Can you give yourself the care you offer others?

Lately, inspired by a client, I’ve been pondering the conflict between self-care and care for others. I see this conflict often, predominately with women who are deeply committed to the well-being of others and working long hours in the workplace, in the community, and in the home. They express worry and fear that prioritizing themselves would inadvertently contribute to the suffering of others.

When you are committed to the work of making things better, it is easy to feel that you don’t have enough time to care for yourself; that to care for yourself is to take away from others.

These thoughts continued to percolate when I attended a conversation on Poetry as Community Care at the Association of Black Fundraising Executives annual conference.

One of the speakers, Damion Wilson, challenged the notion that caring for self must be at the expense of caring for others, when he said “You are part of the community, so give yourself the care you offer others.”

Another speaker, Sarah Byrne-Houser made a similar point, noting that, “we are conditioned to put our stakeholders first, rather than ourselves.”

All of this has me thinking about what would be learned if there were a 360 review process for the caregivers in our organizations and in our communities.

If you are a leader in an organization, you are accustomed to the process of 360 feedback, in which people who report to you, work with you – whether inside or outside the organization – give you anonymous feedback on how they experience you and your leadership.

What if we asked the beneficiaries of care how they experience the people who provide the care, and the quality of the care? Would they say, yes, I want you to be available 24/7 to me? And what if we asked what they want for the caregiver, and not just from the caregiver? Would we be surprised by their response?

How might someone accustomed to prioritizing the well-being of others over their own disrupt that behavior in a way that didn’t pit “self-care” against collective care, but rather defined the care of the self and the other as interconnected and dependent?

For the hard working person who’s developed a strong sense of self connected with giving, and supporting others, what does it mean to receive? To receive care? To receive help? To receive support?

Might the 360 process be a way for the caregiver to stop, be vulnerable and share her own needs and wants, then receive the support that they need and desire?

Might this be a way to enter into what author Diana Rowan calls “sacred reciprocity,” acknowledging that caring our ourselves is not something that we should do in isolation, but in relationship with those we care about and for, both giving and receiving, nurturing and being nurtured?

What if self care were somehow more radically considered inseparable from collective care, central to the growth and regeneration of us all? What a gift that would be.