Be Gentle With Your Giant Heart:
Self-Care, Self-Advocacy, and Reclaiming the Right to Receive with Suzy Reading
Be Gentle With Your Giant Heart: Self-Care, Self-Advocacy, and Reclaiming the Right to Receive with Suzy Reading
Self-care and self-advocacy for neurodivergent women are not separate conversations. They are, as this episode makes plain, the same conversation told from two different directions. In this episode of This Voice Is Mine: The Unquiet Podcast, Dr Emma Offord is joined by Suzy Reading: Chartered Psychologist, author of ten books, and one of the UK's most trusted voices on wellbeing. Suzy's latest book, How to Be Selfish, challenges one of the most loaded words in our culture. This is not a book about greed. It is a book about healing our relationship with self.
When self-care becomes another thing to fail at
What happens when the practices designed to restore you start to feel like proof of how much you are still failing? Suzy and Emma explore how self-care can tip into performance when it is driven by striving rather than genuine connection with self. The checklist replaces the relationship, and the whole thing becomes exhausting in a different way.
Selflessness is a coping mechanism, not a virtue
Suzy names something quietly radical: that selflessness, the quality women are most praised for, is not a moral achievement. It is a coping mechanism. She traces this back to the gender conditioning that shapes our relationship with our own needs from childhood, and what it costs us across a lifetime. Emma reflects on the moment in perimenopause when her unsustainable role in the home simply started to change, and her husband looked at her and said: "You've changed." She had not changed. The role had changed her.
The anger that is pointing somewhere important
Anger and resentment are not problems to soothe away. They are signals. Suzy is direct on this: do not do a yoga nidra to get rid of your anger. Use it. Anger is there to galvanise you, to take action in service of your values, to protect those in your care, including yourself. Underneath resentment is almost always an unmet or unvoiced need. The episode holds space for women to take that signal seriously rather than manage it away.
Disconnection and the slow drift from self
Long before burnout arrives, there are quieter signs that something is wrong. Suzy maps what disconnection looks like in practice: forgetting what you enjoy, not knowing what to do with half an hour to yourself, missing the body's most basic cues. Emma reflects on the clues she did not pick up for years. The conversation asks: what does reconnection look like before you reach the tipping point?
Two somatic practices you can do right now
Suzy guides the group through two grounding practices that are more powerful than they look. The first is the face hug: a simple act of cradling your own face that invites tenderness back in and helps the nervous system find safety. The second is a mindful check-in anchored to a sip of water, a two-minute practice that asks: where am I at, and what do I need? These are not spa-day luxuries. They are the building blocks of self-trust.
Receiving is not taking
One of the deepest threads in this conversation is the resistance so many people feel toward receiving care, even from themselves. Suzy reframes it: when you refuse to receive, you are also denying someone else the gift of giving. Genuine interdependence is not the same as codependency. It is the recognition that we are social animals who need each other, and that asking for support is not a deficit. It is how we stay whole.
The word that needs reclaiming
The conversation returns again and again to trust: trust that your needs are real, trust that receiving is not the same as taking, trust that when you fill your own cup you are not stealing from anyone else. Suzy's invitation is simple. Be gentle with your giant heart. It has always included you.
Connect with Suzy on Instagram: @suzyreading suzyreading.co.uk
This Voice Is Mine: The Unquiet Podcast is hosted by Dr Emma Offord, clinical psychologist and founder of Divergent Lives. For every neurodivergent mind that was masked, misread, or missed.
Suzy on why she wrote How to Be Selfish: 3:00
Why selflessness is a coping mechanism, not a virtue:5:00
Emma: "You've changed" - perimenopause and the unsustainable role 14:30
Anger as fuel, not a problem to soothe away: 20:50
The face hug practice - coming home to self: 28:45
The mindful check-in: where am I at, what do I need?35:30
What is the difference between self-care and self-advocacy? Self-care is about tending to your own needs, but self-advocacy is about voicing those needs and allowing yourself to receive support from others. As Suzy Reading explains, doing all the right things for yourself is not enough if you are still unable to ask for help or say no. For neurodivergent women especially, both skills often need to be consciously rebuilt.
Why do so many women feel guilty about having needs? Gender conditioning teaches women from childhood that their worth is tied to how much they give and how little they ask for. As Suzy describes in How to Be Selfish, this is not a personal failing. It is a cultural pattern, and one that shapes every choice we make until we examine it directly. The guilt is not a sign that you are doing something wrong. It is a sign that the conditioning has done its job.
Is it selfish to prioritise your own needs? No. Resting, saying no, accepting help, and taking time for yourself are not selfish acts. They are acts of self-advocacy. Suzy Reading is clear that selfishness, in the harmful sense, means greed or disregard for others. Tending to yourself is something entirely different, and the two have been unhelpfully confused for a long time.
What is the face hug and how does it help? The face hug is a simple somatic practice where you gently cradle your own face in your hands. It activates the nervous system's sense of safety, echoes the attachment responses we experience through touch, and invites tenderness inward. Suzy uses it in her work because it bypasses the barrier of feeling unworthy. You do not need to feel deserving of care to do it. The feeling of worth comes from the gesture itself.
What are the early signs that you have lost connection with yourself? Suzy describes several: not knowing what to do with free time because you have forgotten what you enjoy, missing the body's basic cues like hunger, thirst, or the need to rest, and a general sense of emotional flatness or reactivity. These are the quieter warning signs that arrive long before burnout. The longer the disconnection goes unnoticed, the harder it becomes to hear what your body is trying to tell you.
How is interdependence different from codependency? Interdependence means recognising that we are social animals who need to both give and receive care, and that asking for support is not a deficit. Codependency, by contrast, involves losing your own sense of self in relation to another person. Suzy argues that allowing others to care for you is not weakness. It is actually a gift to them, because it gives them the experience of being trusted, needed, and of genuine use.