Saving Some of Yourself for Yourself

When giving everything away feels like love, self-preservation can feel like betrayal.

While recovering from illness, I reflect on the inherited tendency to give away our energy before considering what we need ourselves. I explore how love, validation, guilt, and resentment become intertwined—and how genuine self-love may begin by listening to the sacred voice within before automatically offering ourselves to everyone else.

Walk with me.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Hello. Good morning. Welcome to Embodied Wisdom, a walk and a talk with Dr. Brook. Coming to you live from my neighborhood. Um I am just this month, so you might hear my sort of uh nasally congestion here. Um maybe an abbreviated version, but um wanted to get out for a little while, get my body moving, and um sort of got this download of some you know nice material. Um because you know, sometimes we think, I don't know, we put so much personal responsibility on I don't know if it's well about taking care of ourselves and uh being ill. Somehow it's our responsibility. You know, and being accountable to your health is your responsibility. Sometimes we just get sick, sometimes we get sick from the outside in because we catch something, sometimes we get sick from the inside out. It's a combination of both. But in the end, um, I don't know. I think we could end up getting give being frustrated and giving meaning to it because it feels lousy to feel lousy, you know. Um, but I do also think when we are compromised, that forces us into a surrender. Um and it we learn more, we can learn. Um so I find illness teaches people a lot about themselves. Sometimes it's the things you never really wanted to know or you wanted to learn about. This morning I I I got this insight that like even when I'm like pretty compromised, I I immediately want to give like my energy away. Like the language that's coming to mind, but I hope you hear where it's coming from. It's like I want to whore it out. You know, it's like I just want to give it away the minute I have it, and that makes me feel safe. Like, so it's almost like I'm gonna give the best of myself away, but I'm not gonna give it to myself. And this is some how somehow heroic. And I think the less energy we have, like I'm usually someone who's blessed with having, you know me, I'm very and if you know me through the podcast, you I guess it's the same thing, I've intense. I have lots of energy and never, you know, early in my life wasn't really given a place to put it. And now I definitely apply it, especially in my work, because that's where I'm oriented, but definitely my work, my family, my spiritual life, it just just immediately, if I have it, I'm giving it. And um, I don't know, I was I was like reflecting this morning about how many generations, and in this I'm saying of women. I don't mean it only needs to be women, but that's what came through to me. How many generations of women have done this? How many generations of women have given the best to themselves before they even evaluated what it is they want that or needed to do? Run themselves. Um in other words, if you don't take care of yourself, this is the whole thing with the gas mask. If you don't take care of yourself first, how are you going to be able to sustain this situation? I'm just gonna give a beautiful deer. You know what? I think they're gonna, I hope they stay. I'm gonna give them the pick of the day. Oh, they're not gonna stay. Oh this nice car left and take these pictures and let me. I don't know. It stopped, it was very considerate of what I was doing. Anyway, so I guess I feel like well, first of all, I'm alone like a New Yorker where you just feel like you're gonna get run over wherever you're standing. But uh yeah, uh, sometimes around here you don't know the culture here could be very intense around the cars, anyway. So, so if you have no energy left for yourself because you're so heroic in giving it, is it really heroic? Because guess what that builds? Uh, very high levels of resentment that you're not doing anything for yourself. So here's this irony you're gonna give it away, it's heroic. Generations of women have done this, and guess what that created? Very angry people who may have not treated you so well because they're so angry that they don't value themselves. And so I've reflected on this before that I really had always wished that the women in my family, if you if I had one wish for them, it was that they actually would have thought they mattered. Because if they did, then they would have walked around thinking they married and they would have offered themselves to others thinking they mattered, and because they did. But listen, I'm gonna say, if you matter either way, but you're an asshole, excuse me, you're not liked because no one really likes an asshole. But why do you become an asshole? Because you're resentful that you don't take care of yourself, that you don't look within, that you don't give yourself the best of yourself, and you're annoyed because everyone else gets the best of you. You don't really feel appreciated because they don't, you know, the whole thing is not even the best of you anymore because now it's like corrupted by you having to have given it away. Um, so and I think this is like an autopilot. So, what does this have to do with? It's like autopilot, it's it's so intense. So then I was thinking about what does it all have to do with love, all this resentment and all this upset, and all this not saving the best of us for for ourselves, is about love, and everyone goes, self-love, self-love, you gotta love yourself, I deserve it, all these ideas. Well, what does that mean? What does it mean? Because if the part of the reason why the women in my family, and let's say the women all over the globe, wake up in the morning and think about the other is because they love the other, right? And the other loves them, and so I don't know, Freud talked about this. I thought this is very interesting, and I read it. I read his like early stuff and I've read his later stuff. I've