Growing up female in a Judeo-Christian tradition, I've been subject (as all of us have been) to the pervading notion that it's “nobler to give than to receive.” I've also been subject to our culture's cell-deep indoctrination that a woman's role is always that of primary nurturer to others or, as writer Anne Lamott would call it, emotional Sherpa to the multitudes; trained to serve herself last and only with what is left over after everyone else in need is replete.
My mother didn't fit this mold. She was a very damaged woman who needed much more mothering than she could ever provide to a child. My early survival depended on being attuned to the nuances of this disturbed woman's generally unpredictable psychic state. My safety depended on immediately sensing and accommodating to her needs.
My inner child was an undernourished starveling whose needs I learned to deny or ignore in order to feel safe. Instead, alertly sensitive to those around me, I'd tune in to the unnamed hungers/needs of the denied inner starvelings in anyone and everyone else. These starvelings I was, by my culture and personal history, encouraged and permitted to try to nourish (even if I had to do that covertly).
This awareness of others' denied neediness carried with it a grave sense of responsibility. If I could perceive someone's unacknowledged hunger, I felt compelled to do something for or about it. It never mattered if I was tired, overloaded, spent or at the edge of my own endurance. My responsibility was to respond to those needs that I perceived in others. (Or those needs that others revealed to me, however indirectly.) It was, as I'd learned with my mother, also essential that my help was given in a manner that did not force the person to become conscious either of their need for help or of my ministrations to that need.
I was forever being psychically grabbed-by-the-collar by the untended, unrecognized hungry waifs inside others. Most often these others were people like me. They were outwardly highly functional. They appeared (and had a stake in appearing) self-sufficient. As I involved myself in covert ministrations to the waif inside of these other people, my inner starveling could secretly sort of jump into the person I was tending, vicariously identify with the person and feel she, too, was secretly receiving some of my caring bounty.
Despite this secret identifying, my attempts (mostly covert) to help others move toward their own wholeness usually proved exhausting or insufficient and seemingly never-ending. After devoting some considerable time to this thankless and ineffective giving, I (and my unacknowledged inner starveling) would feel depleted, frustrated, unappreciated and despairing.
Sometimes, I'd even feel furious (secretly, of course) with the recipient of my giving: “if someone gave me what I was giving you I would have done so much more with it. I would have appreciated it, used it to help heal myself.” I would feel angry that nothing I did ever seemed good enough for them, ever seemed to fill them up or to be enough to heal them. Or, I'd be furious-if I had slipped and they'd noticed my giving at all-that they were disparaging or dismissing the value of whatever I was giving to them.
These cycles were a continuing, though less than conscious replay of my early, endless and unsuccessful attempts to covertly nourish my own mother into enough wholeness that she might then mother me. I was repeatedly and automatically giving away that for which I longed.
What I didn't understand then was that, if someone actually had offered me what I was longing for, I would have felt threatened by it. Because of my early training, I would have had considerable resistance to receiving it, to allowing it in. I would have felt bad and wrong. I would have felt both shamed and indignantly offended at being seen as needing anything at all.
In those years of my life, I also didn't understand that feeding the little starveling is for every one of us always an inside job. Whatever comes from outside of us can never reach across the time warp to that undernourished inner child. When others are trying to nourish her directly it doesn't work. She feels badly. What is given doesn't get inside of her to the empty place. She may see this as hateful evidence of her own insatiability. Or, she may see it as irritating/enraging evidence of the giver's incompetence at giving or even the giver's malevolent manipulation.
Only we ourselves can re-mother that under- or un-nourished self that wasn't properly nourished in the time that she was a physical child. It's only when we ourselves have opened a conscious connection with that little one within us that others' gifts can work to help support our own loving ministrations to her.
In my early forties I gradually began to grasp these truths. In those years I began to give myself permission to recognize and to care for the starving child inside of me. Not having that permission had set me up for the awful, fruitless subterfuge of trying secretly and vicariously to get for her some of the nourishment I was always offering to others (whether they wanted it or not). I'd felt shamed by being a vulnerable human being, by having any needs at all.
As I began to openly focus on giving to myself, to my Little One inside, I could see how much my giving to others had been always tainted by hidden expectations, strings and agendas. I expected people to use what I offered to make them selves better. I expected them, once better, to be able to give back to me what I had given to them. (Even though I now understood that I probably would not have been able to receive what they gave.) I could see that much of my supposedly selfless giving to others was the convoluted, less than conscious (and doomed to failure) attempt indirectly to get nourishment for myself.
When we give because we believe that everyone else's needs are always more compelling or important than our own, when we give to get, when we give to others what we really (but less than consciously) need and want for ourselves-we are depleting ourselves. Because we are, in these instances, giving with secret agendas and expectations, what we give is tainted and ultimately toxic for its recipient. And, all too often, what we are giving is what both that person and we ourselves each need to be giving to our own selves.
When we do the work to develop and act on the permission to give our own selves that devoted tending and caring, we are doing the real work of nourishing our inner starvelings. When we deepen our practice and hone our skills at loving and nurturing our selves, we become capable of filling the emptiness inside of our long abandoned little inner selves. We become less vulnerable to being grabbed-by-the-collar by the disowned neediness in others.
As we become adept at feeding and filling ourselves, we become able to truly gift others out of our inner abundance, out of overflow. This kind of giving often feels the same as just being ourselves: no effort, no agendas, no needing anything in return. The joy we feel in sharing ourselves, our overflow, our bountifulness is complete in itself. We offer our love, our energy, our caring and our being as giveaway rather than as give-to-get or give to fix. In this offering, it is possible for all of us to be nourished in appropriate, effective ways.
In releasing myself from my convoluted giving, I learned that the hardest piece of the work was giving up the belief/hope that anyone other than I could or would ever be the Mommy for whom my starveling ached and yearned. So much of my Mommy-ing of others had been my way of creating and sustaining the illusion that it might really be possible for one person to Mommy another person into wholeness. Sustaining that illusion allowed me to keep on hoping and believing that one day someone would at last appear to Mommy me into wholeness.
Giving up that hope/belief was for me and is for each of us intolerably challenging. We are forced to come to terms with the fact that if we didn't get the mothering we needed when it would have been age appropriate, we can never get it from anyone outside of our selves. We are filled with incalculable grief and intense rage. Yet, it's only when we can give up the hope that we reach the threshold from which we can at last begin to do the work to grow an inner Mommy who can finally provide us with what we've so been longing for.
Consider giving yourself permission to take exquisitely loving care of your very own self.
P.S. So many of your delicious e-mails send appreciations for the affirmation, support and nourishment you receive from the site. When I answer them, I don’t always remember to let you know that having your own deck of the Rememberings and Celebrations cards is a way to bring this same loving voice into your everyday world, to have it at hand as you need to remind yourself of the "real" truth moment to moment in the crazimakingness of the so-called real world!
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The card on this page is part of a set of 64 bookmark-size cards called the Rememberings and Celebrations deck. They can be used as an oracle, a meditation focus or a "book-in-pieces" to kindle and grow a compassionate, gentle, unconditionally loving, fiercely protective inner-Mother to help you carve safe healing space for your emerging self and for the wounded little ones inside.
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