How to Keep House While Drowning: 31 days of compassionate help by KC Davis

Author:KC Davis
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Published: 2020-10-31T05:00:00+00:00

16

You do not Exist to Serve your Space, Your Space Exists to Serve You

One reason people find it difficult to tolerate the repetitive nature of care tasks is that they hold a moral rather than functional view. For example, if you feel like a “good” mom has a clean house, you can really only feel adequate when everything is its place. But the reality of life is that even after you put in hours of work cleaning, by virtue of the fact that people (especially children) live in that place, from the moment the cleaning is done the space begins to move away from that magazine cover clean you worked so hard for. The idea that “I’ll just have to do this again tomorrow” can be exhausting and de-motivating for many people. Yet most people don’t say “why bother eating, I’m just going to be hungry again in a few hours?” This is because they don’t have a moral view of the state of hunger or fullness. Instead they understand that eating is functional. We need to give our bodies calories and nutrients so they can continue to function and we can go about our joyful lives. If we change our perspective of care tasks to morally neutral and focus on the functional reason we are doing them, it becomes easier to tolerate the natural ebb and flow of repetitive tasks.

One exercise that can be helpful is to write down your various care tasks and isolate the functional reason for doing them. This helps bring yourself out of a perfectionistic view of all or nothing. For example, take the task of sweeping our floors. A moral view might say “A dirty floor is disgusting. A floor should be clean. Real adults keep their floors clean.” Notice all the value statements. Also notice that in order to fulfill this value standard the floor must be clean at all times. Instead, lets challenge ourselves to find a functional reason to clean our floors. For me, I do not like the feeling of little bits of stuff sticking to the bottom of my feet. That bothers me. When there are things cluttering the ground, I often trip. Those are two great functional reasons for me to pick up and sweep my floor. I still may not do this every day or even often if I am really struggling. But with a functional rather than moral view, my brain may go, “Let’s sweep a path from the bedroom to the kitchen because I deserve to walk that path without tripping or getting dirt on my feet.” All of a sudden, the task isn’t about measuring up but instead about caring for self by providing an increase in function.

Let’s try this exercise with our kitchen counter. A moral message I may have is “a good wife keeps her kitchen clean.” This will either cause me to stress out unless the whole kitchen is spotless or be so overwhelmed with the idea that I must clean the whole kitchen that I feel paralyzed and do nothing.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.