K.C. Davis > Quotes

“Codependency" is a pop-psychology term that often finds itself in these types of books. But it won't be in this one. That's because codependency often implies that there's a problem in being emotionally dependent on others. Some people then mistakenly believe that true emotional health only occurs when you achieve the Zen-like state of unattachment, as though you need to be able to meet all your own emotional needs yourself.
This is crap. You are a social creature and you need relationships to survive, and you thrive in a state of interdependence. While you are not responsible for meeting every emotional need of another person, you do have some responsibilities to others, as they do to you. This book will help you identify which responsibilities are reasonable to meet and which are reasonable to expect. This understanding will be rooted in your own values - not in the demands of others.”
― K.C. Davis, Who Deserves Your Love: How to Create Boundaries to Start, Strengthen, or End Any Relationship

“KC Davis > Quotes > Quotable Quote


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“Codependency" is a pop-psychology term that often finds itself in these types of books. But it won't be in this one. That's because codependency often implies that there's a problem in being emotionally dependent on others. Some people then mistakenly believe that true emotional health only occurs when you achieve the Zen-like state of unattachment, as though you need to be able to meet all your own emotional needs yourself.
This is crap. You are a social creature and you need relationships to survive, and you thrive in a state of interdependence. While you are not responsible for meeting every emotional need of another person, you do have some responsibilities to others, as they do to you. This book will help you identify which responsibilities are reasonable to meet and which are reasonable to expect. This understanding will be rooted in your own values - not in the demands of others.”
― KC Davis, Who Deserves Your Love

“In our society, care tasks have historically been left to women. Unfortunately, as the role of the daughter, wife, and mother has widened to allow for personal ambitions, careers, and equal partnership in the working world, the pattern of placing the main responsibility for a family’s care tasks on the women in the family still remains. This leads many women to be overloaded with never-ending work”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning: A Gentle Approach to Cleaning and Organising

“To be human is to be wounded.”
― K.C. Davis, Who Deserves Your Love: How to Create Boundaries to Start, Strengthen, or End Any Relationship

“How you relate to care tasks—whether you are clean or dirty, messy or tidy, organized or unorganized—has absolutely no bearing on whether you are a good enough person.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“gentle skill building: a system for keeping your car clean i dunno, friends. My car looks like shit. I don’t have this one figured out. I may never have this one figured out. That’s okay too. I honestly stopped putting much effort into trying. This journey isn’t about some mythical destination where everything has the perfect system; it’s about permission to make things functional and permission to enjoy your life even if your car never gets clean.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“One night I was lying in bed and cuddling my eighteen-month-old. She was asleep in my arms with her angelic face resting in the crook of my elbow. We were lying next to my husband, a man whom I love deeply and who loves me. On the floor on a little pallet was my three-year-old, a spitfire little sprite who brightens my world. I realized that I only ever wanted to be skinny because I wanted to be loved and happy. But I already have that. Skinny hasn’t seemed very important to me since then.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“The truth is that it’s not waste if you are using something to function. Running your sprinklers every day for fifteen minutes is wasting water because that’s more water than your yard needs to live. Grocery stores and restaurants throw out good food daily and that’s wasting food. Not getting a dripping faucet fixed when you can afford to is wasting water. But using something is not the same as wasting something. It’s okay to use a paper plate to eat if you’re depressed and otherwise would’ve struggled to eat at all. Someone with diabetes can use disposable needles and you can buy a fucking prepackaged salad so you eat.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“why clean when it will look like this tomorrow? A really common defeating message that we say to ourselves is “What’s the point of picking up? It’s just going to look like this again tomorrow.” I find this stems from that binary view of care tasks that they can be only either done or not done and that done is the superior state. But keeping everything done isn’t the point. Keeping things functional is the point because here’s the thing: it will look like that again tomorrow only if I clean it today. If I don’t clean it, it will be even more messy because we live here and we create mess. And if tomorrow’s mess on top of today’s mess is going to make my space not function for me, then it’s time to reset the space. I tidy things up not because it’s bad that it’s messy but because it has reached the end of that cycle of functionality and I need to reset it so it can have another twenty-four hours of it serving me.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“What I need to do here is find a way to create momentum. Just like with my exercise bike, we can widen the entry point to the task by creating an on-ramp.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“When you experience a pervasive lack of psychological safety in childhood, you learn to hide, suppress, or despise the most vulnerable pieces of yourself because they will be weaponized against you. You hide them to protect yourself, but, in doing so, you ensure that you never get the opportunity to prove the story wrong.”
― K.C. Davis, Who Deserves Your Love: How to Create Boundaries to Start, Strengthen, or End Any Relationship

