Blogs

Alex Moliski

One of the biggest misconceptions people have about self-care is that it’s mostly about adding things to your life: bubble baths, massages, vacations, pedicures, yoga classes, meditation apps. And while there’s absolutely nothing wrong with any of those things, most people don’t actually need more self-care activities. They need to stop overriding themselves.

They need to stop saying yes when their whole body is saying no. They need to stop performing participation while secretly counting the minutes until they can leave. They need to stop exhausting themselves trying to keep the peace while quietly abandoning themselves in the process. That’s where self-care boundaries come in, because real self-care isn’t just about what you add to your life. It’s also about what you stop forcing yourself to endure.

I was reminded of this when I reread a message from a former client. She had gone away with family for Thanksgiving and texted me something that perfectly captures what healthy boundaries actually make possible. She said:

“I just ended up backing out of a family hike because I hate hiking and needed alone time. I was able to let them know I just need some alone time, and they should go on without me. And it was so freeing, and I’m so enjoying soaking up these quiet hours alone.

If I hadn’t done this, I don’t think I would have been very pleasant on the hike or at dinner tonight. But now I’ll be rested up and ready to talk all evening. Thank you for teaching me how to do this gracefully.”

I love this story because on the surface, it sounds so simple. She skipped a hike. But underneath that decision was an enormous internal shift. She stopped abandoning herself in real time, and honestly, that’s what self-care boundaries are really about. Not controlling other people, becoming rigid or refusing to participate in life. And not turning into someone who only does what they want all the time. It’s about learning how to stay connected to yourself while you’re making decisions.

That means being able to hear yourself clearly. Being able to notice your own limits before resentment takes over. Being able to remember what’s true for you, even when other people are disappointed, confused, or doing things differently than you would. 

For many people, especially women who grew up in dysfunctional families, this is incredibly difficult because we learned that being “good” meant going along to get along, being easy-going, low maintenance, always available, and being accommodating. So we override ourselves constantly and call it being “nice.”

But eventually that creates exhaustion, resentment, irritability, emotional shutdown, and disconnection from ourselves as well as others. Then we wonder why we don’t even know what we want anymore. It’s because we’ve spent years leaving ourselves.

What struck me most about my client’s message was not that she hated hiking. It was that she finally allowed that truth to matter.

Read the rest at your own pace here

Not everything that looks like self-care actually nourishes you.

Sometimes what we call “self-care” is actually avoidance. Sometimes what looks like rest is shutdown. And sometimes what feels like helping is really self-abandonment in disguise.

And that’s why I think one of the most important questions we can ask ourselves is this:

What’s my motivation here?

Not: “Is this good or bad?”

Not: “Would other people approve of this?”

Not even: “Does this technically count as self-care?”

But: “What is this actually doing for me emotionally?”

That question changed my life.

Years ago, when I first started learning about codependence and recovery, I heard someone say that the difference between healthy helping and rescuing behavior is your motivation. At first, I didn’t understand that at all.

I thought I was just a nice, helpful, generous, and thoughtful person. What I couldn’t yet see was that much of my helping behavior was driven by anxiety, fear, approval-seeking, and an unconscious attempt to control outcomes (esp. what others thought of me) so I could feel emotionally safe.

I wasn’t helping because I simply wanted to help. I was helping because I needed something (Yikes! What a revelation!). 

I needed reassurance, connection, validation, certainty, and relief from discomfort. That realization opened an entirely new way of understanding myself.

And over the years, I’ve realized this same question helps us understand so many things related to self-care, boundaries, healing, and emotional well-being. Because the same exact behavior can be healthy or unhealthy depending on what’s happening underneath it.

Alone Time or Isolation?

One of the clearest examples is time alone. Healthy solitude can be deeply nourishing. It can look like reading, resting, skating, coloring, napping, working on a puzzle, going for a walk, journaling, creating art, or simply enjoying your own company without needing to perform for anyone.

Healthy alone time usually feels intentional. There’s choice in it. You’re present with yourself.
You have a sense of returning to yourself rather than disappearing from yourself. You often leave it feeling more grounded, more connected, more energized, or more settled inside yourself.

Isolation feels different. It often comes from overwhelm, shame, fear, exhaustion, resentment, or emotional flooding. Instead of reconnecting with yourself, you’re trying to escape yourself (or the world). Or avoid feelings you don’t know how to stay with.

That’s a very different internal experience.

The external behavior may look identical (you’re still alone, still at home and may even still be watching Netflix under a blanket). But internally, one experience is restorative and the other is draining.

One creates more internal safety. The other slowly disconnects you from yourself.

That is why your motivation matters.

Read the rest at your own pace here

Photo Credit: Braxton Apana

There’s a phrase I heard years ago by the Buddhist teacher Cheri Huber that completely changed the way I relate to emotions:

“You are responsible for your feelings, not for your feelings.”

At the time, I understood it intellectually. But I don’t think I truly understood it emotionally until recovery. I get now that you don’t need to explain your feelings. You actually don’t even need to understand them. You just need to honor them (i.e., feel them). That’s what it means to be responsible TO your feelings.

For most of my life, I thought feelings were problems to solve, explain, justify, control or suppress. I believed that if I felt something intensely, there had to be a reason. And that there was some kind of fix or strategy to make it go away.

Especially if the feeling was inconvenient, made other people uncomfortable, and particularly if it made me uncomfortable. So instead of feeling my feelings, I analyzed them. Rationalized them. Judged them. I tried to out-think them (or ignored them completely while focusing on everyone else!).

That’s what so many people do when they’ve learned that emotions aren’t safe. Not physically safe, relationally safe, and especially not internally safe. Once you understand that, so much starts to make sense.

When Feelings Didn’t Feel Safe

I grew up in a family where feelings weren’t really welcome. Actually, that’s not entirely true. Some feelings were allowed: calmness, pleasantness, composure. But sadness, anger, overwhelm, grief or vulnerability? Nope!

One of the worst things my father used to say to me was:

“Do you want me to give you a reason to cry?!”

That sentence carries so much distortion inside it. It really fucked me up.

It taught me: My feelings weren’t real, my emotions were excessive and that I shouldn’t trust myself. I got the message, “You need to shut this down immediately.”

And for many people, that’s where self-abandonment began. That’s not because they consciously chose it, but because overriding themselves became necessary for emotional survival.

So they stopped asking: “What am I feeling?”

And started asking: “How do I make this go away?”

Or worse: “How do I make sure nobody else has to deal with it?”

Read the rest at your own pace here

Photo Credit: Alex Shadowz

This past week I had one of those moments where I realized how much my relationship with my own mind has changed.

I was thinking about something coming up and noticed myself starting to go down a familiar (negative) path. You know the one… Thinking through all the possible scenarios, trying to predict what might happen - what someone might say, how I might respond. It wasn’t even particularly dramatic, but I could feel the shift in my body. It felt tighter, I felt a sense of urgency and a pull to “figure it out.”

And then I caught it. Not in a harsh way. Just a simple, “oh… this is a story, not a prediction of the future.”

That one moment changed everything. Because instead of continuing down that path of living into the wreckage of the future (and jacking up my nervous system), I paused and came back to reality.

I never used to be able to do that. I didn’t even know it was an option!

When Your Thoughts Feel Like Facts

Have you ever caught yourself thinking something like:

• They’re upset with me… I must’ve done something wrong 
• This is never gonna work out 
• She’s gonna think I’m a bad person
• Something bad is going to happen, I can feel it 

And then, without even realizing it, your mood shifts, your body tightens, and your nervous system start reacting as if that thought is true.

That’s not just overthinking. It’s you believing a story your mind is telling you. And most of the time, you don’t even realize you’re doing it. Stories are not predictions of the future. They’re stories.

Read the rest at your own pace here.

The summit between President Trump and President Xi Jinping in Beijing next week could be the most significant encounter between American and Chinese leaders since Richard Nixon met Mao Zedong in Beijing in 1972.

That summit eased decades of Sino-American animosity and forged a tacit alliance between the United States and China against the Soviet Union. This summit comes at a similar transformational moment in world affairs, when there is a new shared threat to both China and America. It is a metastasizing disorder that could destabilize the world and harm both countries unless they figure out a way to simultaneously compete and collaborate against a growing list of challenges. These challenges can be successfully confronted only by their collective action — starting with the United States and China together creating guardrails against the malign uses of A.I., now that the latest models have demonstrated staggeringly powerful cyberattack capabilities.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/05/opinion/trump-xi-summit-ai-global-threats.html?smid=nytcore-android-share

I’m local to New Haven and want to share briefly.

Alongside my coaching business, I offer part-time administrative support for professionals who need help staying organized and keeping things running smoothly but don’t need a full-time hire.

I’m currently looking to take on one consistent role, around 20 hours a week.

If that’s something that might be helpful now or in the future, I’d be glad to connect.