What if your personal growth is taking the time it needs because you’re working against forces bigger than you and your system needs a layered approach? This episode explores intergenerational patterns, systemic conditions, and what it actually looks like to build well-being. Understanding this is clarifying and gives you a compass. Come explore the layers you haven’t had the chance to see yet.
What you’ll learn:
- What makes building self-care foundations harder when you’re doing it as an adult
- Why shame often comes from stories that don’t have enough context
- What it means to do embodied work when your nervous system is used to something else
- The systemic contexts that shaped what was and wasn’t available to you
- Why the work of building self-care foundations lives in three places: collective, personal, and embodied
SHOW NOTES
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Full Transcript:
Welcome in From Out of the Rain, I’m Quai, and this is In Your Hands.
Welcome in From Out of the Rain, I’m Quai and this is In Your Hands. Herbal Self-Care for Emotional Bodies, a podcast about the complexities of building your own wellness blueprint. I’m a psychotherapist and herbalist who brings a critical lens to the systems that both help and harm. I’ll hold that tension with you as we explore plant remedies, trauma work, nervous system support, and building self-care foundations.
And now for that awkward. Disclaimer, I’ve gotta give you. This shows for educational purposes only and is not a replacement for therapy or personalized herbal care. The herbal remedies and practices discussed are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. Please consult your healthcare provider for medical advice.
Now, let’s begin.
The other day, I was around a bunch of toddlers and I noticed them saying, I need some space now. And it was interesting because a few of them were saying it and it was just coming like naturally to them. They were saying it left and right, and I’m sure that someone had recently taught them, Hey, when you need some space, say it and take it.
And they were putting that into practice right away repeatedly. And I thought, oh, how great for them. They’re like getting that into their system and they did not care what anybody else was thinking about that because that is not online at that point. So it made me think about something I’ve been wanting to talk about when I see people that I’m holding space for.
Not have patience with themselves about some foundational pieces of self-care. When you have to learn some of those pieces later in life, it truly does take longer. What I see is that people lack patience, partly because they’re not accounting for everything they’re working against. Learning these foundations as an adult gets framed as an individual path.
You walk alone and while parts of this work are personal and needs to be your own journey, treating it as only an individual effort or. A personal failure misses the bigger picture.
There’s forces beyond you, systemic barriers, cultural expectations, histories of assimilation and disconnection that shape what’s hard. And understanding these forces, being able to name what you’re actually working against, that’s what starts to free you up.
It’s what we can’t see clearly that keeps us most stuck. And something else people often don’t realize is knowing the cognitive piece, understanding the narratives of your story, it’s not enough. Making changes means working with your impulses, your felt experiences, and or engaging creativity and community along the way.
This isn’t optional. Transformation happens in your nervous system and in relationship, not just in your thinking mind. There’s layers that under. Stand to get more calm, clarity and ease. And I know this can sound like a lot, but hold on. You might be thinking, how am I supposed to do all of this? But this doesn’t happen all at once.
This work has phases, a wide arc where you can take breaks and let your systems set the pace. But I’ve seen with people I hold space for is that when they stay with noticing and curiosity, gradually building pieces over time, they find their way to more groundedness and capacity. If you’re early on, I hear things like, I wish I could stay clearheaded when things get hard, or I feel completely destabilized when someone speaks harshly to me, or I don’t understand why I keep repeating this pattern.
When people are further along, I hear things like it’s a different way of living. When you discover how to be your own best resource or. I’m not as reactive. The triggers don’t create such big storms in me anymore, or I can be present for someone without absorbing their emotions. When I see people in moments of frustration, it moves me to compassion towards ’em because they may not yet know all of the pieces they need to get to where they wanna go.
So today I’m walking you through those context. How unfamiliarity feels unsafe, how sometimes protective parts of us can block new practices or make it difficult to see what other facets of our struggles are. And here’s what I mean about this internal piece. When I’m talking about parts that may unconsciously block.
Parts of you may have learned that taking time and space for yourself is self-indulgent or greedy. Parts that learn to prioritize other people’s comfort over your own, maybe as a person of color, managing white people’s defensive responses, or navigating being misgendered. Or if you’re from a first generation family, keeping your different needs quiet to avoid awkwardness.
