Releasing the Shame I Associate with Resting
The importance of centering ourselves in rest and self-care, no matter what others say.
Now that I have reached the end of my intensive outpatient therapy program (IOP), I want to intentionally incorporate the skills I learned along the way in an effort to ensure permanent change. As I shared in a note, this was a difficult week where I had to implement some of the coping skills in my safety plan. The beauty of such challenges is that it affords the opportunity for introspection and to rewire our brains through practicing newly learned skills. This is where the growth happens.
Last week, I allowed someone’s statements to trigger me into questioning my decision to choose myself during the final quarter of 2024 when they shared the negative impact it had on them. I responded to their story by questioning my actions. Was I being too selfish? Did I overreact? Maybe, I just didn’t dig deep enough? Should I have just powered through? Is this just more evidence that I am an imposter? Could it be that I am just weak and not enough? Was my perceived growth truly just a facade? Was I merely catastrophizing my experience when others would have easily picked themselves up and continued to work?
My mind was racing. The ground I thought was now stable was beginning to shift again. I felt myself spiral into a panic. Unfortunately, I no longer had the luxury or support of IOP to walk me through whether these racing thoughts were merely distortions or reality. I coped with this discomfort by phoning my husband and my mother, then I put these thoughts on the shelf. Yes, I “powered through.”
That night, the real magic happened. I pulled out my CBT app and challenged those feelings like I would have in IOP. When this proved to be ineffective, I tried tapping or emotional freedom technique (EFT). This is a mind-body practice of tapping on meridian points of the body to relieve negative emotions.
In writing this week’s blog, I now see these statements pushed me into a fawn response. I won’t be going into the weeds of fawn response this week, except to say that it is a trauma response like fight, flight, and freeze where a person responds to a perceived threat by making themselves more appealing. Signs of fawning can include:
Stifling your needs
Flying under the radar
Having trouble saying no
Over-apologizing
Difficulty setting and reinforcing boundaries
Assuming responsibility for the emotional reactions and responses of others
Fixing or rescuing others from their problems
Attempting to control others to maintain emotional safety
Becoming numb to your own physical needs, wants, or emotions
Ignoring your preferences to align with others
This week’s blog rejects this fawning behavior. I am acknowledging that my experience was real. 2024 was a difficult year. It’s natural that I required a break. It also makes sense that I needed a higher level of care to heal from the trauma wake it left behind. Fawn response recovery requires reflection and implementation of healthy emotional behavioral skills. For this reason, I am focusing on the basics.
PLEASE Skills
One of the foundations of my weekly IOP therapy sessions was the idea that we can take care of our minds by taking care of our bodies, or implementing the PLEASE skills. The PLEASE acronym is not very intuitive but the principle is fundamental for self-care. PLEASE stands for:
Treat Physical Illness: Take care of your body. See a doctor when necessary. Take prescribed medication.
Balanced Eating: Don’t eat too much or too little. Eat regularly and mindfully throughout the day. Stay away from foods that make you feel over emotional.
Avoid Mood-Altering Substances: Stay off illicit drugs and use alcohol and caffeine in moderation (if at all).
Balanced Sleep: Try to get 7-9 hours of sleep a night, or at least the amount of sleep that helps you feel good. Keep to a consistent sleep schedule, especially if you are having difficulty sleeping.
Get Exercise: Do some sort of exercise every day. Try to build up to 20 minutes of daily exercise.
These PLEASE skills focus on the impact that physical health can have on our emotional needs. Sleep, nutrition, exercise, illness, and avoidance of chemical substances are the core steps for increasing our resilience and decreasing the potential for an emotional response to triggers. At the start of each IOP session, we tracked the steps we took to practice these PLEASE skills. We also assigned a number to rate our depression and anxiety levels. With time, it was easy to see the correlation between our depression and/or anxiety levels and whether we took these steps to maintain our physical health.
The Importance of Sleep
The PLEASE skill that has the biggest impact on my physical and emotional health is sleep. Indeed, many physicians agree that sleep is tied to our overall health. Sleep deprivation can intensify our response to emotional triggers and impair cognitive function. It can also affect our ability to problem solve, focus, retain information, exercise patience, and socialize with others.
Sleep can be difficult for many of us to come by. Many people struggle with sleep in one way or another. Some of us struggle with insomnia or experience difficulty falling asleep and/or staying asleep. Chronic stress, poor sleep hygiene, environmental changes, medications, and chronic medical conditions are common causes of insomnia. Other sleep disorders include sleep apnea or snoring, circadian rhythm disruptions (this is our body’s internal clock, which can become askew after travel across time zones, shift work, an inconsistent sleep schedule, overstimulation, or electronic use before bed), night terrors, or hypersomnia (over 10 hours of sleep per night).
The frequent source of sleep dysregulation for me has been a combination of stress and anxiety, as well as working before bed. I find myself struggling to settle my mind from looping thoughts about my endless to do list during times of intense stress and anxiety. Now that I am struggling with depression on top of anxiety, I am also fighting the ability to stay asleep.
The Shame of Rest
Given how critical it is for our emotional health and how I am struggling with both my emotions and sleep, I thought I would spend time researching and analyzing the importance of sleep and its cousin, rest. I am currently reading Tricia Hersey's Rest Is Resistance. I bought this book during the summer while visiting the Whitney Plantation in Louisiana. Their gift shop had an amazing library filled with works by black creatives.
