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Don’t Let Negative Thoughts Zap Your Energy

Posted by on Every negative thought we have drains our energy. Every time we think negatively about our bodies and our weight or about something we’re doing, saying, creating or that someone else is doing etc. we drain ourselves of our valuable resource of life energy. You need your energy to discover and fully embrace and live your passion. How can you do that when you are focussed on what isn’t working or on what you don’t like or don’t want? Just try for one day to reframe any negative thought or judgement that you catch yourself having of yourself or others and you’ll notice you feel lighter and freer for just that one day of thinking more positively. When you catch yourself in a judgement or criticism say something like: “What do I want my life to be?” or “What do I want to bring into my life?” Remind yourself through a statement like that that “whatever you think about you bring about.”

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Posted in: 2010, CEDRIC Centre

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The Way You Talk to Yourself is Powerful

Posted by on The Authentic Self is the part of you that houses your feelings and your true essence. It is the real you. It is the one who is speaking when you are answering a question authentically about what you feel or what you need at any given time. It has the potential to be confident, courageous, secure and internally motivated. And it has the potential to be insecure, meek, fearful and a procrastinator. It all depends on how much trust your Authentic Self has in its worth and its right to have what it wants: to be peaceful and be happy. That’s why the communication you offer yourself internally is so important. You alone have the power to instantly change your world, simply by changing the way you communicate with yourself. That is a lot of power, and it is definitely worth learning how to access and utilize it.

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Posted in: 2010, CEDRIC Centre

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The Drill Sgt. and Co-Dependency

Posted by on The Drill Sgt. is caught up in co-dependency. He’s caught up in needing everyone else’s approval first and foremost. Then and only then will he let you attend to any esteem or self-respect needs of your own. Well, you know firsthand that there is absolutely no way to meet everyone’s needs. There is always someone who will be unhappy or frustrated or want more or less, or something other than what you’re offering.

Understanding this point and how it impacts you is very important. You see, when you really get that your focus on meeting the needs of others is harming you and preventing you from meeting your own needs, thus forcing you to numb out with your food and body focus coping strategies, you will begin to allow for the possibility that you might better serve yourself and others by attending to your needs first. Now as far as the Drill Sgt. is concerned, I have just committed a sacrilege. "Meet your own needs before you meet those of others?" He says. "That’s a sure path to ostracism, judgement and vanity." So of course he’s going to have some resistance and uncertainty about a new way of thinking. It’s time to ask yourself how well the old way of thinking is working for you.

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Posted in: 2010, CEDRIC Centre

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Conscious Competence

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Conscious Competence



The healing journey begins with conscious awareness. We must be aware of what we’re doing in order to change behaviours, thoughts and feelings that are not serving our goals for health and happiness. Conscious Competence is a key step in this process.

Initially, frequently our awareness will come after the fact – after the binge or after the purge or after the bad body thought.

That’s not a failure or a sign of your ability to recover, it’s simply the natural process of changing human thinking and behavioural processes. Like it or lump it – that’s how it goes.

We start out in a place of unconsciousness and we don’t really even know what isn’t working for us.

Then we come to a place of consciousness about what isn’t working – for example, our way of perceiving ourselves and our relationship with food – but we still don’t seem to be able to change anything about it just yet. This is a very uncomfortable stage of change called “conscious incompetence.”

Even the term “conscious incompetence” makes our Drill Sgt. want to cringe and deny that anything is wrong – he’s such a perfectionist! But, hang in there. If you can allow yourself to admit that you do not have a perfect grasp on yourself when it comes to self-esteem and your relationship with food, then you can actually be successful in changing those patterns and step into a wonderfully esteem-enhancing place called “conscious competence.”

And as long as you don’t let yourself buy into the story that there is something wrong with you because you’re thinking and feeling and behaving as you are you’ll find it much easier to open yourself to getting help and change will come more rapidly.

Once you get tools and support to understand why you do those harmful behaviours or feel so anxious or insecure or depressed in the first place you can begin to change the way you think and respond to life.

This is the stage of conscious competence. In this stage your conscious effort is required in order for you to use new ways of thinking and behaving instead of the old default ones, but it gets easier each time and soon becomes your natural approach to life (unconscious competence) and the old one just doesn’t fit or make sense any more. 

If you’re ready for change and you want to make sure you’re not wasting your time or energy – reach out and let us help you.

Love Michelle
mmorand@cedriccentre.com

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Posted in: 2010, CEDRIC Centre, Complete Recovery, Relationship with Food, Relationship with Self

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Loving You and Letting Go

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It’s clear if you want to have success in letting go of using food to cope, you have to first address the connection you have with yourself. You have to love and regard yourself positively before you’ll really care enough about yourself to change your coping behaviours and make honoring choices around food, friendship and self-care. Loving yourself means that you believe you are worthwhile. The Drill Sgt. makes it very hard for you to love yourself because he keeps telling you everything that is wrong with you and why you will never get to where you want to be. The problem is you believe him. You’ve been listening to him for so long that you don’t even realize that there is another part of you in there who actually has the power to do things differently. It’s time to begin to connect with that piece of yourself and to allow that part to invite the Drill Sgt. to share with you his concerns in a way that allows you to hear them without harm. ?

