So, I mean, there are literally so many needs that we have, and we know that when those needs are met and fulfilled, that that’s where we thrive in those areas of our lives. And ultimately, as we get older, we have teachers and friends and adults and other mentors, coaches, people that come into our life as we grow, as we develop that also help to play an important role in, in fulfilling those needs or taking care of us, providing for us in different aspects of our lives. And then as we grow up, we are learning, we’re growing and we become teenagers. We become more independent. And then we start taking on more responsibilities in our lives. This is all normal. This is what we do. In fact, I’m in the midst of raising teenagers right now, and my husband and I are real. We’re really working at giving them more and more responsibilities.

My two older boys are responsible for making their own doctor’s appointments and they’re responsible for doing their own laundry and taking care of their car, things like that. That’s normal. We start teaching responsibilities and all of that. And then as we get into our young adult years, we really do take on the full responsibilities of living as an adult, taking care of ourselves and making sure that we’re paying our rent, that we’re getting jobs, that we’re calling the insurance company and making sure all of those things are in place. And so we become responsible adults taking on a lot of responsibilities. And yet the big question is there’s responsibilities that we have to do to function as mature and responsible adults. But a lot of times in taking care of the responsibilities, it’s very easy to overlook our needs. There’s a difference between our needs and our responsibilities.

And I never really understood this. I was able to grow up and really take care of the responsibilities in my life pretty well. But a lot of times I did that at the expense of not really taking care of my needs and or actually even really knowing what my needs were or how I could meet my needs. And so this is what I wanna talk about today, because then as we become adults, then we get married and we have children, all of a sudden, all of the responsibilities that are associated with that, and then, you know, helping to take care of your spouse and then taking care of all the needs of your children becomes again more. And like that’s more and more responsibility. And then we find ourselves, or at least I discover, like I found myself taking care of all these responsibilities and taking care of everybody else’s needs while at the same time, not even paying attention to my own needs, what are my emotional, physical, spiritual, social needs?

Like I never, like, I completely lost track of those and would suppress them and put them away because the responsibilities in my life always felt so much bigger, so much more important. And of course so much more urgent. And so I think this is what we do. I’m, I’m speaking for myself here mostly, but in coaching other moms over the last several years, this is one of those topics that keeps coming up and it really comes down to first and foremost, how are we recognizing our needs? How are we being attentive to them? And then of course, what are we doing and how well are we at fulfilling those needs and taking care of ourselves to the best of our ability. And again, I think for a lot of us, we were never really taught how to do this well. So the first thing in diving into this that we have to understand is that as human beings, we have a lot of needs that need to be fulfilled.

And when we become adults, we have to be the ones that take full responsibility for that. No one else is expected or called to fulfill our needs. It’s no longer our parents’ job, our teachers, our it’s not even like our spouse’s job, our children’s job, it’s our job to recognize that we have needs and that we actually have to be the ones to fulfill those needs. And this is hard a lot of times because so many of us struggle to have a real loving relationship with ourselves. And this is the thing that I’ve discovered is that for the longest time, a lot of the, a lot of years in my adult life, not only was I not doing a good job of taking care of my emotional, physical, spiritual needs, but I was also like, I didn’t have a good relationship with myself. So on top of not fulfilling my needs, I was also treating myself really badly in the way that I was speaking to myself and the way I was treating myself and beating myself up, tearing myself down all of that.

So can you, can you imagine like this relationship that we have with ourselves, not only are we oftentimes not looking out and being attentive and taking care of our needs, but then oftentimes we’re tearing ourselves and making ourselves feel worse and terrible. And I think we can look around at the world and we see a lot of this happening. We see a lot of people who are not taking care of their needs and they’re beating themselves up and they have a terrible relationship with themselves. And we wonder why so many people are struggling with depression and anxiety and disconnection, and they’re struggling with, um, so many things. And they’re looking for happiness outside of themselves. Like if I only have this, then I’ll be happy if I only have that, I’ll be happy when ultimately I believe that we need to look internally and say, how am I taking care of myself?

