Self-Kindness: A Dialect I Was Never Taught

I didn’t grow up speaking the language of self-kindness.

I was a latchkey kid of the 80s and 90s, raised on microwave dinners, after-school TV, and the unspoken rule: figure it out. I learned early how to shoulder things—big, small, and all-consuming—without stopping to breathe, let alone pat myself on the back for surviving. Survival wasn’t celebrated. It was expected.

The image that often pops into my mind is that old psychological experiment—the wire monkey study by Harry Harlow. Researchers gave baby monkeys two “mothers”: one made of wire that offered milk, and one made of soft cloth that offered comfort but no food. The monkeys clung to the soft mother every time. That study gutted me when I first read it in college, because I was the monkey who only knew how to lean on the cold, metallic version of “nurture”—just the basics, just survival. No comfort. No tenderness. No safe landing.

And let’s be real: that set the stage for the kind of relationships I sought—ones that mirrored that wire monkey energy. Painful. Disconnected. But familiar.

Self-care? That was a foreign concept. It sounded fluffy. Luxurious. Unnecessary. I moved through life emotionally detached, praised for my resilience, never questioned about the wreckage I carried in silence.

Then college happened. In the Redwoods. Where the world moved slow and wild and sacred. I found mindfulness there, though I didn’t fully realize it at the time. Nature became my first real therapist. But even then, I couldn’t hold onto it. Life sped up. I lost myself again in cycles of doing, giving, fixing, proving.

Fast-forward to last year—when the universe hit me with a “gift” I didn’t ask for: time. Time to heal. Time to stop. Time to feel. And trust me—it didn’t feel like a blessing. It felt like a breakdown. A reckoning. I entered a therapy program for CPTSD and secondhand trauma, thinking it was all from my job—burnout from working in a broken system that chewed up kids and spit them out.

But after months of group therapy, long days of unlearning and unraveling, I saw the truth. My go-go-go, fixer-of-everything energy wasn’t strength—it was trauma. My ability to keep moving, to never pause, was a survival mechanism I’d turned into a personality.

And that, my friends, cracked me wide open.

I’m still unpacking it. Still learning that self-kindness isn’t indulgent—it’s revolutionary. My mindfulness practice is now non-negotiable. It’s scheduled. Committed. Protected. I practice like my life depends on it—because it does.

Mindfulness helps me stay here, now. To choose what gets to live in my mind and heart. To feel what needs feeling and not drown in it. To be authentically, unapologetically me.

So if self-kindness feels foreign to you, know this: you’re not broken. You were just taught to love the wire monkey. But there’s softness waiting for you. There’s a warm place to land, even if you have to build it yourself.

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#sassyandcentered #mindfullyrising #selfkindnessisrevolutionary