Fulfillment and Self Nourishment
Self-nourishment is a term that describes a person's approach to wants and needs. When the natural expression and innocent pursuit of wants and needs cause a problem with early caregivers, a person learns and develops unnatural and generally unsatisfying ways to pursue needs and wants.
It will probably be beneficial in this topic to discuss the semantic issue between 'needs' and 'wants.' If there existed in English a word that simply meant both, I would use that word. The distinction is not important for the idea presented here. Unfortunately, often there is a moral undertone to the distinction. To many 'wants', are things to be curtailed and only needs are legitimately pursued. This is a false distinction perpetuated by the predicament of many children facing caregivers who feel they don't have enough for the child, but who at the same time are uncomfortable saying no. That is, our desire presents problems when caregivers or loved ones do not feel adequate. Desire becomes associated with shame and rejection.
Clearly some things are essential to survival and could be described as needs, and some things are inessential to survival, and could be described as wants. To organize an entire way of life around that distinction, though, shows a troubled relationship to desire. All people have a right to receive sometimes and get sometimes. Receiving is taking what some one wants us specifically to have, if we want it. Getting is asking someone for something they have and we want. Some examples of needs:
- To be accepted
- To be secure and relatively free from threat
- To belong, to identify oneself as part of a group
- To be approved and recognized for the unique way in which one functions
- To respond freely and be responsible.
- To determine what one will do, or to move toward self-determination
When early experience teaches that wants and needs are problems, adaptation forms into two paths, 1) self-sufficiency (which is an illusion) and 2) emotional dependency (which for adults cannot work). The two paths can be present in one person together.
Self-sufficiency is the attempt to dissociate wants and needs from the co-operation of other people. Primarily, we try to supply our wants and needs ourselves. This usually involves trying to limit our wants and needs to some minimal level (self-deprivation). This of course never fully works, and when other people must be involved, we insist that other people's role in our needs is mandated by rules, 'what is right', or by the obligation of what we have done for them. With self-sufficiency, asking for or accepting help is always a problem. That is why hearing no is so upsetting to some people. More than the denial of what is asked for, the disruption of the illusion of self-sufficiency causes deep anxiety.
Emotional dependency is the attempt to dissociate wants and needs from oneself. Other people are seen as the origin of our wants and needs, and of course it becomes the duty of others to fulfill them. This is of course a stance appropriate to the very young. When taken by an adult, who also of course wants full autonomy, it tends to produce chaos in relationships.
Self-nourishment is taking ownership of wants and needs, while at the same time accepting that other people, in part, have a role in their satisfaction outside our control. It constitutes a certain faith that the world, in general, is a fulfilling place, and also a faith, that some relationships are possible that are very fulfilling if not perfectly fulfilling. In practical terms, the idea has two parts: 1) taking care of oneself, not to prove that one can, but to increase comfort, and 2) actively seeking good things from others, recognizing that "no" is possible but not inevitable.
To some extent, everyone wants their wants and needs to be fulfilled without asking. For someone to already know our needs, perhaps even before we do, has a certain feeling of 'rightness' about it. This is in fact what a responsive mother does for an infant or a very small child. It helps the infant come to know better his or her wants and needs, and if as adults we also are not sure of our wants and needs, it can seem that we deserve the same. However, it is just not possible for anyone to do it reliably for another adult. Occasionally, the needs or wants of others can be anticipated and fulfilled before and without their asking, but to organize a relationship around this rarity is very unstable and produces resentment. Adults must build relationships on self-nourishment, and then perhaps enjoy the 'mothering' of others once in a while, as it happens, by chance.
Self-nourishment is a stance that can apply to all activities in life. The following are some concrete examples, however, that may be worth suggesting:
- Cleaning the area in which one lives: Many people have described to me an irony: they clean or maintain an area for a living, but they cannot clean for themselves. Starting to clean for ourselves perhaps often stalls because it evokes strong but unclear feelings of deprivation or anger from the lack of nurture from others. The benefit is not just the result of a clean area but also the self-building that comes from working through these feelings.
- Taking very good care of possessions. The reasons and results perhaps are similar as general cleaning above. This also very simply regulates the problem of having too many ( or too few) possessions. Taking care of things puts us into the "here-and-now" The state of being in the here-and-now has been described as 'mindfulness'.
- Home cooking. Reheating processed food, or any racing to get food onto a plate is not cooking in this sense of course. Food is love, and cooking with one's own hands is a way to bring love to oneself and others. It is the quintessential self-nourishment. Cooking also is guided by the senses rather than ideas, and is a good way to get oneself out of one's head and into (or back to) one's senses. Very simple cooking is perhaps still avoiding the issue, and on the other end of the spectrum, very elaborate cooking may still be an ego-trip.
- Finishing tasks and projects: Many projects are begun with elation. Once the heady feeling subsides, the demands of the task evoke feelings of struggle or worries of incompetence. A pattern of starting many things and not finishing may be a bad habit of abusing the good feeling at the start of a project. Having many unfinished things however, creates a drag on the sense of freedom and ease. Finishing a project may force us to work through the anxiety of being imperfect, and provides a feeling (probably the actuality) of being able to breathe more. Stopping a project cleanly and completely when interest is lost is usually better than permanent postponement.
- Accept and Use 'Learning Periods': Difficulties in self-nourishment often arise, when in early experience there was a message given to children that they should be precocious or a high-achieving. This is essentially a message to children to hurry up and grow up, and become self-sufficient. This message is rarely deliberate, but arises often from the parents' own difficulties with self-nourishment, which can lead to a strong conscious determination to nurture the child well but also unconscious resentment and unconscious fear of being able to really do that. Parents who feel secure do not hurry children.
A different unspoken message is that children should bother parents as little as possible, but it has the same stiflingly effect on exploration. In both cases, children respond by favoring things that they can learn quickly and avoiding things that they cannot learn quickly. Commonly under this type of stress the types of things that can be learned quickly are informational like academic subjects and the things that take longer to learn are physical or expressive, like dance, sports, and movement. This can lead to an estrangement from the body and from 'unconscious faculties' that are a big part of growth, and this estrangement compounds the problem.
Later, as a result, many adults give up very quickly when they cannot master something. They very quickly judge themselves as 'incompetent' in a particular area. Innate abilities vary of course, but when it comes to the capacity for creative expression, or the capacity for love, or joy in movement, stratifying ability in this way is clearly senseless. A learning period consists of more than artificially suspending judgment. It consists of having faith in growth itself. This faith is manifested by dropping the demand for quick results. The experience of learning must be an end in itself--self-discovery.
Learning something different usually requires changes in the body and brain that cannot be willfully forced or replaced by information. It takes time. Pleasure may be less evident in the beginning because mastery is often part of pleasure. Still, if an activity is pursued out of some intrinsic interest, a learning period should still have some satisfaction. If a plateau is reached, it could be that anxiety about succeeding is causing the same 'mistakes' to be made over and over again. But also, an apparent plateau could represent a period when internal changes are slowly happening.
- Go for more than crumbs. In this context 'crumbs' are a symbol for things that are left out, or offered to any taker. Crumbs can be quite good, but crumbs do not require receiving, or getting as described above. In an affluent culture it is possible to obtain a fair amount without really asking, except human connection cannot be obtained that way. Sometimes we turn down offers of things we know we want because to receive exposes us the limits of self-sufficiency and brings on anxiety. Self-nourishment comes from working through this anxiety and having a different type of experience.