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Posted in: 2010, CEDRIC Centre

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Goal Setting and the Inner Child

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If there is any part of you that resists engaging in the process of goal setting, I’ll bet it’s your inner child who is deathly afraid of schedules and structure. You see, your inner child is very, very accustomed to the Drill Sgt.’s high-pressure tactics and motivation by criticism. And she is so very reluctant to set herself up for any potential failure. To your inner child, having a clearly-established goal, especially around food and body stuff, is like walking into the lion’s den. It is to be avoided at all costs. Your inner child’s reason for all this resistance is quite understandable. It is directly related to the perfectionism that we carry as disordered eater’s (which is personified by the Drill Sgt.). We received the message from key people in our lives, that we are not acceptable as we are, and many of us have been carrying this belief since we were small children. In our efforts to distance ourselves from this painful thought, we strove to be the best. And so, in a misguided effort to prove our value, we strive to do more, be more, produce more etc., repeatedly compromising our needs to gain that elusive external approval. Take some time to consider how you might meet the needs of both the inner child and the Drill Sgt. With conscious awareness, you can remove the stress around goal setting and step out of the avoidance cycle.

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Posted in: 2010, CEDRIC Centre

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Clothes and Self-Esteem

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Wearing comfortable clothes mean you’re not punishing yourself any longer and harming yourself with truckloads of bad body thoughts. Nothing will make you think nasty thoughts about your body faster and more frequently than tight or uncomfortable clothing. And if you’re one of many who use food to cope with your feelings, then your frustration, disgust, anger, sadness, fear, etc., that is triggered by your bad body thoughts will lead you to eat for comfort faster than anything else! So, if you’re resisting buying comfortable clothes because you don’t feel deserving or you want to “motivate” yourself to lose weight, please remind yourself that this line of thinking is all Drill Sgt. and no compassion, and that all you’ve ever gained by listening to the Drill Sgt. is low self-esteem and more weight. Unmet needs are at the bottom of your food and body image focus. Now it’s time to create a safe and respectful environment for yourself so you can meet your needs without harming yourself in the process.

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Posted in: 2010, CEDRIC Centre

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The Diet Mentality Trap

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The Diet Mentality is a way of thinking that has been ingrained in us by messages we receive from our family and friends, from advertisements and media messages, and from diet and exercise programs that we may have tried in the past or may currently be pursuing. These views about how we should look, feel and behave have become a part of our way of life. Without these guidelines, many of us feel like we would have no restrictions and would just let go and “go crazy” – eating whatever we wanted with no ability to control ourselves. What would follow, we fear, is uncontrollable weight gain. Remember that diet’s don’t work and that 90% of eating disorders begin with dieting. So if you catch yourself thinking or behaving in any of these ways, just pause and remind yourself that this is The Diet Mentality and that it just keeps you stuck in overeating. Let it go. If you can remember that compassion and self-trust is the key to overcoming overeating, you can begin to trust that you are doing the best you can, and that is enough.

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Posted in: 2010, CEDRIC Centre

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Negative Self-Talk is a Trigger

Posted by on Your negative self-talk is a coping strategy. It is simply a tool you use to try to create a sense of control and security in a situation which triggers you to feel unsettled. At the start of your recovery process and while you are learning to be connected to your feelings and needs in the present, there are lots of reasons for you to be feeling anxious or using your harmful coping strategies. There is a definite correlation between the unsettling present moment experience, future thought, or memory and your negative self-talk, feelings of anxiety and use of food and body focus. The sooner you understand this, the sooner you will catch yourself heading down any of those old harmful paths and redirect your course to what is really going on. Underlying issues are what trigger coping strategies. Once you set about the task of identifying what those underlying triggers are and heal them, you’ll be free from the Drill Sgt., the old core beliefs, and the use of food to cope.

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Posted in: 2010, CEDRIC Centre

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The Need, Thought, Feeling Equation

Posted by on Feelings are signals from your body about what you need or want. They are not good or bad, right or wrong. They just are. You have a need which triggers a thought, and immediately a feeling arises. A spiritual leader by the name of Ramana, refers to this pattern as “thought/feeling bundles”. The thoughts arise from the sense of an unmet need, and immediately, with seemingly no space in between, a feeling is elicited, and to the extent that we are conscious of them, the feeling is felt! It is practically impossible to have a thought without a feeling attached to it. And it is not necessary to the healing process to try to separate them. What is important is that we begin to trust – to know on a gut level – that what we are feeling has arisen from a thought which was triggered by a need. That’s all. When we absolutely know this, we no longer spin our wheels and harm ourselves by judging the feeling. Instead, we just ask ourselves “What need do I have that is unmet right now, and what can I do about it?”

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Posted in: 2010, CEDRIC Centre

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