And how am I building a relationship with myself where I value myself and I take care of my needs in a mature and responsible way. Now this is the deal. If we don’t become very intentional and responsible for taking care of our needs, like looking at them and paying attention to them and taking care of them, then we will actually end up taking care of them in a way that is actually destructive and causes more pain and more suffering in our lives. For example, this is what we talk about a lot in our master’s program with our members, when we talk about buffering. And so often we subconsciously turn to buffering as a way of trying to meet a need only to realize that buffering doesn’t really solve the need that we’re trying to meet. And oftentimes just leads to greater pain. So for example, we might have a need or longing for connection, like a longing, to spend quality time with certain people in our lives and to have those moments of deep human connection.

And yet we might not even necessarily be aware or attended to that need because we’re not paying attention to our needs. And yet that need is there, it’s this underlying need. And it’s in a way it’s like crying out to us, but if we’re not paying attention to it and we’re not even trying to meet it, we might find ourselves turning to social media and scrolling on social media for hours and hours trying to fill some sort of connection. And yet we all know how this works out. Like we’ll be on social media, we’ll kind of get this dopamine hit. We’ll get a little bit of a sense of some, some connection, but then we get off of it. And we often times feel even greater loneliness. Why? Because the need for deep human connection wasn’t met and it wasn’t satisfied. And then it just makes us long for more of that in the first place.

And we see this time and time again with buffering, with really anything that we overdo, whether it’s overeating over drinking, um, over shopping, over whatever it happens to be like we’re doing it subconsciously because there’s a need that we’re trying to meet, but the buffering isn’t gonna solve that need. Oftentimes we’ll also see this in people pleasing, like we’ll have a need, a deep belonging to be loved, to be valued, to be recognized we have these needs. But a lot of times, if we’re not attempting those needs and seeking them out and fulfilling them in the proper way, a lot of times we’ll turn to pleasing people in order to get those needs fulfilled. And so what do we need to do to work on this? Well, first of all, we have to understand that each one of us, that we have needs that need to be taken care of.

And we have to also realize that we have to be the responsible adults that are going to take care of our needs, that no one else is responsible for taking care of them, that we literally have to make it a priority and say like, I am the most important person in my life. And I need to make sure that my physical, emotional, spiritual, mental intellectual needs are being met. But this is the struggle for so many of us, especially as women and as mothers, we feel selfish doing that. We have this thought, maybe it’s a conscious thought. Subconscious thought that if I put my needs first, if I take care of myself and my needs, that I am being selfish.  And that means I’m putting myself before others. And for most of us, when we have a thought that we think that if we do something, we will be selfish or we will be perceived as selfish, or we see ourselves as selfish.

We almost always will run the opposite direction from whatever we perceive might make us selfish. But what I wanna show you in this episode, and I think this is probably one of the most important things is this. That is a thought, having the thought, if I put my needs first, I am being selfish. That is a thought. And if we think that thought enough, then it becomes a belief, but I want to just offer it to you as this. That is just a thought. And if it’s just a thought, like how well is that thought serving us? Because I knew that for years, I believed that thought completely. And it was the thought that caused me to continue to ignore my needs, suppress my needs, and ultimately continue a devastating relationship with myself. Ultimately, when we have the thought it’s selfish to take care of myself, what we’re really telling ourselves is that we don’t really matter.

And so I just want you to be aware of this thought and to be aware when it like crops up and just to take some time to look at it and say, how is this thought not really serving me. And in fact, is this the type of thought that I want my children to grow up having? Do I really want my sons and daughters to grow up, to become young adults and to think to themselves that it’s selfish to take care of themselves? And the answer is always, no, I don’t want them to think that I want them to think that it’s important and significant. And literally the most important thing that they can do is to really take care of themselves to the best of their abilities. Another thought that we often have as mothers when it comes to this is that there’s not time.

There’s not enough time to take care of myself and my needs. The responsibilities of my life are just too great in taking care of others that I just don’t have time. I might have the desire to take care of myself, but there’s just not enough time. And again, let’s take a moment to really look at the significance of that thought. First of all, it’s just not true. And I’m gonna try to show you why it’s not true in just a moment, but this is one of those thoughts that we call their scarcity thoughts. Whenever we say there’s not enough time, it creates this sense of scarcity and it makes our life feel very heavy and very burdened. This thought also leads to a sense of victim mentality, where if we have this thought over and over and over, and then we begin to believe that there’s not ever time for us to take care of ourselves.

