I recently unlocked a nourishment barrier and here’s what happened

One of the strangest paradoxes I’ve discovered on my own ‘growth’ journey is the “nourishment barrier.” The basic concept is this: when you were small and certain needs were unmet, you made up a story to protect yourself from how painful it felt. Often, it sounded a little something like, “I don’t actually need that thing.” As you grew up, you may have discovered that you really do need the thing. But for some reason, when people actively offer you what you’re needing, you cannot see or feel it. You might ignore it. You might make up a reason why it doesn’t quite do the trick. The need still feels ‘unmet.’

Nourishment barriers are tricky little things. They are designed to go unnoticed to the point where even if they get called out, you will deny, deny, deny.

Often, the nourishment barrier is layered under a series of stories you’ve told yourself about who you are and what you need. Stories that may not be true, but that you believe in your bones.

If you haven’t heard of nourishment barriers (you’d be in the majority) and you’re curious to see how they manifest and wreak havoc on a person’s life, read on:

I recently unearthed a major nourishment barrier.

First you’re going to need some background:

As a kid, I had a deep need for connection (as most kids do), but there was a lot going on in my family. My folks split when I was six and my mom moved us across an ocean, so I didn’t see my dad much until he moved closer a few years later. Needless to say, my parents were going through their own stuff. They didn’t have the emotional capacity to focus as intently on the ins-and-outs of my young life.

There are trade-offs to feeling a little bit alone. On the one hand, I became pretty good at ‘stuff.’ I explored my neighborhood and the woods nearby on my own terms and learned how to use my imagination and my hands to craft games and toys and entertainment. I was bored a lot—and as it turns out, that’s a good thing. As an adult, I feel really capable. I learn quickly, relatively good at DIYing, and can come up with creative solutions to problems without too much stress. I still use my imagination for all kinds of things and that feels good.

On the other hand, I felt really unseen as a kid. This is not a unique experience, but it was mine. Desperate as I was for connection, I was the kid who would cry out, “look at me! look at me!” whenever I learned something new. I remember once, on a particularly ‘boring’ day, drawing up a board game on my garage floor, not really sure what I was doing because I was seven, and wishing someone was there to help me figure it out as a team. I so wanted to be seen. I so wanted for someone to delight in my human experience, however insignificant it was. I wanted my parents to watch me unsolicited and get curious. “I love watching you play—how did you think to [do that thing]?” That rarely happened. But, it was the 80s, so I’m not really sure it happened for anyone. Empathy-based parenting didn’t exactly have a mainstream hold.

So here I am with this need, right? A need for presence, connection, and to really feel seen. But for a few pivotal years, my dad was absent and my mom was going through it. Nobody was resourced enough to offer this to me without me explicitly asking for it—as an adult, I get that. As a kid, I was heartbroken. It felt painful to think that my parents were disinterested in my human experience. It still feels painful to write about it, which indicates that this was very deep, very tender need. So my psyche made up a story to protect me from that pain, and it went a little something like this: “To be seen and celebrated is dangerous. I am safest when I am unseen.”

Kind of crazy, right? To feel threatened by the thing that I wanted most? But I loved my parents. They did their best and I knew they loved me. So it felt safer to believe that they were doing this for my benefit than it was to think that they didn’t care. My parents were my safety as a kid. So thing I craved most, the thing they didn’t notice I needed, became unsafe.

That’s how nourishment barriers work.

The problem with nourishment barriers is that the tender needs do not disappear. I continued to crave connection through being seen. In fact, I openly wanted it. But my subconscious belief that it was dangerous kept getting in the way. So I was creating two conflicting narratives. (1) “I need to feel seen to feel loved” (the original narrative), and (2) “It is dangerous to be seen.”

Now imagine what happened when people offered to ‘see’ me? I’m kind of at an impasse, right? On the one hand, “wow, it’s finally happening!” and on the other, “this isn’t safe!”

Which of those two statements do you think is going to have a stronger hold on me? The part that feels good, or the part that feels threatened? Human beings are wired to put safety above all else (because: survival), so, yeah, the latter.

Here’s how that manifested in terms of relationships:

As a teenager, I would experience intense crushes on the boys I liked: dreaming, wishing, craving they’d see me in a romantic light. The moment any one of them indicated an ounce of reciprocation, I ran for the hills. I’d make up some story about how he wasn’t really that cool/smart/fun/attractive, and I’d completely turn my attention to someone else. (Not healthy). After a while of playing cat-and-mouse, I simplified the process and began targeting romantic partners who were emotionally unavailable. That way, even when we started dating, I’d feel like I was chasing my unmet need for connection. I found people who were too distracted by their own stuff to offer me the unconditional connection I craved. And, honestly, it was kind of a misery cycle. A self-induced emotional nightmare. What fun!

