Have Breakfast for Dinner: It’s More Important Than You Know

Source: Ryan Moreno/Unsplash

A few months ago, I began my healing journey.

If you’re thinking this article isn’t for you because healing is only for those who have suffered trauma of some sort, you need to keep reading.

Healing is what we do to come back home to our true selves—the essence of who we are. I call it the inner child. You may want it your core or authentic self or your soul.

As such, healing is for all of us because life turns us away from ourselves.

Think of a little baby when it enters the world. So pure that it feels like a dirty finger would leave a mark. So fragile that a loud sound rattles its calm.

Then, the darts begin. And they keep on coming. No one is spared the dents and scratches of life.

That little baby, which you and I once were, twists a little this way and bends a little that way. It gets reshaped into what the world wants, which is very different from what it wants because the world isn’t made for its flourishing.

Most of us arrive at the gates of mid-adulthood feeling like strangers to ourselves.

We wonder who we are and what we want to do in this life. As a coach, I’ve sat across hundreds of women who want help finding their purpose.

What they really need is to heal the inner child that feels wrong or bad or inadequate in some way. They need to make it feel loved and seen for who it is and worthy of what it wants. They need to liberate it of the messages it received for so long that they’ve morphed into an inner patriarchy that’s sucked the joy out of life.

In my younger days, this inner patriarchy took the form of an eating disorder that nearly killed me more than once. My inner child was burdened with the task of making sure I ate minimally because it had come to believe that eating less was the only way to win love.

Later, it changed roles into what I can best describe as a tyrannical director of a movie, walking around with a clapperboard that came down with every minor mistake. Take two turned into Take 102, and here I was in my 50s, still waiting for my life to roll.

If you relate to any of this—to patterns of perfecting and pleasing, to pushing and proving, to controlling and comparing, then smile and tell yourself that this is your purpose at this time.

You’re being called to pamper your inner child. To love it unconditionally. To value its needs and asks. And to prize it as the most beautiful thing you’ve been tasked to protect.

For me, this means having breakfast for dinner when I feel like it. To stop at the pastry shop on the way home because pastries are not rewards for “being good”; they’re expressions of love.

It’s writing what comes to me rather than what I should write (while my inner judge sits atop my shoulder and corrects every thought even before it makes it to the page).

It’s sleeping in because I don’t have a morning call or being unproductive without feeling guilty. Or feeling guilt and refusing to entertain it. Even better, watching its drama as though it were a silly little character in a comedy show.

It’s stopping on my morning walk to have a conversation or pet a dog or take pictures of that one street where I love to walk as the sun rises through the trees and shines on the dew-laden grass.

It’s to live in the world that Mary Oliver describes as “announcing your place in the family of things.” It’s to feel like I belong and to show up grounded in that truth because I know that when we don’t, we become demanding. And we start proving.

At the end of the day, it’s about loving myself enough to honor the needs and asks of my inner child as though they matter. And you know what I’m finding is that most of what it wants is so innocent and harmless. The kind of asks that a secure parent would rarely resist.

Personal Perspectives Essential Reads

What If Our Departed Loved Ones Are Just an Inch Away?

Grieving the Death of a Child Diminishes With Time

I’m learning to be that kind of parent to my inner child so that it trusts me enough to guide and correct it when needed. I invite you to do the same in whichever way feels right for you!