We will subconsciously feel like we’re a victim. And when we get into victim mode, then we start to feel really resentful and angry. And it starts to come out again in very destructive ways in our relationships. So we wanna be really careful with that thought as well. And I wanna present to all of us, and this is what I’ve been working on myself is this thought that number one, I’m responsible for taking care of myself. And two, there’s plenty of time to take care of myself and my needs. And this is the big secret. My sisters in Christ. I want you to like to lean in and hear this. I’m gonna say it slowly. When we truly take care of ourselves. When we repair our relationship with ourselves, when we start to love ourselves and recognize how important we are to ourselves and to this world, and we start paying attention to our needs, and we start actually making our needs a priority, something very powerful happens.

We start to thrive and it only makes sense when we’re taking care of ourselves physically, when we’re feeding ourselves the right kind of foods, like we’re making sure that we’re taking care of our health and our wellbeing. Like we’re going to the doctor. And we’re making sure that all of our physical needs are being met and we’re eating well. We’re, we’re drinking well, we’re getting plenty of water. We’re getting plenty of sleep. And we’re making sure that those needs are met. Then we feel better when we’re moving and getting some exercise in our day and getting out into the sunshine. We feel better when we are taking care of our social and emotional needs. When we’re being intentional about spending quality time with people and having some carefree timelessness and making, um, ourselves a priority in the day when it comes to our relationships, then our hearts grow right.

We feel that within us and our, we feel this sense of connection and love, and we feel valued and we feel cherished like something in us comes alive. And of course, more than anything when we’re taking care of our spiritual needs, when we are creating time in our life to connect with God, when we’re cultivating moments of silence in our lives. So we can just listen to the gentle voice that he’s, that of his voice, speaking to us in our hearts and our souls to dream and to imagine, and we are making that a priority in our lives. Like our soul comes alive and we feel God’s presence more. And we feel the holy spirit working more. Why? Because we say to ourselves, like it’s important that my spiritual needs are being met. And I have to make sure that I am creating space in my life for God.

And then of course our mental and intellectual needs, are we learning? Are we reading books? Are we entering into intellectual conversations with people that stimulate our brains? Because when we do that too, our brain, it fires up. Are we listening to podcasts that challenge us and inspire us? Those types of things like those literally send, you know, nerves in our brains. Like it fires them up. And all of a sudden we can think clearer and we have more energy and we feel more fully alive. And so my sister in Christ, like this is what happens. Like when we take care of our needs, we become, we have more energy. We feel better physically. We feel more rested. We feel like our souls are being taken care of. And when we are in this place, that’s where we find ourselves thriving. And then this is the really cool and powerful thing.

When we’re in that place of thriving, we are able to give of ourselves even better. We’re able to love our families and our husbands and our children. And we are able to give of ourselves in a much more healthy and full way. That’s why the thought of there’s not enough time to take care of myself is so backwards. It’s twisted, it’s wrong. And I wanna challenge you to just recognize that thought when it comes up and then challenge that thought and say, no, no, that’s not true. I actually like it, if I take the time to take care of myself and my needs, then I will have more time to take care of others and things will fall into their proper place. And then the beautiful thing is when we start doing this and practicing it, and of course it’s not gonna always be perfect, but when we start really making ourselves a priority and focusing on these things and our needs, and then serving from a place where our cup is full versus our cup being empty, we become a powerful example to the people in our lives of what this looks like to be a person that really knows how to take care of themselves.

A person who actually really has a meaningful and loving relationship with themselves, a person who listens to their needs and knows how to take care of them, how to advocate for them, how to ask for help in order for their needs to be met. And we truly become powerful witnesses to those in our lives of what this looks like, especially to our children. And for me, the biggest factor is that I want to learn how to take care of myself so well that I model it in such a powerful way for my children, so that they pick up on it and they learn how to do it for themselves. And that I can actually show them, have conversations with them, um, encourage them to pay attention to their needs and what are, what are they longing for and how are they as they grow up taking responsibility for taking care of not only their responsibilities in their life, but that they’re taking care of their needs in their life.

