Hold Yourself Accountable Or Be Gentle On Yourself?

Friend, let me blow your mind. YOU CAN DO BOTH. AT THE SAME TIME.

Healing doesn’t mean healed.

Healed doesn’t mean invincible.

This is what I’m reminding myself at this very moment- that our progress still counts even on days we fall back, that our journey will never look like achieving a level of perfection.

The end of the month is hard on me. Rent is due, and I’m always stressed about it. Even if I can pay it on time with little struggle one month, I’m still reminded I have to do the same damn thing in 30 days, on repeat, on my own, for as long as I can see.

I planned to wake early today and make the most of my Sunday by getting as much work in as possible. I try not to leave huge projects for the weekdays when I’m with the kids. But, I sat on my couch after two cups of coffee at 11 am, and I could hardly keep my eyes open.

So I let myself sleep, but only if I promised myself I would not berate myself for needing a Sunday nap the rest of the day, turning the few productive hours I’d have left into a self-hatred spiral of doom.

One of y’all recently asked in the comments on another post how I walk the line between holding myself accountable and being gentle on myself, and I keep meaning to dedicate a whole post to answering that. I guess this is it.

Not long ago, I thought healing would look like knowing. I thought I’d come out of 2 months of intensive outpatient therapy with confidence that I could make the right choices, and that I would know what choices are right.

I know now that healing looks like never knowing and never expecting to, but, instead, living with uncertainty with the certainty that I can live through it.

It’s not black and white. It’s not right or wrong. It’s not do this and don’t do that. What looks like holding myself accountable one day can become an unproductive shame spiral the next day.

Sometimes accountability is the wisdom to know that if you always push yourself to do more and sleep less, you’ll break. And sometimes it’s knowing that you feel tired because you are overwhelmed and dissociating, so you need a plan to manage what’s overwhelming you when you wake up.

Yes, I can be gentle on myself and let myself rest, and also, yes, I can hold myself accountable, tune into what this exhaustion is telling me and do something about it.

I may not have come out of IOP therapy with answers, but I did come out of it with a kinder, more confident, more assuring, more gentle inner voice. That’s really what the entire program was about, for me. I came out with an inner voice who could be reasoned with, who wasn’t as quick to panic or judge, who didn’t need answers or certainty to say, “It’s going to be fine. We’re going to be ok.”

Anytime I see an influential, motivational speaker or podcast host or life coach pushing out a message that comes from a place of certainty, especially aggressive certainty, the NOPE alarm goes off in my brain. Do not trust this person, I think.

They are certain anyone who doesn’t wake at 5 am is lazy. They are certain we are all just giving up on life because we’re lazy. (I recommend not listening to anyone who accuses people of being lazy because that’s a really lazy way to simplify complex struggles.) They are certain going to the gym will cure everything. They are certain we are not being hard enough on ourselves. They are certain that since they could do something, anyone can.

For me, the best teachers I’ve ever had in life weren’t the ones who shouted certainties and gripped the answer key for the multiple choice tests. They were the teachers who held space for me while I worked out the answers for myself, even when I didn’t arrive at those answers they way they would have. They were quietly confident, not aggressively certain. They held me accountable, but they also made me feel safe to make mistakes.

Accountability and gentleness can and should co-exist. There is no arrival at one destination or the other. There is no being gentle with ourselves on the “lazy” side of the spectrum and holding ourselves accountable on the “perfection” side. It’s not about striking a balance in the middle. It’s about having the quiet confidence to live with the uncertainty of all of it swirling around us.

I get frustrated when it seems someone thinks being kinder to myself is me giving up or not pushing myself. That I’ve somehow become too lazy to hold my bootstraps up anymore.

I lived decades with an inner voice that was aggressively certain I was fucking things up daily, no matter what I achieved. I white knuckled my bootstraps up nearly my entire life while my inner voice clung to right & wrong and pissed itself in the face of uncertainty.

That is no way to live. I know because eventually that inner voice made me want to die.

My inner voice is kinder now, but do not mistake that for being lazy or giving up, for not holding myself accountable. It takes far more strength to live in the middle, to not know what the answers are, but to love yourself through it all anyway.

How do you hold yourself accountable and also be more gentle on yourself? You do both at the same time. It’s not an either/or choice. You stop associating accountability with winning and being gentle with losing. You stop making it black and white.

You empower your inner voice to speak and hold space for you with quiet confidence, and you recognize when it’s scared because it’s screaming at you with aggressive certainty. You say, ahhh… I get why you feel certain there’s only one “right” thing to do here. It’s because you’re scared, and when you’re scared you get loud.

Healing is not about walking a road to perfection. There is no destination where we will finally do all the things “right” or recognize what is best for us all the time. Healing is about trusting ourselves to find the answers that are right for us when the moment arrives, and being ok with those not always being the best choice because, no matter what, we’re going to keep showing up for ourselves with love and compassion, with kind inner voices that believe we deserve great things, that also know that we don’t have to break ourselves to get them.