Addressing Your Health Is a Fundamental Self-Care Skill

What is fundamental self-care?

In my personal and professional opinion, fundamental self-care is not the window dressing that makes things look and feel temporarily better.

Instead, fundamental self-care is often the hard, consistent, unglamorous, non-Instagrammable actions and behaviors required to take care of ourselves sustainably and consistently well as adults.

It is akin to the proverbial foundation of the proverbial house of your life.

Fundamental self-care, for me, means first attending to the necessary psychological, logistical, mental, and, yes, medical work required to help you live a functional, responsible, healthy adult life.

And attending to our medical health is a fundamental self-care step with which so many survivors of trauma backgrounds struggle.

Why is self-care often so hard for those who come from relational trauma backgrounds?

For some, attending to your basic medical health may sound like an obvious thing to do (and quite honestly, if this is you, feel free to not read the rest of this essay).

But many of us—particularly those of us from relational trauma backgrounds—may struggle with this.

Why?

In my personal and professional experience, this may be because of a few reasons:

• We perhaps didn’t have this modeled for us well (if at all) as children by our caregivers, who had their own mental health and logistical deficits.
• We perhaps grew up in financial scarcity and still don’t have the insurance coverage or money required to attend well to our medical health.
• We perhaps grew up with a fundamental and maladaptive belief that we’re broken and not worthy, so, really, what’s the point of taking good care of ourselves?
• We—like many—perhaps have had negative (if not traumatic) experiences with the medical community that further reinforced our childhood trauma histories.

And perhaps the reason why it feels hard for you to take good care of yourself medically is for another reason altogether.

Whatever the reason for the lack of skillful and consistent ability to do this, in my opinion, it’s still a critical self-care skill for everyone—particularly those of us who come from relational trauma backgrounds who are working so hard to otherwise be our own good-enough inner parents—to learn, practice, and refine.

What does it mean practically to attend to our medical health well?

In my personal and professional experience, this means, abstractly, taking care of and treating ourselves as well as a devoted, caring, and fiercely protective good-enough parent would have done for us.

Practically and tangibly, I’ll share what I anecdotally* believe attending to our medical health looks like:

• Make sure you have regular, annual physical check-ups with your primary care physician and medical care team (such as your OBGYN, audiologist, optometrist, etc.), and then follow up on the suggestions and guidance given to you by your licensed medical professional after this is complete.
• Make sure you are regularly filling and refilling any prescriptions you are prescribed so there are no gaps in your medication treatment (which could lead to adverse consequences).
• Seek out professional support to help you address any long-standing health issues and injuries, which, even though you’ve grown accustomed to them, could, if resolved, greatly improve the quality of your life.
• If and when you experience dismissal or insufficient service from your medical providers, ask/demand that your presenting concerns and requests for specific next steps be put into your medical records for that visit; then ask for a copy of those records, and if necessary, seek out a second opinion, a third opinion, and/or speak to the department head that that medical professional reports to.
• Rearrange your finances and spending and budget to prioritize having medical health care coverage so that all of the above feels more possible.

This list is not exhaustive, but it is, I find, a great way to begin actively practicing the skill of attending to your basic medical health.

And if you read this list and anxieties, doubts, or maladaptive beliefs start to surface (for instance, “I could never be that assertive with a doctor!” or “I’m too ashamed of my body to go in for an appointment, even though I’m worried about this mole”), I want you to please consider reaching out for therapy support. This directory here on Psychology Today is a wonderful resource for finding a skilled therapist who can help support you in learning the fundamental self-care skill of attending to your medical health and believing you’re worthy of doing so.