Being Gentle With Yourself: My Own Experience

I’m a pretty private person. While I am open with the people closest to me, I am an introvert, shy and tend to be pretty conservative about what I share with the public. My personal social media accounts consist of posts about adventures with my family and to be completely honest, at least 50% of my posts are about my two cats, and I like it that way. Additionally, as a clinical psychologist in private practice, I also am used to keeping my own world to myself. The focus is on the clients and I was trained in a way that promotes very limited self-disclosure. All of this has been working well for me….

And then in early 2024, I set out to launch Rain Into Rainbows, a new business focused on resources for women related to all stages of break-ups and divorce. In this new business, I was going to have to branch out and start using social media professionally. I had the website created, made a few posts on Canva and prepared myself for the launch. I have tendencies towards perfectionism and I fought that by telling myself that I would never be “ready” enough and I would just go ahead and launch the business and learn the rest as I went along. “The rest” mostly being the world of social media. I have never used social media as a part of my psychology private practice before, so this was a whole new adventure. I was prepared to inevitably stumble sometimes, but to ultimately keep plowing ahead and learning as I went.

Being Gentle With Yourself: My Own Experience, Rain Into Rainbows LLC

What I wasn’t prepared for was that in the first half of last year, I would decide to leave my long-term romantic relationship, move out of my house, move my office to a new town, and have a breast cancer scare (my health turned out to be fine). None of that fit into my plans for launching a new business, and I certainly wasn’t prepared to share any of that online. I understood the irony of going through my own break-up right around the time I was launching a new business designed to help women who are also going through break-ups and divorces, but I was not yet prepared to share my own experience. My initial plan for using social media as a part of that business was to share things like quotes and checklists; it definitely did not include me being a guinea pig as I went through my own personal life transition.

So, here I sit almost a year later. Rain Into Rainbows basically came to a screaming halt in early 2024 while I went into survival mode and focused all of my extra energy on continuing to effectively run my full-time private practice. Historically, I have been an over-achiever and I push myself hard, but I had to recognize the limits of my own bandwidth. I wondered how it would look to others that I had technically launched a business and then gone radio silent. I wondered if I had messed it all up. I struggled with self-criticism about why I hadn’t been able to find a way to keep it all going at the same time as I was upending my personal life. And then I had to remind myself to do what I am frequently talking to clients about: I had to be more gentle with myself. I had to remind myself that I am not Super Woman and that it was okay to meet myself where I was. I had to listen to my body and know my limits. I had to give myself permission to focus on healing even if that meant temporarily letting other things go. And I had to trust myself that when the time was right, I would return to my mission with Rain Into Rainbows. So, here I am, doing just that. I am putting myself out there as an example of what it can look like when a break-up or divorce derails parts of your life and I am here to say that it is okay to have grace with yourself and to do just what you can while you heal. You will know when it is time to start picking up certain pieces again.