How to Keep House While Drowning: 31 Days of Compassionate Help

by K.C. Davis

So many people will say to this, “But I don’t feel any better or more cared for after I do the dishes or change my sheets.” That’s because you view care tasks as moral. It’s the “right” thing to do. It’s what a “good” partner or parent or child does. This moral value saps the caring power from the task. If a task is viewed this way, not doing it causes shame and guilt. So doing the task doesn’t do much more than give you a day-long reprieve from the guilt until it’s time to do it again. In this mode, completing a care task only takes you from distress to neutral and sets up a cycle of constantly running from distressing emotions. If we are overwhelmed by the dishes and feel like a failure the more they stack up, we avoid them further because facing the failure is painful. Eventually, we bully ourselves into doing the dishes. It takes every ounce of energy we have, but we finish. We feel better after they are done, but only because we don’t have to feel the crushing shame of “being so bad at all of this.” But you use dishes every day, and you don’t have the energy to fight this battle every day. This way of doing care tasks does not work.