Self-Care. Easy to Say, Hard to Do

A mother’s journey with her daughter’s substance abuse and mental health disorders.

Self-care is one of the fundamental principles of CRAFT Connect. As we learned to support our daughter in less judgemental ways, I had to accept the “put your own mask on first” principle. Today, I can see how my self-care practice started in those first CRAFT Connect sessions has increased the stamina necessary for the recovery journey.

After several CRAFT Connect groups, I’ve witnessed many people who state exhaustion as their main reason for joining. Exhaustion from everything related to loving someone with behavioral or substance abuse disorders: worry, crisis, conflict, grief, you name it. Yet, those same folks almost bristle at the “Enrich Your Own Life” session, as I did the first time. I can almost hear them thinking, “Wait! I’m here because my family is in crisis! I’m here to learn how to fix it. Why are we talking about taking care of myself?”

The session does seem jarring after the experiences that can bring us to CRAFT Connect. In my notes from my first Enrich session, I see a brightly colored note on which I wrote “Spend time on this one.” This was my “note to self” during those first weeks when we were spending weekends traveling to visit our daughter in residential treatment, and it was hard to think of self-care.

Self-care in CRAFT Connect is founded on one of the program goals: Increasing your own happiness, independent of whether your loved one enters or stays in treatment. That goal, in and of itself, was hard for me to accept in the beginning of our journey. My deep fear called out, “How can I ever be happy if my loved one isn’t?” CRAFT Connect group was a supportive and safe place for me to accept that my own happiness and sense of self needed to be extricated from the crisis nature of the current situation. It was hard to let go of the grip (or illusion) that I could fix this situation and the drive to keep working at it until we got to the “right” outcome.

Through the practical skills introduced in CRAFT Connect (and supportive group discussions and CRAFT Connect partners), I found a new acceptance that the quality of my own life -- and my connections with other loved ones -- were as important as our daughter’s recovery.

Self-care skills in CRAFT Connect are quite simple. Through the activities, I was able to:

●      Notice the areas in my life that were personally dragging me down

●      Identify simple things I enjoy and that also address the trouble areas

●      Build a self-care plan to add some of those simple things to my week

At the start of every CRAFT Connect session, we reflect on our self-care over the past week. This simple accountability step over those first ten weeks helped build my commitment to self-care. Through CRAFT Connect, I have gained awareness of when I’m taking care of myself and, more importantly, when I’m not! And I have found a new sense of purpose that self-care, rather than being something I “ought to do” is the greatest thing that I can do for the long-term journey with the people I love.