read some stuff in between, but I think most of it is earlier and later. And I like to read people's the latest things they wrote because I I kind of think that's the wisest. I wouldn't say always, but but I do I enjoy that the most because it digests everything they ever were, especially these very prolific philosophers and writers. Um so okay, so so in civilization and its discontents, Freud he basically talks about this, you know, he he says throughout all his work that like you know, we love our parents no matter what. It's like a human phenomenon. We love our parents no matter what. And it's just like phenomenological, it's like just what it is. It doesn't matter what a parent does. I mean, this is theorized from psychologists, psychiatrists, you know, people who study the mind, people who study people, they say it over and over again. It's like it blows our mind that no matter how you're treated, you will still come to love, you know, you still love the perpetrator. And we see this behavior, you know, we see it with our loving animals and things like that as well. It's not, you know, we see this in nature. Okay, so there's that. And so if we're taught that if I love someone, it means you give yourself completely over, no matter what that makes you feel like. And that's the that that gives you love. Like here comes the idea of conditional love, conditioned love. You're just gonna do that. And what if it's also your nature? I mean, now now you're starting with, you know, when I talk about the spiritual blueprint, my rising sign, like the way where I was born that is accommodating. So here I am, a born to accommodate, born to accommodate, and then taught to accommodate. Maybe they're one and the same things. I mean, the mystery is endless, I don't know, but here I am giving it over, proud to, happy to, feels right to me, and little seed loving, right? I'm loving everyone, and little seeds of resentment are growing because with the little bit of energy I have today, I've started the day and I have given it away. And I already set myself up to give it away later because then I'm gonna like also host my family. And now I'm thinking, which can still be canceled, I don't know, that I'm not sure if that's the best idea because I do feel better, but I have limited energy, and if I think about how I plan to use it, and again, it's not in value, it's not not valuable. The energy I'm giving away, it isn't that it's not valuable because it is, and the people who I'm giving it to deeply appreciate it, and I'm making a choice to give it to them. No one is asking me to do that. Well, except if I go back to the love idea, because I was asked to do that. I was asked to do that, and because I was asked to do that, I or because I believe love came from there, and because I'm built to do that, I do it, and then the idea that I'm gonna take that back for myself because now that now now I'm even gonna go into validation. I kind of knew this would, I feel like somehow get complicated. Um, but I didn't expect to also to bring validation into it. I guess I did, but okay, so so let's say now the thing with the love is built into like this idea of seeking validation, right? Because if you're taught, so this is the thing: one mother, one woman gives everything she can to the others in her life, meaning her mother, her sister, her children, all her husband, because here we are, it's generalized because you're taught this is what love means, and you're validated when you do that, and you're invalidated when you don't do that. So this is the validation. This is like, well, that means I'm lovable and loving, versus if you don't do it, it means you're not, and that is not inherently true. It's not, but it is a deep conditioned truth that layers upon layers of people in your heritage believed made things safe because it made it safe for them and it made it safe for you, no doubt. So that tendency in you is so showing why did it make it safe? Well, because if you didn't show up for your mother for something, and I'm talking about this in a particular context, but if you're listening and you understand it, then you know you're in that context, and if you don't, um it's that you know, and nothing not everything's for everybody, but I'm speaking about this in a particular context. So if you've experienced this, you understand it. But everybody, though, the example I'm giving may be more idiosyncratic, but everybody has this idea about the love and the parents and validation and conditioned love responses, and what we do for love, what we're willing to do for love. I mean, it's like what comes to mind is we're like willing to sell our soul to the devil. That's what we're willing to do. And you know, in civilization and discontents, Freud brings up this interesting idea about guilt. And what he says is the reason we experience guilt isn't because we're guilted really into giving the love away. Because people, I think, in my experience, think about guilt like, well, if you don't give yourself away, you're gonna feel guilty, right? If you don't give yourself away, you're gonna feel guilty, excuse me. And if you don't give yourself away, you're gonna feel guilty because you got the Jewish guilt or the Catholic guilt because you didn't follow the rules of what makes you lovable, and they want to make you lovable. And the reason why they want to make you lovable, like, is so that you know, someone someone wants to marry you, you prolip, you know, you continue the tribe. This is what we believe, and everybody in the tribe, though, is resentful and unhappy, right? Okay, so we think, oh, then they guilt us into doing that. What Freud says guilt is is really that we know we're betraying ourselves by giving ourselves away, that we know that we're listening to the conditioned response, we're not listening to the truth within ourselves, and the truth is we are sacred, we're sacred onto ourselves. This whole thing is a game, an illusion of what love is, so that we can be nurtured, etc. But once we're not being treated as sacred because we're here at hello. Honestly, oh