The Viable Alternative

Many people, especially men, when approached with the concept of learning how to nurture yourself would dismiss it as being “weak.” They would explain that nurturing yourself can be equated to babying yourself or self-coddling which causes you to let yourself off the hook of and cower from the trials, tribulations and challenges that inevitably arise in one’s life that have the potential to make you stronger, wiser and more powerful. They would further tell you that self nurturing enforces the role of you as a victim and gives you a platform to whine and complain.

People who think this way can be commended for wanting to take responsibility for their lives rather than play the victim role. They can also be commended for wanting to continuously grow and evolve into a stronger version of themselves without taking shortcuts or making excuses as to why they remain complacent in mediocrity.

However, as noble and praiseworthy as their intentions are, they’re greatly mistaken in their concept of self nurturing and the pivotal role it plays in becoming a grounded, SECURE, and authentic person of strength and power.

If you don’t learn how to properly nurture yourself, no matter how “strong” you get, there will always be cracks in the foundation upon which your strength is built such that your strength will never be pm truly on SOLID ground. Also, like a boat at sea with a tiny hole in it, you’ll always be hindered in one way or another because no matter how smooth the sailing may seem, water will always be coming into your boat such that from time to time you’ll have to take the necessary time out to clear the water out of the boat in order to prevent the ship from sinking.

Finally, like a speedboat attached to an anchor that’s attempting to take off, there’ll always be something threatening to pull you back or stifle your progress no matter how far you get.

Think back to the time when we were kids. At such a time, we were totally and completely dependent on our parents for nurturing, comfort, validation, approval, food, clothing, shelter, love and life itself.

In essence we were quite NEEDY.

As such, no matter the amount of well meaning adults we had around us, no matter how great and loving our parents were, from the child’s point of view, there were still some needs we had on an emotional level that were never met. This is not to due to the fact that the adults around us were “bad” per se, but for the simple reason that everyone, despite their best intentions, makes mistakes.

To add, no matter how “idyllic” our childhoods seemed, we’ve ALL had hurtful things happen to us that left us feeling sad, angry, shameful, fearful, unloved, etc. We may look at the situation now and think, “Oh that was nothing,” however, way back when, as children with unformed and impressionable minds fully dependent on our parents for just about everything, we didn’t see it as “nothing>’

Because as kids we had such limited tools and knowledge to understand the world around us and to properly deal with the things that happened to us, we’d both take personally a lot of the things that happened to us and we’d also compartmentalize the emotions we felt by shoving them deep into our psyche so that we didn’t have to deal with how uncomfortable they were.

Such were coping mechanisms we adopted in order to deal with such a “crazy,” “unpredictable” world.

The problem is that as years pass and we mature physically from children to adolescents to adults, (notice I said “physically” and not “emotionally”), we become saddled with a bunch of coping mechanisms that we UNCONSCIOUSLY carry out without remembering how they came about or from where they came. They’re so common to us that we don’t even question us doing them, we just unconsciously act on autopilot.

Though we’re not even aware of our behaviour, though we may not consciously remember the initial event that caused us to adopt the behaviour, and though we may not CONSCIOUSLY feel the pain associated with the event and the behaviour, on a deep unconscious level, our bodies are harbouring the pain and that pain triggers different thoughts and actions.

To cut to the chase, as hokey and airy fairy as it may sound to you, much of our behaviours, perspective and actions are run by our “wounded inner child” that is trying to meet its unmet needs and receive healing from its wounds.

Now you may protest and say, “That was a long time ago, I’m an adult now. How can me as a kid possibly affect me or be running my life?”

The simple answer to that is unhealed emotional pain doesn’t just disappear into thin air, rather subsequent memories, actions, behaviours and thoughts get built on top of it that are all in reaction to our inner child dealing with its pain in the best way it knows how.

Such deep, unconscious pain is what drives someone who felt weak as a child to become a top MMA fighter as an adult.

It’s what drives someone who felt ashamed for being poor as a child to become filthy rich as an adult.

It’s what drives someone who felt unseen by his parents to become a successful entertainer.

And of course, on the other end of the spectrum, it’s what drives all the self-destructive behaviour we see in our lives and the rest of the world from drug abuse, to alcoholism, to lack, to toxic relationships, to procrastination, to every other dysfunction under the sun.

The only way to “stop the madness” is to go deep and learn how to meet the needs of the inner child and heal its pain AT THE LEVEL OF THE CHILD. That means….gulp….learning how to nurture yourself.

You may have held 12 different MMA titles, or you may be able to knock out people three times your size, or you may have steel fortitude, ironclad determination, half a billion dollars in the bank, the courage of a lion, or whatever other quality that allows you to define yourself as strong, BUT how strong can you truly be if underneath all that is a wounded child crying for attention?

In one way or another, that pain is holding you back, and as long as it remains unaddressed, you’ll never be able to reach your FULL potential, and that is WEAK.

In one of my therapy sessions within the last three weeks, I was sharing with my therapist the utter need I felt to pay heed to that negative voice in my head, no matter how harmful and hurtful the things were that it was telling me. Logically I knew not to pay heed to it because it stole my confidence and self esteem away but emotionally I felt I HAD to listen to it.

It turns out that this voice represented my critical father, and as a child totally dependent on my parents for survival, I felt I had to believe everything my father said because I needed and trusted him to make sense of the world to me. If he was wrong, then I had no one else to turn to make sense of the world to me, and would have to make sense of it myself, but since I couldn’t trust myself because I was a defenseless child, I had to choose the “lesser of two evils” and believe everything my father said, no matter how toxic they were.

Years later this translated in me not being able to trust myself and feeling compelled to listen to my harmful inner dialog.

My therapist told me the solution to my issue was that I needed to learn to become the father to myself that my father never was to me. That means learning how to nurture myself in such a way that the inner child could heal and and subsequently feel safe in trusting me and not my father.

By learning to nurture myself, I’ll be allowed to heal my so I can live proactively, coming from the core of who I am, rather than living reactively from my wounded child.

Which option sounds stronger?

To properly nurture ourselves, we have to meet our inner child at its level by giving it what it felt it didn’t get from one or both of its primary caretakers. That may be love, assurance, approval, patience, acceptance, understanding, and yes, maybe even coddling. When this happens, the screaming of our wounded inner child that’s buried beneath our actions and thoughts resulting from its wounds can taper off and we can build the TRUE strength of building a connection to our core.

Our unattended wounded inner child tends to weaken us, self nurturing addresses its needs and helps it heal which leads to us building our strength on a proper foundation and in the process become truly self sufficient.

This is The Viable Alternative.

Hope this helps,

Ike Love