At the time, we were on our first family vacation since our daughter’s suicide attempt. It was a much needed long weekend respite during a summer filled of overwork and leaning in. I now recognize these work habits were a fawn response to the trauma of our family emergency. I was course correcting from prioritizing family and myself because I was afraid of the many times I had to say “no” during the first quarter of the year. I was so comfortable with denying my own needs.
I was struggling. Rest Is Resistance called to me because deep down I was attracted to its rejection of the hustle or grind culture I was embracing. I was in desperate need of self prioritization.
I didn’t begin reading Hersey’s manifesto until October when I finally took take time off after experiencing yet another breakdown at work. I only completed the introduction before I put it down and entered a freeze state. I picked it back up last week after the book came up in three separate discussions during the span of a week. Clearly, fate was pushing me down a specific path.
I finished Part One: Rest! this week. It begins with a call to action:
I want you to firmly plant yourself inside your imagination.
Take refuge in the beauty and power of our community care.
Take root in our daydreaming.
We can rest, build, and usher in a new way.
We center rest and care no matter what the systems say.
Rest is a portal.
Silence is our pillow.
Hold silence with me now.
Take a deep, full breath.
Hold for four seconds.
Release the shame you feel when resting.
It does not belong to you.
Those words! Inject them into my veins! Why didn’t I continue reading this book when I needed to hear them in October? No matter. I am reading them now and repeating them to you here in case if you too need to hear them. These are troubling times and we all need to rest.
Fawning behavior is prevalent in minority and other marginalized communities. Indeed, there is a lot of well-intentioned but damaging messaging around rest. As a baby lawyer, I was taught that it was important to strive for perfection. Perfection is impossible. However, I recall attending conferences for minority attorneys and hearing the following ideas from senior lawyers of color:
Be the first lawyer in the office and the last to leave.
Never work less hours than your assistant.
Always exceed your billable hours or face job insecurity.
Minor mistakes are perceived as shortcomings that may be forgiven for our majority counterparts but used as evidence of our ineffectiveness.
Never say no to work or face the potential for not getting future assignments.
In the corporate space, we are measured by our efficiency and productivity. Hersey’s early pages describe how her father worked himself into an early grave in attempt to succeed as the only black employee in a managerial role with his company. In addition to the microaggressions that minorities face today, her father experienced outright racism. He responded by attempting to prove himself by working overtime and showing up with perfect attendance while waking early to enjoy a couple hours to himself before work and maintaining his pastoral career which filled him with joy.
I’m probably not spoiling the book by sharing that Hersey blames these habits for her father’s early death. She describes his loss in such vivid detail that it is hard to not get lost in the emotion. His physical ailments were similar to my own family’s genetics. His story easily could have been my father’s, and thanks to his genetics, they easily could be mine.
Hersey responded to the pain of her father’s death by seeking balance, flexibility, and liberation from capitalism and the patriarchy through rest. She writes, “Our drive and obsession to always be in a state of ‘productivity’ leads us to the path of exhaustion, guilt, and shame. We falsely believe we are not doing enough and that we must always be guiding our lives toward more labor.”
She calls for a global mindset shift away from filling our cup so we have enough to pour into others and instead towards taking a global holistic approach to resting on an ongoing basis with the shear goal of rest. Resting during periodic vacations between grind sessions is not enough. She created collective napping experiences to make rest more accessible so that communities could gain tools to rest on an ongoing basis.
The passage that particularly resonated with me, came from the section where she explains why we aren’t resting. Here, she describes how corporations who want to do better, learn, and engage her services in support of their workers continue to embody the behavior for which they are seeking to engage her:
When we don’t take our own rest while holding space for others around us to rest, we are functioning like the systems we want to gain freedom from. I battle and navigate this daily as I engage with corporations, institutions, and individuals constantly ignoring my workflow boundaries, requesting work from me even while on an announced sabbatical, and requesting my labor for free. I am amazed at how many well-meaning people interested in this work aggressively push and micromanage our interactions. Because grind culture is a curriculum that has been forced on us and reinforced through corporate and academic culture, it is always present.
As I reflect on my decision to rest in October and attend intensive outpatient therapy upon my return to work, I am warmed by Hersey’s thesis that rest is resistance. I am choosing to take in the idea that these decisions were the only cure to my fawn response and necessary for my healing. Indeed, I was dangerously close to overdosing on medication intentionally simply to get the rest I craved. It is not time to question whether it was centered in weakness, selfishness, and my inability to cope with daily living. It was a decision rooted in rest. Rest is an important behavioral skill for managing my emotional wellness and it is only through the continued prioritization and implementation of boundaries around rest, that I will ensure my ongoing recovery.
In case if you missed them, here are resources I linked to throughout this week’s blog:
My February 26 Note on the efficacy of tapping to reduce trauma responses
My last blog post on safety planning
EFT Tapping (Healthline)
Fawn Response (PsychCentral)
My blog on anxiety and the fight/flight response
PLEASE Skills Handout (Northern Arizona University)
Good Sleep in Times of Stress (Cedars-Sinai Blog)
The Six Types of Sleep Disorders (Cedars-Sinai Blog)
Sleep Hygiene Protocol (Australian DBT Institute)
Tricia Hersey’s The Nap Ministry Blog
Rest Is Resistance by Tricia Hersey
The Grind Culture: A Double-Edged Sword in the Workplace (Avidon Health)
My November blog post on taking a medical leave of absence
The Fawn Response to Racism (Psychology Today)
Wow, Gwen. SO MUCH of this I relate to, including some of the tools.. never knew about fawn response, which I have done and still do. Thank you for continuing to pour your heart into these posts. They mean so much. Love you and I'm always, ALWAYS here. 💗