“In my work as a therapist I have seen hundreds of clients who struggle with these issues, and I am convinced now more than ever of one simple truth: they are not lazy. In fact, I do not think laziness exists. You know what does exist? Executive dysfunction, procrastination, feeling overwhelmed, perfectionism, trauma, amotivation, chronic pain, energy fatigue, depression, lack of skills, lack of support, and differing priorities.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“Chores → care tasks Chores are obligations. Care tasks are kindness to self. Cleaning → resetting the space”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“It’s reasonable to expect people you are in relationships with to care about your pain, even when they aren’t doing anything “wrong.”
― K.C. Davis, Who Deserves Your Love: How to Create Boundaries to Start, Strengthen, or End Any Relationship

“nobody is doing all the good things all the time”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“Think back to the last kind thing you did for another human or animal. Remember the compassion you felt? The gentleness with which you helped them? That person. This is your compassionate self. This self feels empathy for others because they are worthy of love, and this self wants to give it to them.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“stare at the fridge with little sentient leg weights hanging on to my ankles,”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“Followed by a few attempts to get back on track, which also fail. I never manage to recapture that initial motivation and in turn give up completely and feel guilty whenever I look at the thing.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“Our brains need to see progress or they get discouraged. Category cleaning gives your brain multiple, quick finish lines to feel good about.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“When I was sent to rehab for a year and a half at the age of sixteen, I was able to crawl out of the addiction but found myself just anxious to be thought of as the poster child of a “good client” as a substitute for genuine self-worth. Even a very real experience of religious faith was hijacked by my need to fill this hole. After becoming a missionary and attending seminary, I was quietly ashamed to discover that a majority of my motivation for doing so was again to become a person who was seen as good enough by those around me. I realized in my late twenties that I’d been playing out the same pattern over and over without realizing it: looking for a role to fill that would finally make me worthy of kindness and love and belonging. When I viewed getting my life together as a way for trying to atone for the sin of falling apart, I stayed stuck in a shame-fueled cycle of performance, perfectionism, and failure.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“But sometimes the “right” way of doing something creates barriers for certain executive functioning skills. Sometimes the simple reason is that the right way is not enjoyable and so it gets procrastinated.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“life would be better with clean clothes, and you would like to be able to do the laundry you’ve been staring at for hours but just can’t seem to make yourself do, that’s not a lack of motivation. That is a problem with task initiation.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning: A Gentle Approach to Cleaning and Organising

“Perfectionism is debilitating. I want you to embrace adaptive imperfection. We aren’t settling for less; we are engaging in adaptive routines that help us live and function and thrive. Good enough is perfect.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“My organizational system is, on its face, just putting a basket in the right place.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“6 I promise God does not care how you do your laundry.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“Overfunctioning isn’t about other people but about a lack of internal boundaries. Overfunctioning can manifest in all kinds of behavior, including people-pleasing and enabling, which require a hard look at our own side of the responsibilities chart.”
― K.C. Davis, Who Deserves Your Love: How to Create Boundaries to Start, Strengthen, or End Any Relationship

“Even when I’m by myself, I tend to wander excitedly from project to project without quite wrapping up the former one before beginning the next. This isn’t a flaw. I like spending my day this way. It’s fun and enjoyable for me. It does make for a bigger mess at the end of the day, but the answer isn’t to force myself into a clean-as-you-go habit that doesn’t work for my brain. The solution is to develop achievable and even rewarding strategies for tackling a larger end of day reset. That’s what works for me and it’s just as valid as the choice of those who prefer to clean as they go.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“Anything worth doing is worth doing partially.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“As you embark on this journey I invite you to remember these words: “slow,” “quiet,” “gentle.” You are already worthy of love and belonging. This is not a journey of worthiness but a journey of care. A journey of learning how we can care for ourselves when we feel like we are drowning. Because you must know, dear heart, that you are worthy of care whether your house is immaculate or a mess.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“Let yourself use 5 percent energy to do 5 percent of the task. Maybe you keep going. Maybe you don’t. That’s okay. Anything worth doing is worth doing partially.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning