It is so important that when grandparents are experiencing the living bereavement of being denied contact that they learn to self protect.
One thing that needs to be made clear is that self care/self protection does not mean you are self indulgent or that you have to suddenly become selfish, nothing could be further from the truth.
It is all about making sure you keep yourself as mentally and physically healthy, to enable you to live your life.
We are usually so focused on making sure everyone else we care for are ok, that we can forget to ask,
“What about me?”
Self-care will be as individual as you are.
We need to find things that promote positive well-being.
It might be easier if we put things we can do in sections.
Emotional self-care: talk to yourself in a positive way, learn to say ‘no’ to anything that causes you unnecessary stress, have coffee with a friend regularly.
Physical self-care: stick to an exercise routine (not talking about running a marathon every week, it can be just going for a daily walk), try to get a good nights sleep, eat a good diet avoid processed food.
Spiritual self-care: spending time in nature, finding things to be grateful for, meditate if thats your thing, acts of kindness, practising mindfulness.
Self care should bring you joy.
One of the things we don’t do enough of is giving ourselves time. We rush from one thing to another, we need to pause and take a breath. I know that when we are feeling low we feel we must keep ourselves busy to focus on something other than the hurt and pain we drown in if we stop, but actually we need to find the healthy balance.
Sometimes just being quiet for five minutes can recharge our batteries.
We can’t all have the wonderful opportunity to sit and just listen to the sea, my person most favourite thing, but we can all just sit somewhere in nature and just listen.
This morning having woken early, I was responding via email to a grandparent, and I was feeling so sad at the cruelty of it all, and as dawn broke a bird starting singing outside my window, and it made me stop my thoughts of despair and I just listened to the wonder of that tiny bird, such a joyful tune.
It is not difficult to see how self-care can be of a benefit to us, but there is also another very good reason.
We need to keep ourselves as mentally and physically healthy as we can, so that when our grandchildren return to our lives we are ready, and we will be the very best of ourselves that we can be.