no, look at a little see how I feel type of day. So I'm not going too far out. Okay. Um avoiding people, that is also funny too. I'm also doing that. Okay, so um, all right. So if we connect the fact that we're betraying ourselves by being in love, by loving someone and doing what they say, because we've sold our soul to the devil for validation, opposed to being like, hmm, do I feel like hosting, do I feel up for hosting my family today? Well, also, I don't have to go all out, just freaking bring in something, because my son would rather be at home because he recently also was compromised, which is probably why I'm also compromised. See, he had some surgery, he's recovering well, but it was rough. So um here, here, but here it is. It's like I really do love him so much, and my heart hurt so much during the surgery that I cried because that's the way I feel, but that that has nothing to do with what I give him. That's sacred. I don't have to give him anything to feel like that, right? And here's the irony so what is it that we actually feel? Okay, so we can feel love without the seeking of this validation. So when does it become something detached or something removed from that? And and so this is I think I've been trying to like fix this this whole thing here. I've been trying to fix my experience of the human condition rather than oh, oh well for me, this is my experience, this is my narrative of that. And I can analyze it, I can reconstruct it, I could do whatever I want with this mechanism. You could describe the mechanism in a different way, but it's gonna exist. So the minute you start down that road, and I I think if you go backwards, it starts with the seeking of validation, opposed to hmm, what do I feel like today? What do I feel like today? How do I feel? So, and what energy do I have to give after what I must accomplish for myself? And if I'm asking that question, I know it's gonna be foggy because of all these things, but there's a sacred, sacred profundity underneath all of it. Now, in I don't know, like it's you know, all spiritual traditions has like, you know, they all have a name for this, and like let's say um one tradition will say it's the guru within, another will say it's the light, it's the Christ light. Uh I uh you know, there's there's theories, psychological theories, like internal family systems that would say it's the big S, the self, that there's something all-knowing within us. People call it the God, you know, the God within. And when we source from that, that's like saying, Oh, I know how I feel today. That isn't seeking validation. And let's say that's why that's the truest form of love. Is because when we source from that, there is no resentment. There is just what is and what isn't. So what looks like a sacrifice on one person's behalf and what is then, you know, I don't know, praised, praise, praise, praise on one person's behalf. Um, and what society praises is a model that no one could really live up to because it doesn't uh accurately reflect um what it is that we're um seeking in this life. Because what we're I believe we're all seeking in this life is to find that place in ourselves, or at least that's what I hear. Because that in the end is what makes people feel from my perspective as I am a psychologist. I'm gonna say better. Now these phenomena will continue, but what game are we gonna choose to play? Are we always gonna look for that guru within, the goddess within the little voice inside to guide us, or are we gonna look for the validation of where love came from intergenerationally, despite the endless resentments that created? Okay, and then people say, Well, how do you find that place? And God knows it's not an easy place to find, but it's like everything, everybody has it. So if you build that muscle where you look for that, and now there's different ways to look for that. There's literally there's teachers, endless teachers, endless information on this, endless ideas on this, and so you choose, but you commit to it. I've just created these workbooks on how to get there, how to make trustworthy decision-making decisions, how for couples to better communicate because they communicate from a more truthful place rather than this resentment, because everybody's doing this and everybody wants love, and it feels to me everybody has some kind of yearning to find this truth. You know, sometimes people call it the mother within. I mean, it's just these, it's untainted. It's untainted and it's in there, but first you have to believe it's in there if you're gonna want to live from there, and it's a tall order and it's hard work, and you don't get it from a pill. Um, you get it because you find that the space inside and you reside meditation. You know, this is what this is what I think meditation's for. This is why people go on all the psychedelics. Cannabis is an ethnogen, meaning it's like God speaks to you through that space. I mean, this is why people do this, this is why this is becoming increasingly popular, because in a world where you don't know where your center is, where there's so many conflicting uh, you know, observations, where people don't know what their um, which end is up, who should they trust in their health care. Was it one of the most vulnerable places of all when it's been cleared the community was encouraged to trust people that aren't are not trustworthy, but then there are trustworthy people and trustworthy medical endeavors, and try but we don't know. We have to be able to find and decipher that and move from a space within us, and maybe in the end that's what I think it's complex, but maybe that's what I think self-love actually is. So when people just like just love yourself, you're supposed to love yourself, and you do that, you know, the stuff in the mirror, the affirmations, the well, this is complicated because if that's the love within you're looking for, that's a journey, it's not a destination. So on that note, I'm going to put her out myself. Um, and hope you enjoyed this download and appreciate you listening and uh walk with me again soon. Take care.