Parts that learned. Being the entertainer or placate keeps things smooth and avoids complex topics, which also keeps your needs hidden from you. Or parts that learned. Your security and relationships depends on you being the one providing care and attunement and don’t know what reciprocal or interdependent relationships actually look like.
These protective BART didn’t form in a vacuum. They developed in response to what wasn’t available. Care practices are hard to garner when they weren’t modeled or when connection to them was severed through colonization, immigration, or needing to assimilate for safety. This kind of context helps with some of our understanding, um, what supports patients is considering how adult life has structural constraints and how systemic barriers shape what’s available.
Understanding these contexts along with what it means to do embodied work is really crucial because then you can address this work where it actually lives. Collectively, personally and in your body.
All right, so moving into why building care practices is harder in adult life. The first thing is unfamiliarity feels like wrongness when you didn’t have something established since childhood. Or never learned it, it can feel alien or even like, it’s not you to do or implement things that are about taking care of yourself.
And your nervous system reads unfamiliar as unsafe, or at least not certain or Sure. Around safety. Which can make new self-care practices feel awkward or uncomfortable even when they’re good for you. And I think that this can show up as guilt sometimes. So it can feel wrong to use carved out time or even bandwidth.
Your self care. Let me give you an example of how this might show up. Maybe you don’t notice when you’re hungry, tired, or stressed, and you sort of just keep pushing through the day because it would feel wrong to pause and take care of whatever the need is, or you feel some strangeness. About telling someone that you have to take a break or that something’s, that there’s something you need and maybe the other person doesn’t realize it, which further normalizes the invisiblizing of your need.
Um, and you. You block what it is that you need, and it never comes to the surface. The awareness of the blocking, recognizing this pattern is happening is your initial and crucial first. Step, it’s a cognitive one. You can think about it as a doorway, but cognitive awareness alone isn’t the destination. The next step is working with the felt experiences of that wrongness.
Otherwise, your nervous system will continue to read something like, stating my needs isn’t okay. Even after your mind intellectually understands the pattern. You’re operating from two different levels of knowledge that are in conflict with each other, what your mind knows and what your nervous system believes.
The transformation of these things is subtle and it accumulates gradually.
The second thing that I’m gonna talk about is resistance that you might feel inside. If you were taught not to focus on your needs, you likely have parts that are gonna register that as not okay to do. And these parts don’t give you the space that you need to notice. They don’t give you room for taking action or need or like restructuring things when you need to or protecting that time and energy for self-care.
And it’s not that they wanna sabotage you. They want the opposite. They want you to be okay in your life and they’re used to what has felt okay in the past. So they’re following what once kept you safe or at least kept you in a place of certainty around what the expectations were. And related to that is.
You don’t know what you don’t know. So maybe it takes some time to think about what were regular facets of your early life. Where was the emphasis on what to focus on? You cannot see what you don’t know exists,
so whatever wasn’t there earlier on means there needs to be a discovery process for this, and it’s part of the learning to bring things in. And this isn’t just about your individual family, it’s also. Shaped by the systems and conditions you and your family were navigating. For some people, systemic barriers meant that caregivers had to optimize output and productivity over rest because survival required it.
Maybe you’re from a working class family where multiple jobs were necessary, or an immigrant or first generation family, and building stability was the focus. Maybe racism meant working hard was part of success, or accessing needs or securing safety. Maybe gender expectations shaped what was modeled as acceptable, and part of that meant your role was to care for others and not yourself as much.
Maybe ableism meant accessing what you needed. Required constant advocacy, your needs going underground, navigating systems not designed for you, or barriers that made. Basic self-care, exhausting, or if you’re neurodivergent, perhaps discovering the ways you process the world were treated as deficits rather than differences.
These realities really shape what gets passed down and what doesn’t. When people raising you were navigating structural barriers, they might not have had access to the self-care practices you’re trying to learn now, not because they didn’t value them. But because those practices weren’t available or sustainable in their reality, understanding the full picture of why certain foundations are missing can be helpful if you feel shame about what you feel like you should have accomplished earlier on.
