What About the Holidays Prompts Us to Prioritize Self-Care?

 It’s that time of year.

Pick up any popular magazine, and you’ll find it filled with tips for practicing “self-care” throughout the holidays. It makes sense; between the increased stressors of family, shopping and spending, parenting, and rituals, plus the culturally sanctified tradition of setting lofty New Year’s resolutions aimed to perpetuate self-improvement and the illusion of linear progress, it’s inevitable that ultimately, what was more becomes less—less connection to ourselves and less connection to others.

The truth is that, relationally, this is one of the most challenging seasons. We see it at NCCT: Our phone rings more, our website gets more hits; people tell us things are worse, that they’re under stress, that they are fighting often, and so, consequently, January is our busiest month. 

Which begs the question: If our hearts and relationships experience increased duress during the holidays, why do we prioritize caring for ourselves when what is equally essential, is caring for each other? 

I am a huge advocate for self-care; personally and professionally, I witness the generative impact taking care of oneself—physically, mentally, and emotionally— has on our world. I also recognize the huge privilege that being able to do so implies. However, like many terms that have become popularized, the meaning of “self-care” has lost some of the nuance intended by its creator, Audre Lorde. A self-defined Black civil rights activist, writer, lesbian, and feminist, Lorde originally coined the term to emphasize how a return to self can be a communal effort rather than an individualistic pursuit. Lorde challenges the Western notion of “me time,” which reduces self-care to a consumer activity. She famously states, “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence; it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” 

In this context, self-care becomes an intentional radical act that recognizes the interconnectedness of personal and communal well-being. Self-care is not meant to be an exclusionary practice colonized by white heteropatriarchy, but rather, a practice and necessity essential for the well-being of everyone, both societally and individually.

As a systemically trained Couple and Family therapist, I examine the bidirectional interactions between the individual, relational, and collective. Simply put, I examine how a person’s well-being affects their relationships, how those relationships impact the community, and how the community influences broader systems such as capitalism, policies, and social norms. Each factor interacts with and influences the others in a continual and corresponding process. 

Which leads me to an ongoing and (somewhat) polarizing conversation in our field: Which is more effective for the health of our relationships, taking care of oneself (self-regulation) or being more relationally minded (co-regulation)?

Regulation refers to the ability to flexibly move between fight, flight, freeze, and our regulated, more balanced state when we experience a real (or perceived) threat. When faced with a stressful change in our environment, we can adapt and work with feeling overwhelmed or being emotionally  “hijacked.”  Self-regulation involves using one’s resources to cope, such as taking a walk, practicing breathing exercises, meditation, humming, or shaking the body (similar to how dogs shake themselves during transitions or stressful situations). Co-regulation, on the other hand, relies on the support of another person, including things like a comforting hug, sitting side by side while holding hands, or sharing your feelings out loud while someone listens.

In any relationship, two key forces are at play: attachment (or togetherness) and autonomy. At first glance, these seem like dichotomous concepts. How can togetherness and individuality occur at the same time? In reality, the relationship between self and relational care is a fluid spectrum of interdependence; caring for ourselves benefits our loved ones and vice versa.

We’ve all heard the metaphor you must put on your oxygen mask before assisting someone else. This expression underscores the idea that we must first care for ourselves to support others effectively. Stan Tatkin, who created a psychobiological approach to couples therapy, states, “Your job is to know what matters to your partner and how to make them feel safe and secure.” This implies that we should strive to understand our partner’s sense of safety and security rather than impose our own ideas about what that should look like. However, if we focus too much on our partner’s needs and lose sight of ourselves, we risk self-abandoning, which can then lead to codependency or enmeshment.

Juxtaposing Tatkin’s co-regulatory approach is the concept of differentiation. Differentiation was originally introduced by Murray Bowen and extended by Clinical Psychologists and Couple and Family therapists such as David Schnarch and Ellyn Bader. Bader defines differentiation as “the active, ongoing process of defining self, revealing self, clarifying boundaries, and managing the anxiety that comes from risking either greater intimacy or potential separation.” The theory is often positioned as oppositional to Tatkin’s stance or that of co-regulation.

A common misunderstanding about differentiation is that its encouragement of self-regulation and self-care prioritizes individualism. In actuality, differentiation is a necessary tool for relational health. Differentiation is the balance between these two forces: self and other. An image commonly shared to illustrate differentiation is two people side by side, each with their hand on their own heart and their arm wrapped around the other. 

Embodying differentiation is asking, “Can you sit with me and help me tolerate this pain?”

Enmeshment says,  “I need you to fix my pain.”

It’s essential to recognize the order of these two forces—it’s not about choosing one over the other. According to Julia Conroy, LPC, Ph.D., “We learn self-regulation by the experiences we have with co-regulation.” Both self-care and relational care are essential for secure functioning. Conroy states that secure functioning happens in a developmental order. In other words, co-regulation comes before self-regulation in one’s development.

How we care for ourselves and our partner(s) affects how we show up in our communities, which impacts social change. We live in a time when engaging in Socratic dialogue or offering contrasting perspectives is perceived as threatening one’s values. One of my favorite parts of our founder Kerry Lusignan’s Crisis to Connected course is an exploratory distillation of one’s values to use as a reference point for checking the alignment of our behavior, thoughts, and feelings.

Secure functioning, clarity on our values, differentiation, and care for self, others, and community are all vital relational elements that impact every level of how we love and the impact we leave as a people.

When this balance is effective it naturally enriches personal well-being while also deepening our social connections. Recognizing this movement empowers us to foster a culture that celebrates individual and collective well-being as intertwined and inseparable, highlighting the interdependent nature of our shared human experience.

As we navigate the perennial stressors of the holidays and the heightened relationship pressures that come with them, I wish for each of us to find a sweet spot between self-care and the care of others so that our relationships thrive as we do and in turn, we thrive as our relationships do, with one hand on our hearts and the other wrapped around those we love.

Like what you’ve read? NCCT offers weekly couples therapy and private marathon retreats. You can request an appointment here.