And this is what makes me excited, because imagine as women of God, if we really see our own value, we see our dignity and we see how, um, important of the gift we are in this world and what a blessing we are in this world. And if we start treating ourselves like this and we start acting like this from a place of deep self love, I believe it has the power to change the world in such significant ways. Why? Because so few people actually know how to do this, and that’s why I think it’s so important for us to say, you know what, maybe the last 10 or 15 years or 30 years or 40 years, I haven’t been so good at this, but I can change on, I can change that. I can work on that. And it really does start with recognizing that the most important relationship we have is our relationship with yourself.

And from there, that’s where like all the other relationships flow our relationship with God, our relationship with others. And so this is my question. If you recognize that maybe your relationship with yourself hasn’t been so great. Maybe you haven’t talked to yourself, so, so well, maybe you don’t treat yourself so well, maybe you don’t take care of your needs. Don’t beat yourself up about it. This is an opportunity to say, you know what? I wanna start working on improving my relationship with myself. And so how do we do that? I want you to think about, uh, maybe a relationship in your own life. Maybe like, let’s say you have a relationship with someone that’s pretty broken, um, a relationship where maybe you recognize that you’ve caused someone else pain and that’s created kind of a break in your relationship and you wanna repair that relationship.

What would you do? First of all, chances are you would go to them and you would apologize. You would say, I’m so sorry for the times that I did this. Maybe I talked to you like this, or I didn’t, maybe I, the times I ignored you or didn’t go out of my way to, to check in with you and see how you were doing. Sorry for the things I said to you, I’m sorry for treating you like this, will you please forgive me? And we would, we would start repairing that relationship by starting with an apology. And that apology might need to happen a couple times, right? Like, I’m so sorry, but I want to have a relationship with you. And then what would, would we, what would we do in that relationship? We would, if we wanted to cultivate that relationship and strengthen it and repair it, we would be attentive to that person.

We would call them and check in with them and wanna spend time with that person. And we would want to support them and cheer them on and lift them up and do whatever we could to show them how much we love them. That is how we would repair that relationship. And my sisters in Christ, this is no different than our relationship with ourselves, for me in my life. I can literally look back and say, I had a terrible relationship with myself. I treated myself terribly. I was horrible to myself for many years. And so I had to start repairing my relationship. I had to start with an apology. Like I had to write a letter to myself, just saying Lorissa. I’m so sorry for all the things I said to you, for the ways I neglected you for the times that I heard you telling me what you needed, but I ignored that.

And I really got clear with this apology. Like I really wanted to, to, to make amends in that way and to heal my relationship with myself, it is how to start with reconciliation with myself. And even part of that, like I took part of that to confession because I knew that I needed to, I needed the sacramental grace of repairing my relationship with myself and starting to work on that. And then when it, like, after you kind of get through that forgiveness piece, then it becomes, okay, how do I really love and support myself? How do I treat myself as my best friend in our master’s program? A lot of times we talk about how we have our own backs? Which means how do we really like to be our best friend? How do we build ourselves up? How do we support ourselves? How do we cheer ourselves on? How do we make sure that if we try something new or we put ourselves out there, or maybe we make a mistake, we fall down, we fail.

How do we treat ourselves in those moments? Do we beat ourselves down? Do we insult ourselves? Do we like to kick ourselves in the stomach? Like when we’re down? No. Like when we have our backs, we look at ourselves and say, all right, you’re amazing. Look at what you tried. Maybe you made a mistake. It’s okay. How can we learn from this mistake? How can we get back up? And how can we try again? How, like, what do we need to do to fix this situation? But we have our backs. And so we truly become, we become our best friend. We become our biggest cheerleader. And when we start doing that, we start loving ourselves. In that way. We also have to start paying attention to our needs. The deep, quiet longings that are in our hearts, that are in our minds that are deep within our soul.

Like, what do we really need? And this is the big question that we need to be asking ourselves. And I’ve started doing this myself, and it’s been a major game changer in my life. When we ask ourselves powerful questions, we cannot help, but find powerful answers. This is so much of what we do in coaching. It’s just learning to ask the right questions, the powerful questions that cause our brain to start thinking and looking for the powerful answers. And I think that one of the most powerful questions we can ask ourselves is also one of the simplest, what do I need? And this is a question that I’ve started asking myself, particularly in the last few months, because I wanna be a woman that knows what she needs. And then like, is really attentive to that. And then I wanna be a woman that actually follows through in fulfilling them.

