My Highlight Time is a HiMoment column where real readers share the small, often unspoken moments of self-care, connection, and discovery that shaped them. Names have been changed to protect privacy.
Feeling Guilty About Pleasure? My Therapy Breakthrough
By Marcus, 37 — Washington, DC
I had been feeling guilty about pleasure for as long as I could remember — not just physical pleasure, but anything that existed solely for me. A long shower. A meal I didn’t eat standing over the sink. A full night of sleep when I knew someone out there was suffering. It sounds dramatic when I write it down, but when you spend your days as a social worker sitting across from people in genuine crisis, the math starts to feel simple: their pain is real, so your comfort is selfish. I carried that equation in my chest for over a decade before a therapist finally told me it was broken.
Her name was Dr. Alicia. I started seeing her in the fall, after a particularly rough stretch at work — three child welfare cases back to back, each one worse than the last. I wasn’t sleeping. I was grinding my teeth so hard my dentist noticed before I did. A colleague suggested therapy, and I said sure, because I recommend therapy to clients every single day and figured I should stop being a hypocrite about it.
The first few sessions were what you’d expect. We talked about burnout, about secondary trauma, about the way I’d stopped calling friends back. Standard stuff. I was fluent in this language. I could name my feelings with clinical precision and still feel absolutely nothing while doing it.
Then, in our sixth session, Dr. Alicia asked me a question I wasn’t prepared for.
When a Therapist Asks About Pleasure
“When was the last time you felt good in your body?”
I stared at her. Not uncomfortable, exactly. More like the question didn’t compute. I repeated it back to her, stalling. She waited — therapists are very good at waiting — and I finally said, “I don’t know. The gym, maybe?”
“That’s not what I asked,” she said gently. “I didn’t ask when you last exercised. I asked when you last felt good. When your body felt like a place you wanted to be.”
I had no answer. I genuinely could not remember.
She didn’t push. She just noted it, the way you’d note that someone hadn’t eaten all day — not with alarm, but with a quiet recognition that something essential had been skipped. We moved on. But I couldn’t stop thinking about the question.
That night I went home to my apartment — a one-bedroom in Columbia Heights that I kept clean the way you keep an office clean, not the way you keep a home. I sat on the couch and tried to feel good in my body. I stretched. I took a hot shower. I put on a playlist I used to love. Nothing landed. It was like trying to taste food with a burned tongue. The receptors were there, but the signal wasn’t getting through.
The Homework Assignment I Never Expected
Over the next few weeks, Dr. Alicia and I kept circling back to this. She introduced a concept I’d heard in grad school but never applied to myself: somatic disconnection. The idea that when you spend years absorbing other people’s pain — really holding it, not just hearing it — your nervous system starts to treat your own body as a secondary concern. You become very good at noticing suffering in others and very bad at noticing anything in yourself.
“Your body isn’t just a vehicle for getting to work,” she told me. “It’s where you live.”
I laughed. She didn’t.
Then she gave me homework. Actual homework, like I was a client in my own caseload. She asked me to spend time — not a lot of time, just ten or fifteen minutes — exploring physical sensation without any goal. No exercise, no productivity, no “earning” it. She wanted me to touch my own skin. To notice temperature, pressure, texture. To find out what felt good without deciding in advance whether I deserved it.
I want to tell you I went home that night and had some beautiful breakthrough. I didn’t. I went home and felt ridiculous. I sat on the edge of my bed with my hands on my knees and thought, this is absurd. I’m a grown man. I help families navigate the worst moments of their lives. And I’m sitting here trying to feel my own kneecaps.
But I kept at it. Not because I believed in it, but because I trusted Dr. Alicia, and because I tell my clients to do their homework, and I meant it when I said it to them.
Learning That Pleasure Is Not a Reward
The shift happened on a Tuesday. I remember because Tuesdays are my lightest day — only two client sessions — and I’d started protecting Tuesday evenings the way Dr. Alicia suggested. No case notes after seven. No checking email. Just me and whatever felt like rest.