Now I know what you’re thinking: but Killian, you’re married! What the heck? And here’s the thing: my husband is, like, truly a gift from the universe. Someone up there was like, “girl, you deserve to feel loved so we are going to gift you this person who can do that for you, but you will have to learn to unravel that love.” Without invading his privacy, I will say that my husband and I have been on a JOURNEY. We started dating at age 24. We were babies. We connected on all the things, but we were both a little ‘unavailable’ in our own ways. This made it really exciting at first. But as things got serious, it got uncomfortable for me. As his offerings for genuine connection started to naturally unravel, I would put my guard up. Thankfully, we embraced therapy—and this is just one facet of our relationship—but I had to work VERY hard to hold space for my discomfort when it came to really feeling seen and accepted for who I am. To this day it is the biggest thing that I struggle with in relationship. And isn’t that wild? Like, my biggest problem is that I struggle to receive love?! The one thing relationships are all founded on!? It baffles me still. But THIS IS WHAT NOURISHMENT BARRIERS DO.

Here’s how it manifested in terms of my career:

Something you should know about me is that I am a very good employee. Awkward to say because be humble, but it’s true. You want me on your team. This is in part because I am chasing connection, right? I want to be seen and valued for my work. And thanks to my being alone a lot as a kid, I know how to get creative when it comes to solving problems. That said. When I really get on a roll and start to feel seen for my work, I have been known to shut down. I lose interest in what I’m doing and come up with some kind of excuse about how it no longer serves or satisfies me. I change jobs. When I started to pursue my own thing and began selling gratitude calendars, Buzzfeed randomly gave them a mention and it attracted hundreds of people to my site. My calendars were taking off and I could have capitalized on it. I could have worked hard to keep that audience by offering similar products, sending consistent newsletters, etc. But guess what? Yep, I didn’t! The amount of attention I received DIDN’T. FEEL. SAFE. I was getting exactly what I wanted and it didn’t feel safe, so I started making excuses about how gratitude calendars weren’t my bread-and-butter and I wanted to pivot into other content. I look back on that now and I can see it all so clearly: I was running scared.

These conflicting needs (for connection and safety) created a ‘chase’ cycle. I got so good at the chase. I couldn’t stand getting caught in it.

So how does a nourishment barrier get unearthed?

Unearthing our nourishment barriers can be the trickiest part of healing. Our psyches and our nervous systems rely on them to help us feel safe. We do not want to admit they exist, because if we do, we’ll have to let a guard down—and letting that guard down can be terrifying and even painful.

If you turn the mirror on yourself without judgment, it will be a lot easier to admit where you might be harboring a nourishment barrier. If you look hard enough, you’ll find it. But for most people, the nourishment barrier appears after consciously trying to meet those tender needs you’re unconsciously avoiding. You start to notice that even as you are witnessing yourself ‘getting what you want,’ it’s not landing.

it helps to know what a nourishment barrier IS

It took me a very long time to uncover this particular barrier. I’d known for years that when people expressed admiration for me, I either pushed them away or brushed off the sentiment. But I hadn’t connected all the dots. I didn’t know what nourishment barriers were until just a few years ago. I hadn’t fully admitted, either, that I wanted the admiration. It was all so abstract. I knew I wanted some kind of connection that wasn’t getting met. But I had this story running through me that nobody wanted to offer it to me. I wasn’t fully noticing the moments where it was being offered and I was shutting it down.

I wasn’t noticing.

If there’s one thing a meditation practice is good for, it’s the art of noticing. One day, not terribly long ago, actually—I was having a conversation with my mom, who was expressing an unmet need of her own, and I noticed something: I noticed myself. I noticed myself in her behavior, her mannerisms, her complaints. It was a little bit jarring, to say the least, because I was relating to the aspects of her I struggle with. (Actually, it wasn’t a little bit jarring: it was an extremely uncomfortable out-of-body experience). But the beautiful thing about seeing yourself in someone else is that you can also more easily see how they’re telling themselves a story that doesn’t correspond with your own reality. I saw that she was expressing an unmet need, but I could think of numerous occasions when I witnessed other people, including myself, attempt to meet that need. It’s not that nobody wanted to offer it to her, it’s that she wasn’t absorbing it when they did.

And I had this light-bulb hit, equally as uncomfortable, that maybe I was doing this, too. Maybe I was feeling like ‘nobody cared about me enough to XYZ…’ when, in actuality, a LOT of people care about me enough to ‘ALL THE THINGS.’ Suddenly I was flooded with memories of moments when people connected with me exactly as I’d needed them to. When people had delighted in me simply for being me. It was clear. I knew it was happening at the time, but couldn’t absorb it. For about a week after that conversation with my mother, my meditations looked like big, messy, releases. Lots of tears, lots of grief, lots of freedom.

The part of me that discovered the nourishment barrier felt empowered. The part that that had to let it go grieved. To relearn a story that’s so intricately tied to your sense of safety is terrifying. How can I believe it is safe to have other people delight in me for being me when my whole life I believed it was dangerous?

Dissolving a Nourishment Barrier

I think it’s really important to emphasize that as with all nourishment barriers, there was a time when mine did serve me. It saved me from the pain and heartache of an unmet need. It allowed me to feel connected to my parents even though it wasn’t the kind of connection I craved. I have to honor that this nourishment barrier did serve me. I have to honor it because, otherwise, I might resent it, and resentment is a ‘holding onto’ feeling. Holding onto it wouldn’t allow me to let it go. The truth is there really is no “bad” or “good,” just trade-offs. The trade-off of feeling lonely as a kid is that I increased my creativity and love of learning. The trade-off of this nourishment barrier is that I was able to feel bonded with my parents when I needed it most.

This is where the art of noticing—and the art of gratitude—come through.

I know a few things now about healing trauma. The first is that the nervous system doesn’t shift course overnight. If it thinks something is unsafe, it will continue to trigger fight/flight until it is proven, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that it is safe. Even after loads of proof, its suspicion can linger. It may never fully ‘turn off,’ and that’s okay. Because it can soften. And it softens with proof of safety. The second thing I’ve learned is that ‘proof’ can start small. It’s hard to go from ‘unsafe’ to ‘safe’ on the fly. Sometimes you need a neutral stepping stone. Instead of “this thing is unsafe,” you can try, “this thing just is. It is neither safe nor unsafe. It exists.”

So I started paying attention. When my husband offered words or actions that fed my need for connection, I noticed how it felt in my body. I noticed the desire to joke or brush it off. I noticed the tightness and discomfort in my chest if I didn’t brush it off. And I decided to stay with it. I knew, rationally, that I was safe. But my body felt threatened. So I would think to myself, “I’m noticing my discomfort, but I really want to be able to absorb this moment. So right now, I’m just going to notice that this happened.” It was neither good nor bad, it just was. I wasn’t ignoring it. But I wasn’t absorbing it, either. In neutralizing the moment, I was gently teaching my nervous system that even as I sat in the discomfort, the threat was not coming.

Gratitude is an ‘absorbing’ feeling.

The next step I would take, when I had time to be alone, was to meditate on what it would feel like to receive connection and feel safe with it. It’s easier for me to teach my nervous system the sensation of safety when I’m meditating, because it’s so abstract and it’s also within my control. It doesn’t trigger my fight/flight this way. This doesn’t work for everyone, but it helps me a great deal. So I started a mantra for myself: “it is safe when other people delight in my human experience.” “it is safe for people to express affection for me.” And while in meditation, I would envision people offering me the experience I was looking for. I would re-play the childhood moments where I craved connection, and imagine what it would have felt like to receive it. And then I sat in that feeling. I expressed gratitude for that feeling. Just as resentment is a ‘holding on’ feeling, gratitude is an ‘absorbing’ feeling. That’s why it’s so powerful, it allows you to absorb the light, the joy, the healing balm.

A funny thing happened the more that I practiced this—I started to notice how frequently connection was offered to me in my every day life. I had spent so long thinking the well had run dry, when actually it was overflowing. True proof that perspective is reality.

Healing is a practice

As I’m writing this, I have not yet ‘healed’ this wound. I have not erased the nourishment barrier. And it may never fully fade, it is so deeply engrained. I notice that when I stop my practice of noticing and sitting with gratitude in meditation, I easily sink back into old patterns of feeling like ‘nobody cares/delights in me’ etc. I am still wading through this inner evolution, my feet still in the mud. But the further I walk, the lighter I feel. The easier it gets. If I stop, I sink again. So this has to be a consistent practice.

That said, I have shifted my relationship to my awareness. That part is permanent. My perspective regarding my entire life, in some ways, has changed. I feel more cared for, which is an incredibly comforting, energizing, joyful feeling—when I really allow myself to sit with it. Even if I still struggle with the in-the-moment offerings for connection, I am still able to feel, from a rational birds-eye-view, how connected I am.

The only way to continue feeling this way is to continue the practice of noticing. And to continue sitting with gratitude for it when I do, so that I can absorb it. Eventually, I know that I’ll start to feel safer in-the-moment. I’ll be able to absorb another person’s offer more immediately, rather than having to reflect on it later. But for now, these baby steps feel monumental. My heart is full. My inner child is healing.