So I check in with myself a lot more than I used to. I treat myself as if I’m my best friend and when I have friends, I like to check in with them. I wanna see how they’re doing, and this is no different with ourselves. So we check in with ourselves, okay, Lorissa, how are you doing today? How are you feeling? And what do you need? And this is the adult. When we ask questions like that, our brain can’t help. But look for an answer most of the time, like with pretty much any question. When you ask a question, your brain is always gonna be looking for an answer. It can’t not look for an answer. It’s always gonna go searching for an answer. And so when you say to yourself, like, especially when you find yourself maybe feeling sad or you’re, you’re feeling maybe an, an emotion that’s, um, maybe, you know, you’re, you’re sad.

Maybe you’re feeling lonely, you’re feeling tired, whatever it happens to be, these are really powerful opportunities to say, to check in and to just say, what’s going on, first of all, how are you feeling? And once you ask that question, like, like Lorissa, when I ask myself, like, how are you feeling right now? Because a lot of times we have this feeling, this sensation in our bodies and we feel something and it’s really important to get clear with it. What am I feeling? Am I feeling sad? Am I feeling disappointed? Am I feeling tired? Am I feeling lonely? Am I feeling, um, despair, anger, frustration? Like, what is the emotion that I’m feeling in this moment?

Once you get clear with that emotion, chances are you’re feeling that because there is a need that is unmet. And so then you can ask yourself, what do I need right now? And then give yourself a few moments. Just sit with that question and see what comes up. And chances are your brain, your heart, your soul will tell you exactly what you need in that moment. And then this is the deal. Once we know what we need, then we actually have to think out how to try to meet the need in the best way possible. But when you find yourself asking yourself, truly, what do I need the answer to, how to fulfill it always follows. And especially when we invite God into that question, um, and we invite the holy spirit. We always discover exactly the right way to fulfill it. Not in a way that’s buffering or people pleasing or destructive, or in a way that’s gonna lead us to more pain, but in a way that’s actually gonna fulfill that need. And so let me give you a few examples. Maybe you find yourself feeling lonely and you say to yourself, what do I need right now?

Chances are you’ll sit with that for a moment and pray about it. And the answer will be, you need to connect with someone and you’ll say, well, who do I need to connect with? And you will find out exactly who your heart is longing to connect with. Maybe it’s your husband, maybe it’s your children. Maybe it’s a friend that you’ve been thinking about, but you haven’t seen for a while. Maybe it’s a family member. Maybe it’s God, maybe your soul is saying, feel lonely right now. But no human being is gonna be able to fulfill this, this loneliness right now, what my heart and my soul really needs is to connect with God. And then you can say, okay, I’m gonna take some time in prayer, or maybe I’m gonna look at my schedule and see where I can fit in going to the chapel and spending some time in adoration. Or maybe I just need 10 minutes to just sit with God and just open my heart, open my Bible, read a scripture passage, maybe look at the reading of the day and just let him speak to me and fill my cup.

Maybe you are feeling tired, exhausted. And you’re just like, that’s maybe the feeling that you’re feeling. And you’re like, what am I feeling? Okay. I’m feeling exhausted. So what do I need right now? And when you ask that question and you sit with it, your body, your brain, your heart will tell you Lorissa right now, you need some rest. You need to create some time for some rest. And I know that some of you are thinking, but Lorissa, if you saw my schedule, I’ve got all these little kids and babies and I don’t have time for rest. I wanna challenge you to just really spend some time thinking about that and really moving to a place of how I have this need and how I can try to fulfill it to the best of my abilities, given my circumstances right now. Sure. You might not be able to take a three hour nap, but how can you create some space in your life?

Who do you need to talk to? Do you need to talk to your husband? Do you need to talk to a family member? Do you need to hire a babysitter? What are some ways that you can think of that you can try to figure out how to get a little bit more rest in your life? I promise you, if you go into problem solving mode, you will discover the answers and you will discover the way in which you can take care of yourself, better in this area. Again, I want you to imagine that you’re talking to your best friend. And if you’re, if you were talking to your best friend and your best friend was telling you about their struggles, like if they were saying, I really need to get some rest in my life, I really need to have a better connection in my life. I really need to take care of myself better physically or spiritually.

