Retreat: A survival skill

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Welcome to the first of a four-part series about The 4 Rs.
You can find all four posts here.

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I had no idea what I was doing or where I was going when I hit send on the first Friday Feels…I just knew that I needed to write.

Along the way, I started to discover themes and patterns in the stories that I told — ones that helped me identify a specific process for my boundary setting + Self-care practices.

The 4 R’s is the framework that emerged from writing The Friday Feels.

The Friday Feels started after I had started writing for myself as a Self-care practice, because I had a bit of a mental meltdown after becoming a mother of two — it turned out that the whole pressure to business build + raise wee ones was a little much.

I am human, and growth is hard.

Even though I’d been in the self-care and wellness industry for nearly a decade by the time I was momming so hard— and “knew” all the things I was “supposed to do” to stay healthy — it all became too much when my natural predisposition towards anxiety and depression collided with postpartum and the stress of becoming a mother.

Luckily, breakdowns aren’t the end. In fact, they’re usually more of a beginning.

Survival gives us serious perspective.

But that perspective is REALLY hard to find when it feels like you’re drowning.

The early years of motherhood were the first time that I really couldn’t stay ahead of my self-care game. The stressors in life kept stacking in the form of crying kids, unending laundry piles, sleep deprivation, and more — and my capacity to deal with those stressors continued to diminish in the absence of the usual self-care suspects like adequate sleep and regular exercise.

Part of the problem is that by the time that I realized I was struggling, introducing coping mechanisms like exercise, work, alone time, meditation, sleep, etc weren’t helping. (An issue that came to the forefront again when pandemic life hit.)

Without the space or capacity to take care of myself, I wasn’t able to fill my cup. But I kept pouring out for others, until I had completely emptied my Self — and was starting to suffer as a result.

Enter, Retreat: A Survival Skill

There was a time that I would hear “retreat” and think about a super bougie experience: An escape to The Spa, time spent at a cabin in the woods without any wifi, or a silent meditation experience with a woman who smells like patchouli but calls herself Sage.

What I didn’t think about was a wounded animal who was retreating to flee a threat; escaping to a quiet place so that it could lick its wounds and heal.

I realized that somewhere along the line I bought into a version of Self-care that aligned more closely with that first set of scenarios — one that placed the potential for healing or tending in the hands of someone else.

It made my wellness another thing to-do, and, made it inaccessible when shit hit the fan.

In a healthy dynamic, we’re capable of handling stress and rolling with the punches of life because our nervous system is wired for stress and repair. But here’s the catch — to make that repair happen, we need to create the space to metabolize the stress and relax.

(100% easier said than done.)

When those ways of dealing with stress weren’t accessible to me, it took a serious toll on my health:

Emotionally, I felt a lot of extremes. I would flip from feeling frustrated, to rage; from feeling sad, to absolutely miserable. I found myself unable to stop crying, regularly — emotional regulation in general felt out of reach.
Physically, I had no appetite and couldn’t keep on weight. I was exhausted all the time. I felt nauseous for no reason. I struggled to get out of bed.
Mentally, my brain would catastrophize everything. I lost my sense of accomplishment. I lacked focus. I was starting to wish away the life I had because I couldn’t find the good in it anymore.

Once I’d hit that point, something like crying (which I highly recommend as a way to honour your emotional needs) was no longer a healthy expression of feelings — because healthy expression includes recovery, and I was so burnt-out it felt like I’d lost the ability to recover.

Those, my friend, were big flaming red flags — and signs that I needed to Retreat as an act of survival.

When red flags show up, pay attention.

Now, it’s not that feelings themselves are the problem, because they’re not. If there’s one thing this whole experience has taught me, it’s that your feelings are not a pathology — they contain valuable information about what’s going on around you, so that you can make choices that keep you safe and well.

But when we’re taught to ignore those warning signs from our feelings — the ones that are telling us that something is wrong — and we persevere in spite of our brain and body warning us to rest…. that’s when we get hurt.

And if we’ve been ignoring our needs for a long time, we can get really hurt — the kind of hurt that takes more than a personal day to deal with.

I know that I’m one of the lucky ones because when I hit this point of Retreat a few years ago — and during the pockets in my life since then, when I’ve noticed myself starting to slip towards retreat again — I’ve had support and was able to right the ship. I had a doctor who believed me, a partner who was there for me, and friends + family who showed up when I waved all my red flags in the air.

We need each other to survive.

With the support of my community, I was able to find new ways to manage the stressors in my life and develop a stronger anchor in my Self — so that I could create new, more sustainable, systems of support for when the next emotional riptide threatened to take me under.