When setting up a lifestyle that suits your PDAer it is often easy to feel like everyone else’s needs come second. Their siblings, your partner and your own needs all have to be considered too. Every strategy or change that gets implementing into your household has to be sustainable and work for your whole family.
It is easy to get sucked into patterns of catastrophising. To feel like there is no light at the end of the tunnel. To feel you have lost yourself. To feel guilty that your other children’s needs aren’t being met. To feel disconnected from your partner. To feel it is impossible to create your own self-care routines around a child what needs constant co-regulation.
…And even if you know all the things that you need to do to look after yourself and your family, the reality is that when you are parenting a PDAer, days don’t go to plan. Sometimes you have to come up with ever changing, flexible solutions to ensure everyone’s needs are met.
When you are the parent of a PDAer, you often have to make huge life-altering sacrifices. You have to pick between your child’s mental health and your career. You have to pick between your child’s need for co-regulation and being able to engage in your own hobbies and interests. It doesn’t always seem fair. Carer burnout is very real. I have been there. It took reaching breaking point to learn that I needed to prioritise my own self care and work on ways to regulate my own nervous system.
This is what self-care looks like for me:
- Regularly seeing a counsellor to help me work through everything.
- Going for a 20-minute walk each evening in the window between when my husband gets home from work and when the sunsets.
- Getting out of the house to play tennis one night a week.
- Engaging in meaningful work, even if it is just in a small capacity around life, keeps my brain active, has given me an outlet that encourages my journalling, and fulfils a need to be of service to others.
- Playing piano. It gets me into a state of flow and quiets my thoughts.
- Being part of an online book club that means I can participate without having to leave the house and gives me something else to read, rather than getting sucked into scrolling on my phone.
- Deep breathing and yoga. Most days by midday I need a break. I have a 10-minute full body stretch yoga video that I follow along to while the kids have some screen time. Breathing and mindfulness practices come in handy for helping me get to sleep too.
- Putting on my favourite music to sing and dance to.
- Journalling. I can’t tell you how important this is for me in working through my thoughts, feelings, and worries. Once it’s out on the page, it stops ruminating in my head. Anytime I find myself zoning out in my own thoughts, catastrophising, getting emotional, or having trouble sleeping, I know that I need to write about it.
- Every night before bed my husband and I finish up each day with a gratitude practice, specifically we just say 3 things that we are grateful for today.
What does self-care look like for you?
What is most important?
How can you make it a priority?