And if they were struggling to figure out how they could do it, you as their friend, as someone who wants to support them, you would start asking them questions. You would start saying, well, could you do this? Or what about this? Um, or how could you find more time in your life to take care of this area of your life? And so you would ask them questions and you would instantly go into problem solving mode to try to help them solve that problem, because that’s what we do as human beings. Most of the time, like we wanna try to figure things out, but a lot of times when it comes to ourselves, we just will believe the thoughts that either if I take care of myself, I’m being selfish or there’s just not enough time, or there’s no way that I can take care of this need. And we just believe it. We just believe it. And we don’t go into problem solving mode. But when we get clear and when we become our best friend and we say, you know what, this is a need of yours.

And I’m gonna be here to help you figure out what this need is and how we can best fulfill this need in this situation. Then our brain instantly goes into problem solving mode and we start figuring it out. And all of a sudden, we start to realize that we can, like there are actual ways to fulfill our needs. And there are people that we can talk to who can help us. And when we start recognizing that sometimes with fulfilling our needs, that we’re gonna need help, or that we’re gonna need to advocate for ourselves, that we’re gonna need to tell people that we have a need and that we might need their help in making sure that need is met. Then we actually start really advocating for ourselves and start making ourselves a priority. And all of a sudden solutions start coming forward. And we start having our backs and we start not only like working on, on strengthening our relationship with ourselves, but we actually start building integrity with ourselves. Like when we tell ourselves that we’re gonna do something in order to fulfill one of our needs, and then we actually end up doing that, we strengthen our relationship with ourselves in such an extraordinary way. And then it just becomes a practice.

We start practicing this more and more, and we start, it almost becomes like a habit. And then we actually end up really having a lot of self respect, self integrity. It builds our self-esteem. It builds our self-confidence because we have our back and we’re following through and we’re building ourselves up and we’re taking care of our needs and little by little by little step by step by step, we start to find ourselves thriving more and more. We move from survival mode and we start moving towards thriving mode because we are truly taking care of ourselves. And from there, we can take care of everybody else in such a more powerful way. And so this is what I have for you.

My sisters in Christ, are we truly building and cultivating a relationship with ourselves where we recognize how truly important we are to ourselves and in this world, and that we’re living from a place of understanding that and knowing it are we modeling that for our children? Are we taking inventory? Are we checking in with ourselves throughout the day? Are we getting a pulse on what we need? And then actually following through with it, are we taking full responsibility for taking care of ourselves, knowing that now that we’re adults, then nobody else is gonna do it for us. And that if we actually don’t do it, nobody else really will. And certainly nobody will do it as well as we can for ourselves. And for me, knowing that feels very empowering. Like when I realize, like I have to be the one that’s responsible for my well being, physically, spiritually, mentally, emotionally, and that I can love myself in such a way that I’m working towards following through with that. I actually find it empowering and exciting to know that I can do that for myself, and I can take care of myself in that deep and authentic way. And of course I’m far from perfect. And this is what I said at the beginning of the podcast. Like I’m gonna spend the rest of my life working on this, but I know that as I’m working on it, I will end up showing up in this world.

As I really want to be as a woman who loves herself as a woman who loves God and who can love others even better because of that. And this is my hope and my dream for all of you as well, let’s do this work. Let’s not give up on doing this work and being the kind of women that are living in this type of integrity with ourselves. It’s not easy. It takes effort, it takes intention. But we also know that living in survival mode and putting everybody else’s needs before your own and not taking care of yourself, that that also is painful and hard and difficult, and eventually leads to a lot of disappointment and resentment and anger and an even more destructive relationship with yourself. And ultimately this is the work that we and our members are doing in our master’s program. So if you wanna be surrounded by other Catholic moms who are working on truly loving themselves and being attentive to their needs and working towards living a life where they’re thriving and not just surviving, I would like to invite you to come and check out masters. And, um, let’s do this together. This is hard work. It’s hard to do it on our own. We need to be supporting each other, lifting each other up and modeling for each other, what this looks like. So my sisters in Christ, I hope you have a blessed week and I hope you know what a true blessing you are in this world. And of course, as always, may you remember that you are Made for Greatness.