The Gentle Power of Self-Care: A Return to the Self, Not a Retreat from Life

Self-care has become a buzzword, diluted by hashtags and bubble bath metaphors. For many high-achieving men, the concept feels trivial—indulgent, even. It doesn’t quite land.

You’ve spent your life moving forward. Self-care, at first glance, might look like slowing down. But what if true self-care isn’t about slowing down at all—what if it’s about coming home?

The Illusion of Invulnerability

So many of the men I work with have built their lives on a belief they couldn’t name until we started working together: “I must not need.”

They are leaders, founders, problem-solvers. Their identity is often interwoven with competence. Needing care—let alone giving it to themselves—feels foreign. Even shameful.

And yet underneath the armour of productivity, there’s a quiet ache. A sense of depletion. A wondering: Is this all there is?

That question is not a problem to solve—it’s a doorway.

Where Self-Care Begins: Listening Inward

True self-care begins with a radical act: listening to yourself.

This is not the same as reacting to momentary discomfort. Nor is it about chasing comfort or ease. It is the lifelong practice of attending to the parts of you you’ve exiled in service of performance.

In psychotherapy, we often talk about the “false self”—a concept developed by psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott. The false self isn’t inherently bad; it’s the adaptive front we construct to navigate expectations, demands, relationships. It keeps us moving, keeps us functional. But over time, it can eclipse the true self—the part of us that is spontaneous, feeling, vulnerable, alive.

Self-care, then, is not bubble baths or breathwork (though they may have a place). It’s about making contact again with that true self. It’s asking:

• What do I want—not just from life, but from this moment?

• What parts of me have I silenced?

• What might it mean to honour them now?

This is self-care as self-reclamation.

Reparenting the Self

So many of us internalised a model of care that was conditional. We learned that love came through achievement, attention through performance, belonging through compliance.

In adulthood, these beliefs show up subtly. You push through exhaustion. You dismiss your needs. You avoid softness. You pride yourself on stoicism.

And yet a part of you longs to be held. Heard. Seen.

Psychoanalytic psychotherapy invites you to meet that part of yourself with compassion. To become, in effect, the parent you never had.

You begin to say things to yourself that you might never have heard:

“It’s okay to be tired.”

“You’re allowed to slow down.”

“Your worth is not tied to output.”

This is the soil from which real change grows. Not through willpower, but through relationship—first with the therapist, then with the self.

From Survival to Aliveness

Many high performers operate in a chronic state of low-level survival. Always bracing. Always anticipating. Even if the surface is calm, the nervous system is primed.

Self-care is not just an emotional intervention—it’s a physiological one. Therapy helps the body catch up with the mind. It creates the safety required for softening—not as a loss of strength, but as the rediscovery of it.

You begin to feel again—not just anxiety or numbness, but joy, wonder, curiosity. These are not luxuries; they are indicators of aliveness.

The Unexpected Joy of Slowness

There’s a moment, often weeks or months into therapy, when a man I’m working with will pause mid-session and say something like:

“I didn’t realise how fast I was living.”

“I feel like I’m breathing properly for the first time in years.”

This isn’t about becoming passive or lazy. Quite the opposite. Slowness becomes a choice, not a consequence. Presence becomes a strength, not a loss of momentum.

When you’re no longer driven by the need to prove, life starts to feel different. You can enjoy the view, not just reach the summit.

A Kind of Homecoming

The ultimate gift of self-care—real, deep, psychoanalytically informed self-care—is that it brings you home to yourself. Not the self you perform, but the self you are.

The part that existed long before you started succeeding. The part that’s still there, waiting for your attention.

Therapy is not about turning away from the world. It’s about returning to it differently—with more clarity, more kindness, more access to your full range of feeling.

And perhaps, somewhere along the way, you’ll find yourself smiling at nothing in particular.

Just because you feel more you.