I took a bath, which I almost never do. I’m a shower person. Always have been — in, out, efficient. But that night I filled the tub, and I sat in it, and I let the water be hot enough to actually matter. I could feel my shoulders drop. Not because I told them to, but because the heat did something my willpower couldn’t.
Afterward, I was lying in bed, still warm, and I reached for a wellness device I’d ordered weeks earlier and shoved in my nightstand drawer. I’d bought it during a late-night scroll after Dr. Alicia first started talking about body reconnection. It arrived. I put it away. I wasn’t ready.
But that Tuesday, I was. Or at least, I was less not-ready.
I’m not going to narrate the details, because that isn’t what this story is about. What I will say is this: for the first time in longer than I can calculate, I was present in my own body without evaluating whether I should be. There was no checklist running in the background. No mental tally of who had it worse than me. No voice reminding me that pleasure was something to earn after the real work was done.
It was just sensation, and breath, and the strange, startling experience of being kind to myself without justification.
I cried afterward. Not the cathartic, movie-scene kind of crying. The confused kind. The kind where your body is doing something your brain hasn’t authorized, and you just have to let it happen.
What I’ve Learned About Guilt and Self-Care
At my next session, I told Dr. Alicia what happened. She nodded, unsurprised. “That’s grief,” she said. “You’re grieving all the years you didn’t let yourself have that.”
That sentence rearranged something in me. I’d been treating pleasure like a reward — something you get after suffering, after earning, after making sure everyone else is okay first. But Dr. Alicia reframed it as something much simpler. Pleasure is a signal. It’s your body telling you it’s alive, that it can feel, that it hasn’t shut down entirely under the weight of everything you carry.
Ignoring that signal isn’t noble. It’s just another form of neglect.
I think about my clients — the parents trying to hold it together, the teenagers aging out of foster care, the people I sit with in their worst moments. I would never tell them that feeling good was selfish. I would never tell a single one of them that they had to earn comfort. But I told myself that story every day for fifteen years.
It’s been about seven months since that first Tuesday. I still see Dr. Alicia every other week. I still work in social services. The cases haven’t gotten easier. But something in me has shifted, and it’s not dramatic enough to notice from the outside. My apartment has candles now. I own bath salts. My Tuesday nights are protected. I fall asleep more easily and wake up less like I’m already behind.
The biggest change is the quietest one: I stopped asking for permission. Not from anyone specific — from the part of me that believed I hadn’t done enough to deserve rest. That voice is still there sometimes, especially after a hard day. But it’s quieter now. And when it speaks up, I have a new answer.
Not yet is no longer my default. My body is not a waiting room.
What I Would Tell Someone Who Feels the Same
If you’re reading this and you recognize yourself — if you’re the person who takes care of everyone and can’t remember the last time you felt good without guilt — I want you to know something. You are not broken for feeling that way. You learned it. Probably from people who meant well. Probably from a world that rewards self-sacrifice and side-eyes self-care, especially in men, especially in caregiving professions.
But you can unlearn it. Not all at once. Not perfectly. It might start with a therapist asking you an uncomfortable question. It might start with a Tuesday night and a bathtub and the courage to be alone with yourself without an agenda.
Healing doesn’t always look like talking. Sometimes it looks like a quiet room, warm skin, and the slow, almost embarrassing realization that you are allowed to feel good for no reason at all.
That’s my highlight time. Not a product. Not a moment of fireworks. Just a Tuesday night when I stopped treating my own body like it was someone else’s responsibility.
Have your own Hi-Moment to share? We’d love to hear it. Send your story to [email protected], or tag us on Instagram with #MyHighlightTime. You may also enjoy: Feeling Guilty About Self-Care? Why I Stopped Hiding and How to Actually Relax When You’re Finally Alone. All submissions are anonymized and edited with care.