Maybe living in a larger body meant facing medical bias, assumptions about your worth or discipline, or being taught that your body was a problem to fix rather than you and your body deserving care. And trust me, as that clarity comes on board and that shame comes down, this work of caring for yourself becomes even more accessible.
If this is speaking to how you understand your own journey, share this episode with someone who’s hard on themselves about not being further along. This might ease some of that pressure or give them a different lens on what they’re actually navigating. Okay. Now, back to the context that shapes this work.
There may have been a lack of role models or people mirroring facets of care when you were growing up. Without actually seeing someone say, I need rest and take it, or watching someone set a boundary without guilt, you don’t have those internal templates to draw from. So you might be building some pieces from scratch and maybe you picked up certain care skills, like you learned to feed yourself because you had to.
But other things like knowing when to. Stop working or how to ask for help. Those weren’t necessarily around. Um, and so they couldn’t be observed and absorbed. So without those examples, you’re figuring it out in real time as an adult.
Another reason could be that you’ve structured your life around not knowing your needs. Without that awareness, you built a life that makes them harder to see and be met. Probably the premise or the building blocks of how you structure time, relationships, your resources, your bandwidth, are gonna center other things.
As primary in your decision making process, by the time you realize there are gaps to fill, shifting can feel overwhelming because. Multiple things need adjusting at once. This might look like relationships with people who place demands or guilt on you, an oversized sense of responsibility for others, or maybe it’s just hard to sense when your energy output exceeds what your system can handle, and you don’t realize until you’re like well beyond that point.
And if parts of your identity meant the larger world treated you as different or less than you may have. Also structured your life around others’ needs and comfort. Learning to manage how you’re perceived. Code switching, staying small to stay safe, that takes enormous. Energy and makes it even harder to notice your own needs, and you’re not just learning new practices, you’re dismantling structures you’ve built to survive.
And that takes time. If you’re someone who, for whatever reason, is coming from an experience where some of your personal foundational needs and relational needs were not met early in life. You’ve likely needed time and or are spending a lot of time finding people who can offer safety, a sense of belonging and fleshing out pieces of your life that you wanna share in community.
Maybe you put significant time and energy into building chosen family, finding mentors, or creating community, which means that you had less bandwidth for other developmental tasks like establishing care routines or exploring your. Unique needs. I feel like this is really important to recognize because sometimes people can feel like they’re behind, but they were needing to do essential work that others didn’t have to think about in terms of having.
Relationship structures in their lives.
Now let’s move on to another facet about doing this work of building and strengthening self-care later in life. Adult life doesn’t tend to make space for some of the foundational work of building self-care. And when I’m referencing foundational self-care here, I’m not talking about the logistics lake.
You know, showering, eating, going to doctor’s appointments, keeping food in the house, those matter, but that’s not what I mean. I’m talking about garnering deeper capacity for what makes those things sustainable. So recognizing how much time and energy care actually takes sensing when something in your routine isn’t working and needs adjustment.
Understanding the patterns and how you construct relationships. Who you let close, who you keep at a distance or with certain caveats and why? And knowing when to say no or finding what blocks you from saying no and finding your way to access your choices and act on them. So it’s being able to notice I’m overwhelmed before you’re in a crisis.
And these take meta skills that make day-to-day care possible. Um, once you’re an adult, society expects that your foundation with all of that is set. The idea is that you’re supposed to focus on career relationship, kids, elders, passions. Not the basics. So going back in to fill in what wasn’t there, can feel like it brings up shame or like you’re out of step with other people who seem to have those pieces figured out.
But what I realized is that most of us have gaps that we’re working on filling out and strengthening or building in some way. And it’s harder to do this later in life because there is a scarcity of time and energy. As an adult, you have competing demands. Finding bandwidth for self-care while managing work and relationships and survival needs that you have can create real constraints that children don’t face.
So this is a lot different in adult life, and it’s not about lack of commitment. There’s a structural reality to this. When you understand what you’re actually working on, something changes. You can look for what you actually need because you’re no longer spinning or wondering what’s wrong, and you can start seeking out practices and resources that fit your life.
