Choosing Ourselves Matters

If we don’t choose ourselves, who will?

Choosing ourselves means taking ourselves seriously. Making our own wishes and needs central in our lives.

How seriously? How self-centered?

Exactly as seriously and self-centered as we need to be to ensure we hold on to our individual selves as we weather situations that have vital importance to our well-being. Too often in those situations, other voices dominate and our voice is left out of the conversation. We should be asking: What about what matters to me? Am I willing to let others choose for me? Aren’t there times we should put ourselves first and feel okay about it?

Often, it is certainly in our self-interest to follow recommendations of those who have superior knowledge and skills to ours. Let’s take medical situations. Doctors and health practitioners are usually more expert at figuring out the causes of our ills and knowing ways to ease our pain and “fix” our problems.

Still, it behooves us to remember that medical professionals focus primarily on the medical “problem” that brings us to their attention. As experts, it’s their job to diagnose the problem and offer a recommendation on what the best fix is in medical terms. They typically want to be efficient and proactive. They will not routinely be taking into consideration our life circumstances, our fears, or our hopes and expectations concerning the “problem” or the recommended “fix” – all those considerations that influence our sense of what is best for ourselves.

So then, it seems extremely important to me to put ourselves first in decisions about medical treatments. After all, who stands to gain or lose the most by those decisions? Is it not in our best self-interest to speak up on our own behalf about how we want our pain managed, our “defects” fixed?

It matters that we speak up – to make clear that we see ourselves as having a choice about treatment, to let doctors know that our values and life circumstances will inform our choices. Speaking up about what was important to us in decisions about my son’s treatment gave me a sense of having more control over matters that deeply affected us as a family. With my own medical treatment, I feel better about myself when I choose to be part of the decision-making, rather than leaving the decisions entirely to doctors.

Bottom line: taking ourselves seriously in situations where our preferences can influence decisions about our medical care is important; so is becoming self-centered enough to see ourselves as legitimate decision-makers, responsible for exercising some control over events that affect our well-being and that of those we care about.