What was absent? That gap usually tells you something.

Think about who you were before things got heavy. Not to go backward, but because the things that genuinely lit you up then often still live somewhere in you. I used to spend whole afternoons catching frogs at our family pond. I have no desire to catch frogs now. But that quiet, unhurried time outside? I still need that.

Ask yourself what you’re actually avoiding. Self-care can quietly become its own avoidance strategy. Staying busy, filling the schedule, optimizing everything. Stillness can feel threatening when it’s where the hard feelings tend to surface. If that’s happening, that’s worth being curious about rather than pushed through.

And ask for what you need. This is the part most people skip because it feels uncomfortable or selfish. But scheduling something for yourself is not a luxury. Neither is saying no to things that consistently deplete you.

The goal is not resilience

The standard messaging around self-care is essentially: become more resilient so you can endure harder things. Build your capacity. Fill your cup so you can keep pouring.

What if the goal was just to have a life worth being present in?

That’s a different target. It asks different questions. It asks less about how much you can sustain and more about whether you’re actually okay, actually getting something from the way your days are structured, actually living a life that reflects anything you actually want.

You are allowed to care for yourself because you are a person whose needs matter. Not because it makes you more useful. Please be gentle with yourself as you figure out what that looks like for you.

Everything You Know About Self-Care Is Wrong

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