You can work with the time and energy you have instead of waiting for the conditions that aren’t coming. So understanding what you’re building makes it possible to take smaller steps that actually matter.
I wanna talk about another reality for some people, which is the topic of assimilation. Learning self-care can be harder in life when assimilation disconnects you from practices that might’ve felt more natural or aligned. What makes this particularly challenging is that assimilation means. Or often means learning to override what you sense or feel, what your body needs, what feels more authentic in favor of what’s expected or feels safe.
That disconnection from your internal signals becomes automatic and invisible. So when you’re trying to learn self-care as an adult, you’re not just learning new practices. You’re having to build the very capacity to sense into your own needs, which got trained out for survival. For some people, this looks like coming from indigenous communities where self-care practices, rituals that connected you to yourself, your body, your community, the land were actively suppressed or forced out through colonization and simulation.
Assimilation, what might have been passed down, got replaced with dominant culture’s expectations about how you’re supposed to care for yourself. And I find that reconnecting to those original practices usually means unlearning invisible layers of what was imposed. I wanna acknowledge people navigate this so many different ways.
Some folks work to reclaim and practice what was taken. Others want to explore what resonates and what doesn’t. And for some people, building care practices that are entirely new and separate from those lineages is important for reasons that are their own. That’s particular work addressing what was lost, but from a place that they define for themselves, I have noticed.
That having this consciousness about what existed, what was lost, and what was replaced, and then being able to make your own choices like that awareness can be powerful for others. Assimilation might. Be immigration or being first generation and caught between cultures. Maybe the care practices from your family’s culture of origin didn’t fit the reality of your life, but dominant cultures approaches don’t feel right either.
Maybe you learn to suppress or hide cultural ways of. Being to fit in, which also meant disconnecting from sensing what actually feels nourishing versus just feeling safer or more acceptable. And maybe you’re piecing together something that honors both without a clear roadmap, while building trust in your own internal compass about what fits.
And that’s a beautiful thing to be doing. And then there’s also for folks whose gender identity is outside of what they were socialized into, you might’ve spent years conforming to what felt safe or expected, disconnecting from what actually is authentic for you. That disconnection wasn’t just about presentation.
Likely meant overriding your body’s signals, needs, and ways of caring for yourself that felt true but weren’t safe to express. Now you’re learning care capacities that fit who you are and not who you were forced to be, which means building the capacity to sense and trust what your authentic self actually needs.
These experiences of assimilation aren’t all the same, but there’s a thread when you’ve had to untether from parts of yourself, your lineage or your authentic way of being, whether through force or survival. Building care practices that feel integrated and harmonized with your actual life and identity takes extra work.
We each need care practices that are compatible with the rest of our lives. Sit well with our sense of identity and home, and I lean home in its deepest sense. When that connection gets disrupted, you’re rebuilding a foundation while also recovering from what was lost or hidden. So when oppression means you’ve had to be a chameleon code, switch people please, or mask who you are to survive.
That kind of assimilation means you’re not just learning new practices, you’re rebuilding the very capacity to sense your needs. That survival required you to suppress. Okay. We talked about a lot. Let’s review to let this crystallize. We talked about how unfamiliarity and protective parts and how recognizing those patterns is your doorway to working with them differently.
Adult life has real constraints on time and energy, but understanding what you’re actually working on helps you be strategic with what you have. And for some of you, assimilation and or gender conforming require required disconnecting from your capacity to sense your own needs, which means you rebuild that capacity, you’re doing that essential work.
These challenges are rooted in conditions beyond you not personal failings. And this work unfolds in phases where you can let your system set the pace.
Understanding why it’s harder to work on foundational pieces of self-care later in life isn’t just about self-compassion, though that is important. It’s about perceiving clearly so you can address this work where it actually lives. Which is in the collective realms and community, in your personal choices and relationships and in your body, understanding the systemic roots of what’s behind you is foundational to your wellbeing.
Let me be clear about what this means. It points beyond individual work. I’ve observed that the shame people carry often begins with telling themselves a story about their life or a piece of their life, or something that they did or didn’t do in their life that doesn’t have enough context. Sometimes they’re missing the larger for forces like.
