K.C. Davis > Quotes

“But if prioritizing a few good things that really matter to you and aiming for good enough with the rest of it lets you come out at the end of the day healthy and able to experience joy—now that’s an excellent life.”
― KC Davis LPC, How to Keep House While Drowning

“No person can do all the good things all the time and expecting yourself to just sets up an oppressive perfectionism to which no one can live up. Imperfection is required for a good life.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“What we need here is a paradigm shift on how we look at ourselves and our space. I’ll say it again: you don’t exist to serve your space; your space exists to serve you.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“My point is, sometimes it helps to consider your body as separate from you. You have a body—you are not your body. So even if you think your body is a little bit ratty, you can get to know it, slowly, curiously, nonjudgmentally, by caring for it. And it might end up your friend.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“Other times I could be having a perfectly great day and abruptly at 4:00 pm feel like I’ve hit a brick wall. When that happens the priority becomes getting my kids to bed with kindness.”
― KC Davis

“deficit. Self-care was never meant to be a replacement for community care.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“At the end of the day I typically have a big pile of dirty dishes. I’ve been known to spend ten minutes organizing them on the countertop before loading them into the dishwasher. People almost always scratch their head and say, “You know the right way to do dishes would have been faster that what you just did.” And they aren’t wrong. It is, technically speaking, faster to load dishes directly from the sink into the dishwasher or, better yet, directly from using them into the dishwasher throughout the day. 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. For a lot of people, finding a method that bypasses the most executive functioning barriers or that makes a task a little less intolerable is better than what’s “quickest.” In the end, the approach that you are motivated to do and enjoy doing is the most “efficient,” because you are actually doing it and not avoiding it.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“No one is made functional overnight, and some people may always have barriers. The goal then is to take steps that reduce harm, first to self, then to those individuals around us, then to our community. You cannot jump right to community harm reduction before first addressing individual harm reduction.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“Your father’s responsibility to be the person you needed emotionally when you were a child ended when your childhood did,” she said. “I know it’s not fair—I know you deserved better. But you can’t keep coming back to your father now that you are an adult, expecting him to give you the emotional support you never received—emotional support he isn’t capable of right now. You keep going back to an empty well, hoping that there will be something to drink. But the responsibility to heal is now on you.”
― K.C. Davis, Who Deserves Your Love: How to Create Boundaries to Start, Strengthen, or End Any Relationship

“There are just some seasons of life that we have to limp through.”
― KC Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“It’s helpful when seeing your dirty floor to replace “I just can’t keep up” with “I’ve de-prioritized floors for a more important task right now.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning: A Gentle Approach to Cleaning and Organising

“Leaning into the things we feel naturally motivated to do creates momentum”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“Boundaries are the opposite of control.”
― K.C. Davis, Who Deserves Your Love: How to Create Boundaries to Start, Strengthen, or End Any Relationship

“Most people are shocked to realize that people-pleasing isn’t about other people’s comfort—it’s about your own. It’s about your sense of self being so determined by the opinions and feelings of others that you must manage those things by contorting yourself around the needs of others.”
― K.C. Davis, Who Deserves Your Love: How to Create Boundaries to Start, Strengthen, or End Any Relationship

“easier to tolerate the repetitive nature of care tasks if we let go of moral messages and isolate the functional reason for doing them.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“The weight you are after you adopt healthy habits into your life is the weight you are supposed to be.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“The truth is that it’s not waste if you are using something to function.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning: A Gentle Approach to Cleaning and Organising

“thank you for your concern, but I am not taking any feedback on this issue right now.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“We all have seasons of life when we are capable of contributing more or less than the people around us.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“having a limited capacity is not the same as being entitled and accepting help is not the same as exploiting others.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“When we believe our worth is dependent on completing the never-ending list of care tasks, we are unlikely to let ourselves rest until everything is done. Even when we manage to shame ourselves into action, we find that those”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“I have a philosophy: You don’t exist to serve your space; your space exists to serve you.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning: A Gentle Approach to Cleaning and Organising

“Stop thinking of behaviors as only being good/bad, right/wrong, healthy/unhealthy. Instead, think of all coping behaviors as having a unique cost-benefit analysis.”
― K.C. Davis, Who Deserves Your Love: How to Create Boundaries to Start, Strengthen, or End Any Relationship

“break down behavioral change into three variables: willingness, capability, and skills.”
― K.C. Davis, Who Deserves Your Love: How to Create Boundaries to Start, Strengthen, or End Any Relationship

“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

“Quit beating yourself up for having a skill deficit when what you really have is a support deficit.”
― K.C. Davis

“amotivation”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“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. The year I spent stuck inside”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“Creating momentum is key because motivation builds motivation.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“Even if we understand that doing everything perfectly is impossible, most of us still have a hard time shaking the constant guilt about how things should look.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning