Breaking down the myth of perfect care.
Originally published on Psychology Today
Key points
- Care looks fluid and adaptive. Inconsistency in care is to be expected, not a failure.
- Anger, numbness, and fatigue are signals, not flaws, when systems feel threatening or unsafe.
- Those signals can point to important needs and limits for us to listen and attend to.
- Individual care is inseparable from collective survival. No one should endure unrest alone.
Today’s political climate can feel more volatile and dangerous than it felt in recent times. Research demonstrates how sociopolitical violence against marginalized populations (e.g., immigrants, Black individuals, trans people) negatively impacts mental illnesses (i.e., depression, anxiety, PTSD) (Wang & Narcisse, 2025; Williams, Osman & Hyon, 2023; Grinshteyn, Whaley & Couture, 2022).
Despite this challenge, we must find a means to live our ordinary lives under extraordinary conditions. Many of us navigate multiple roles (e.g., caregiver, parent, immigrant, professional, partner), each demanding its own form of care.
But how exactly does “care” show up in our daily lives, and how does it work in “uncaring” environments that may threaten our physical and psychic bodies?
What Care Looks Like
1. Care as Affect Holding
Emotions are affective cues that inform us about ourselves in relation to our environment and, at times, communicate to us before we know an internal conversation has begun. In relation to care, emotions may signal to us that our environment is too demanding and we have needs (psychic or physical) that must be attended to. During times of instability, feelings of anger, numbness, guilt, shame, and fatigue can be protective (Heilman, 2022); our task becomes not suppression, but to understand what the affect is in response to and honor its purpose. In these instances, care may mean finding community in others who share similar emotional experiences. Care can involve becoming an observer of our internal world, while holding the external conditions shaping it.
2. Care as Imperfect Action
Care can look like scrolling the news, being active, protesting, donating, or volunteering. It may look like finding community for ourselves and those we care about. It may look different on different days. Remember, inconsistency is not failure; it’s adaptation under stress. Contribute when you have the capacity and resources, then rest and allow others to take on extra responsibilities when needed. And sometimes, care looks like not doing any of these things because all we can manage is getting out of bed, going to work, coming home, and watching a reality show to distract ourselves. This does not mean a personal shortcoming; rather, this kind of exhaustion signals prolonged exposure to distressing experiences. In moments like these, our capacity fluctuates under threat, and remembering this matters.
Allowing yourself to be imperfect is a form of care.
3. Care as Rest and Survival
Care is remembering that feeling lethargic, frozen, or shut down is not permanent. These are states, not traits. They are temporary nervous system responses to sustained threat. They are not who we are, but they do tell us that our needs have shifted. To be able to rest, remain in place, do simple daily tasks, or expect a little less productivity of ourselves is a form of caretaking.
In unstable times, symptoms are contextually meaningful. Hypervigilance makes sense, anxiety carries information, and depression can be grief and exhaustion combined. While these are natural responses, they also don’t mean you must live with them forever. Naming our experience can sometimes lessen the intensity of the feeling. Finding predictability in a supportive, helpful community is a form of caring expression in a sea of chaos.
The Limits of Care
Let’s be clear: Care is not fixing everything immediately. It is not endless availability. It is not neutrality at the expense of humanity, nor is it self-erasure. It is impossible to be a calm, neutral, endlessly resourced caregiver and receiver. We care while scared and strive to be ethical within unethical systems. We need rest while feeling urgency. Care has presence and limits.
As a friend, partner, sister, daughter, and neighbor, my form of caring for others can, at times, be a check-in over text. These messages offer me some semblance of control in an unpredictable world, but often leave me wondering “what more can be done?”
Per the APA’s Code of Conduct (APA, 2017), ethics do not disappear during political violence, including when ethical commitments come into direct tension with legal or governmental authority. They do, however, become harder to practice. Asking these questions of ourselves—about care, limits, and responsibility is, in and of itself, an act of care.
In my role as a psychologist (a provider of mental health “care”), I am terrified for my clients’ safety and survival in an increasingly unpredictable and dangerous world. I worry about their symptoms worsening in response to the political climate, about their families being threatened, and about what it means to live in fear every day. I also worry about how much I am able to give them, as well as what I cannot. As psychologists, we are trained to regulate, but our usual regulation skills and coping mechanisms tend to break down as the environment around us does. I often find myself let down by the limits of what I can do. How does one know the impact of our care when it lies within systems that can leave us feeling pretty powerless?
Conclusion
There is no single, right way to care. To exist, to rest, and to feel are all necessary forms of care in unstable systems. Care, then, is the ongoing practice of labelling and holding our emotions with compassion, the willingness to be active, even imperfectly, and the permission to rest. Within our multiple roles and communities, taking turns to lead, carry, and recover, as our nervous systems move from energy to quiet, is an adaptive way to care both for ourselves and for others. Most importantly, individual care is inseparable from our collective survival. After all, no one can sustain times of unrest alone.
References
American Psychological Association. (2017). Ethical principles of psychologists and code of conduct (2002, amended effective June 1, 2010, and January 1, 2017). American Psychological Association. https://www.apa.org/ethics/codeGrinshteyn, E., Whaley, R., & Couture, M.-C. (2022). High Fear of Discriminatory Violence among Racial, Gender, and Sexual Minority College Students and Its Association with Anxiety and Depression. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 19(4), 2117. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph19042117
Heilman, E. E. (2022). Anger is all the rage: a theoretical analysis of anger within emotional ecology to foster growth and political change. Teachers College Record, 124(4), 205-234.
Wang, M. L., & Narcisse, M. (2025). Discrimination, depression, and anxiety among U.S. adults. JAMA Network Open, 8(3), e252404. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2025.2404
Williams, M., Osman, M., & Hyon, C. (2023). Understanding the Psychological Impact of Oppression Using the Trauma Symptoms of Discrimination Scale. Chronic stress (Thousand Oaks, Calif.), 7, 24705470221149511. https://doi.org/10.1177/24705470221149511