Stomach conditions, historical realities that set wheels in motion long before they arrived, and they’ve been shouldering that weight for so long, maybe a lifetime. It’s hard to even perceive it as weight.
And I wanna name something. There are narratives that dismiss this awareness. Calling it something like playing a card, whining or avoiding responsibility. Those narratives are rooted in individualism, that’s not interested in equity and is asking someone to carry a bunch of burdens and blame without acknowledging the conditions that shaped a reality.
But seeing the fuller picture, including these systemic forces. Is taking responsibility, it means you’re addressing attention at every level in yourself, in your relationships and the systems around you. And that kind of clarity doesn’t just free you, it creates the possibility for real change beyond yourself and being able to name that does not.
Mean that somebody then cancels out their own responsibility. And I’m not saying that people may never do that, but naming that is not equivalent to, and so then I don’t mind my own choices or hold accountability in my life, but what it is doing is refusing to accept a story that’s incomplete and doesn’t have fuller context.
So seeing those forces clearly is a huge piece of trauma work and personal growth work. And when you understand that systemic barriers and family and community structures shaped pieces of your experience in all sorts of ways, not necessarily all bad ways, but in various ways, you’re not just gaining personal insight, you’re seeing what needs to be changed beyond yourself.
We’re talking about like cultural level of things. Your personal work exists alongside the need for structural changes and other people’s personal work.
Well, let’s bring this all together. When you say I’m working on self-care, that phrase doesn’t capture that You’re actually navigating multiple trajectories at once. That’s what we’ve been exploring today to find care that truly nourishes you in your emotional body, your relationships, your place and community, and the world.
You’re likely also building conscious awareness of context that shape your experience. Understanding systemic forces and their impact, working with your nervous system and embodied integration, reconfiguring relationships, and perhaps garnering capacity you never had modeled for you. I wanna leave you with some encouragement about how to approach this work.
First, give yourself more time than you think you need. These changes unfold gradually. You’re working with your nervous system, which needs steps towards change, not leaps, not linear, and you’ll circle back to things multiple times to take them in. Another is expect awkwardness. It doesn’t mean you’re doing it wrong.
When you start centering your needs, more relationships reconfigure. Some people might push back, others will adjust, and you’re also adjusting. Another is notice protective parts as they show up because they will, as they do for all of us. If you can acknowledge what they’re trying to do, you can work with them rather than.
Against them. Another is, this isn’t about forcing shifts, it’s about letting your body integrate what your mind has recognized. Can’t reach for skills that weren’t modeled or available to the people raising you. So anything you learned beyond this is real progress. You brought yourself here. So if you’re comparing yourself to where you think you should be, ask am I being unfair to myself?
And. Start small, even smaller than feels necessary when you’re working against years of patterns and things that are really ingrained, tiny, consistent steps build more lasting change than ambitious attempts that fade out. And if you wanna sit with all of this. Make yourself a cup of tea with rose, tulsi, and then just a touch of cinnamon, ginger, or fennel.
Alright, I hope this leaves you in a better place. If this episode was useful, please share it with someone who might benefit. That’s how the show grows and reaches people who need it. You can also subscribe to my newsletter for monthly insights on Herbal Self-Care and building your Wellness Blueprint links in the show notes.
If today’s episode sparked a question or perspective you’d like to share, reach out, especially if you’re speaking from lived experience or your practitioner working with similar themes. Take care however that looks for you today, and I leave you with birds I recorded on my city block to wherever you are.
Hi, I'm Quai - psychotherapist, herbalist, and host of In Your Hands: Herbal Self-Care for Emotional Bodies. This show is for anyone deepening their self-care practice, exploring intergenerational patterns, navigating harm reduction or recovery work, herb-curious folks wanting practical guidance, and practitioners looking for resources to share with clients.
I combine herbalism, trauma work, and a critical lens on the systems that shape wellness. Whether you're piecing together care skills that weren't modeled, working with your relationship to coping strategies, or thinking deeply about how oppression impacts wellbeing, this show offers context, frameworks, and practical tools.
We explore plant remedies, nervous system support, and the often-overlooked infrastructure that makes sustainable self-care actually possible. Join the newsletter at for care tips, episode announcements, and herb recipes.
