February - Be Nurtured - brainstorm your "treat list"

What I want for you in this class: "Find healthy options for treats that truly nurture you."

If you’re down and you feel you need something to get yourself “back to normal”, most people feel a strong temptation to go for “a treat”. And while there’s no denying a treat can be a temporary pick-me-up, unless you’ve also wisely chosen something that’s nurturing, you may find that your treats have a trick hidden inside them.

This is something I struggled with in my own life. When I was a child I keenly felt all the things lacking in my life due to the choices my parents made. Imagine my surprise as I got older and started talking to others and hearing this feeling is pretty universal, whatever the circumstances.

But, what’s more relevant for our conversation today is that when I finally was old enough to make my own way in the world, I also made some very poor choices. Subconsciously, I was trying to “make up for all the missed treats” to the child inside who still felt having a treat was the only way to be nurtured and loved.

As a logical person, I wanted to figure out the best course of action. I wanted to nurture the inner child, but I didn’t want my adult self to regret my choices.

I found it useful to brainstorm a list of all the possible “treats” I could ever imagine wanting, whether they were good for me or not. I let my imagination run wild … sleep for three days straight, eat a whole container of ice cream, spend a day in the pool floating around, turn off the lights and pretend I wasn’t home when the phone rang or there was someone at the door, buy myself an expensive gift, fly somewhere exotic and take a writing workshop with an author I admired, and so on and so on. I wrote page after page after page (who knew the inner child could imagine or want so much?).

When I was done, I logically knew I could never fill the nurture gap with an endless series of outrageous treats, so I’d have to come up with a way to nurture the child AND not damage the adult in the process.

I decided to cut up my pages and separate my imagined treats into categories. First I eliminated the impossible ones, those that were either too expensive or time-consuming to be practical in my immediate life.

Then I separated the rest into either: “unhealthy” or “healthy”.

Unhealthy treats were those with a downside ~ cost too much, bad for the body, hurt the people I loved. Goodbye to endless ice cream (which I’d been promised on my way to the operating room to have my tonsils out ~ the inner child never forgets!), goodbye to the exotic writing vacation, goodbye to ignoring everyone when they called!

Healthy treats, on the other hand, could be silly, freeing, creative, solitary (or not!), energetic, surprising, spontaneous. Hello to singing loudly out of tune at home, hello to finger painting, hello to engaging in conversation with interesting people on the street, hello to audiobooks in the tub.

And hello, every once in a while, to something on the margins: hello to a moderate amount of gelato instead of endless ice cream, hello to letting the phone calls go to message, hello to not-too-crazily expensive local writing workshops at the writers’ festival.

Treated AND nurtured is the real trick.

The Treat List Exercise: Take 10 minutes and very quickly brainstorm your own treat list. Really brainstorm! Don’t judge what’s coming up while you write. After 10 minutes, stop. Then circle and label each “treat” as either healthy or unhealthy. In your journal write about what it is about each treat that makes it healthy or unhealthy for you. Again, don't judge. Just look at it logically. If it helps, think of it as if you were making an argument for (or against) each treat for your best friend.

I was surprised the first time I did the Treat List Exercise the first time that part of me was still waiting for all that ice cream I was promised as an eight-year-old. The inner child really never forgets ... 

A few ways to get started in self-nurturing:

• Figure out, for YOU, which treats are “self-care” (which nurture you) and “soft-care” those that make you feel better in the moment but don’t serve your life goals

• Don’t be too hard on yourself ~ look how far you’ve come!

• Get support from people who love you and are on the same path as you

• Allow yourself some down time in every day. Put away the phone, turn off the TV, learn to be with yourself and listen to what you want in your life at the deepest level

• Make a space in your home that functions as a sanctuary. It doesn’t need to be huge. Sit in the space when you want to clear your head. Place objects that remind you of who and what you love where you can see them while sitting in your space.

• Let things go sometimes.

Next post: lots of ways to nurture yourself, plus some additional resources.