Guest author Melissa B. writes each week in a spiral-bound workbook she got to help her unhook emotionally from sugar. This is what came up for her when working through a chapter on nurturing:
The personal insight for me this week has been recognizing that discovering my needs means I have a choice to do something about them. I can take care of them, or stuff them down with food.
I guess I’m ready to start doing something about my needs.
The issue is that I don’t like to ask for help from anyone, not even my husband. I have this sense that I have to take care of it all, whatever “it” is. It’s partly to avoid being disappointed by those who let me down by not giving me what I needed in the past. It’s also not wanting to impose on someone else for my benefit — which I guess gets at the issue of self worth.
“I don’t want to bother others because they’re so busy,” I say to myself.
This is the kind of unhealthy thinking that got me into a state of burnout as a pastor.
There’s an issue of trusting others and being vulnerable — which is probably the deeper layer of the onion for me. I have huge trust issues. I have never felt comfortable being vulnerable with others since I was very young because when I have allowed myself to do so, it’s usually with the wrong people and I get taken advantage by them.
As I’ve thought about this attitude, I can see that one way to look at it is to think about the joy I get from helping others and see my needs as a way of offering that opportunity for joy to someone else. It’s hard for me to do because it means giving up control.
By not allowing others to help me, I keep control over the situation — determining ahead of time that someone else is too busy or whatever to get involved. So I don’t allow that person to make the decision for him/herself. By doing that, I isolate myself from others, and thereby turn to food / sugar as a means to fill the void of loneliness.
Food and sugar are how I deal with the stress that comes from having the perception that I have to do everything myself. Also, busyness keeps me from having to acknowledge my needs, and therefore it all becomes a self-perpetuated cycle.
The issue of trust may be at the heart of the matter.
And so this session on nurturing ourselves is very important to me as it helps me to see that everyone has needs and to need is part of what it means to be human. God created us to be in community with one another and to deny my needs is more or less a form of arrogance. It’s living a life detached from myself. Neither arrogance nor detachment are satisfying.
Therefore, I would like to approach understanding my needs from a place of curiosity and as a means of getting to know myself on a deeper level. This is something you touched on in the grounding section, but applies also here to the need for self nurturing. Being curious about myself, this makes it a little less scary. I’ll try to be kinder to myself, and that will be the basis for my work going forward.
