When you are a parent carer, your goal might be just to all get through the day alive! Your focus is on making sure your child eats, sleeps and occasionally washes!
Lack of sleep, endless appointments, piles of paperwork, and constantly regulating a dsyregulated or struggling child, is exhausting.
When it’s a challenge to get your basic needs met, achieving personal goals can feel like an impossibility.
If you measure your day, or week, or even your life by the number of goals achieved, you are going to be disappointed and frustrated. Your days may seem futile, and you may beat yourself up for not doing more. How often have you felt that you achieved ‘nothing’ that day?
Wouldn’t you rather live in a more hopeful and self-compassionate way?
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) encourages people to prioritise living according to their values instead of focusing solely on goals.
Instead of reaching a goal, or beating yourself up for not reaching it, what if you could live each day in line with your values? Whereas a goal is something that is either achieved or not achieved, values focus on how you want to show up in your life. Even on a bad day, you can do a tiny action that aligns with your values.
Let me give you an example.
Last week I had a day that wasn’t what I would have chosen. It was the second day back after the Easter holidays, but rather than being a chance for me to work, my day was full of other things.
It started with me waking up with a headache. Instead of going for a swim and working on my goal of getting fitter I stayed in bed. It took me a while to get going, as I felt so groggy. I did a bit of work after I dropped my daughter at nursery, but then decided to practise my value of self-care and go for a slow and gentle swim, which left me feeling much more relaxed.
In the afternoon I had a hygienist appointment, which wasn’t fun, and then went to collect my dad from hospital and take him home. This didn’t fit in with my goal of getting this new website finished, but it aligned with my value of serving my family.
My plans went awry when on the way home my daughter and I stopped in a park. My daughter ended up having a messy toilet incident, so we had to go back to my parent’s to clean her up. Then we were stuck in rush hour traffic and roadworks, which meant she fell asleep at 5.30pm.
We got home to find the meatballs in the hotpot had got to watery as I hadn’t been around to look after them! We had a quick dinner before my husband went out. My quiet evening to either relax or work on my book (another goal) was gone as both kids were up to 9.30pm! And my headache had returned.
When I journaled that evening normally I would have reflected on what went wrong, but when I looked at how I had lived the day according to my values, despite everything I was very pleasantly surprised!
I realised that although I had achieved or moved towards none of my work, fitness or book goals, I had lived out the following:
- Prayer and journaling – my value of my spirituality
- Taking my Dad home from hospital – my value of supporting my parents
- Spending time in the park with my daughter – my value of quality time with her and being in nature
- Going for a swim and to the hygienist – my value of looking after my body
- Posting a copy of my book to a friend – my value of generosity
When I look at my messy, chaotic day with this lens, it was a success!
I’m not going to abandon my goals all together, and ACT doesn’t advocate that, but it does mean provide a way to live with meaning, purpose and kindness. I think the values way of living fits very well with our lives as parent carers, especially when our lives can often feel out of control, shaped as they are around our children’s needs. After all living according to our values is within our control, achieving our goals isn’t always something we have the power or capacity to do:
“We can’t always control whether we achieve our goals, but we can choose to act according to our values even if our goals are not met. In addition, values are about our own actions, not the actions of others”. (Help with ACT)
Sound interesting? ACT isn’t something that I have just found helpful personally. Studies show that Acceptance and Commitment Therapy can help improve the mental health and wellbeing of parents of autistic children.
I used an ACT approach in supporting children and families and can also offer ACT sessions to support you in your role as parent carers. Email me to find out more.
