Author Archive
Posted by Cedric on March 9, 2011
If there is any part of you which feels resistant to the concept of goal setting, it won’t be your Drill Sgt. He loves setting goals. He loves creating rigid guidelines and ridiculous expectations to “support” you to achieve your needs for security, acceptance and esteem. No, any part of you that feels resistant to fully engaging in this discussion on goal setting would be your Authentic Self. She is deathly afraid of schedules and structure.
You see, your Authentic Self is accustomed to the Drill Sgt.’s high-pressure tactics and “motivation through criticism”. She is understandably very reluctant to set herself up for any potential failure which is bound to be the outcome of the old method of goal setting. To your Authentic Self, having a clearly established goal right now is like walking into the lion’s den. It is to be avoided at all costs.
Posted by Cedric on March 8, 2011
The Diet Mentality is all about the future. The Drill Sgt. is only interested in what you have done that wasn’t good enough and what you are going to do to make it better – to redeem yourself, so to speak. So your goal setting and your thoughts about life in general will be centered around what you are going to do in the minutes, hours, days and months to come that will finally make you an acceptable being, bringing all that you desire and deserve.
If you are not conscious of what you are doing, thinking, and feeling, the moment will pass you by, and it will become another of those past experiences for which you are criticized by the Drill Sgt. In the Diet Mentality, you are all about that future fantasy of what you are going to do; how you are going to feel; how you are going to look; what life will be like when…The obvious problem is that, if you are out there fantasizing about the future, there is no one home to actually take action in the moment and change the patterns that keep you from realizing those goals.
Posted by Cedric on March 7, 2011
When it comes to talking about feelings as an indicator of their needs, I have heard many clients say that they don’t know what they feel. This is both true and not true. Clearly, you have an ability to tune out to your feelings. What you will discover, if you haven’t already, is that you are able to identify certain feelings when you simply take the time to stop and be present with yourself and ask the question: “What am I feeling right now?” To make it simple, give yourself just four choices: Mad, Glad, Sad, and Scared.
These are four basic human emotions. All the feelings you will ever experience can be boiled down to one or a combination of those four feelings. So for the next while, each time you check in to see what your Authentic Self is feeling, offer yourself just those four basic choices. You will find that what you are feeling will fit one or a few of these options. What is important to understand about feelings – yours and anyone else’s – is that they are simply flags. Feelings are just indicators of what you need or want at any given moment. They also tell you what needs are being met, that is, when you are feeling peaceful, joyful, and relaxed.
Posted by Cedric on March 6, 2011
What Does Self-Care Mean?
Self-care means taking care of all of you; your emotional self, psychological self, spiritual self and physical self.
If one of these areas is being ignored or set on the back burner, all others will suffer.
If you have an ailment that you have been putting up with and have allowed yourself to be satisfied with treating only its symptoms, you can trust that your overall state of emotional, psychological and spiritual awareness is suffering as well.
It’s hard to feel safe being aware of your body when you’re in pain. And if your Drill Sgt., with his intrusive ideation, has gotten you there, you may have convinced yourself that you have some life-threatening illness, and it is better not to know. And so you eat to numb from the pain and from the fear/anxiety that those scary thoughts of death and doom trigger.
Also, many of us who use food to cope, whether we restrict or binge or purge, are certain it shows. We assume that others can tell we binged or purged or didn’t eat and we feel exposed and fraudulent. This makes us insecure and likely to put ourselves beneath others in our minds and in the world, leading often to unsatisfying relationships and to feeling overrun and taken advantage of in every area of our lives.
Self-care is a key element of self-esteem. You can’t expect to feel good about yourself and have confidence in yourself if you’re not meeting your basic needs for reasonable nutrition and health. That is why those who restrict as a means of feeling better about themselves only find themselves feeling worse and more anxious and depressed.
Self-care and self-esteem are linked. If you want to feel good about yourself and to feel safe in relationships and worthy of love you must learn to identify the behaviours and thoughts that keep you stuck feeling anxious and insecure and change those. Then your relationship with food and your weight will naturally shift to a healthy, easy, peaceful, sexy you.
I’m here to help you if you’re ready. Change is simple and speedy when you have simple tools that work and a supportive guide to show you how to apply them. That’s my whole purpose in being a specialist in this field. I’ve helped thousands of men and women worldwide to get help for binge eating, emotional eating, eating disorders and weight loss that lasts. These tools work equally well for other common coping strategies like drinking, gambling, raging, isolating, procrastinating, internet addiction and more.
Email me and ask about the different ways I can help you learn how to stop binging and any other harmful pattern that you’d like to change.
Love Michelle
mmorand@cedriccentre.com
There are so many ways you can begin to demonstrate self-care for your physical Self. Just choose one that really fits for you right now and get started. By “get started” I mean first with compassionate goal-setting and then with the actual attainment of the goal.
Posted by Cedric on March 5, 2011
Intrusive ideation is a coping strategy thought pattern. It is borne out of trauma and is a key component of post traumatic stress disorder. An example of intrusive ideation is when your partner goes fishing, and, before you know it, you picture him falling out of the boat and drowning. You feel the sensations of pain and suffering, his panic, your loss and grief. You imagine calling his family to notify them, the funeral and what you will wear, say and do; the bills; your children; and how you will ultimately cope. Your partner is having a great time, but you are traumatized and feeling panicked.
But if you are not aware that you have just done a little number on yourself in the form of intrusive ideation, and that you just told yourself a story which has traumatized you, then you will feel as if your current state of anxiety has just come out of nowhere. As a result of your story and not because of anything your partner actually did, you may even begin to have feelings of annoyance or resentment towards him, without realizing that you are experiencing those feelings because of your own intrusive ideation. And depending on where you are in your recovery process, you probably have these experiences countless times a day.
Posted by Cedric on March 4, 2011
When we come from the perfectionism/need to prove our value, our Drill Sgt. is continuously bombarding us with stories of how we must be in order to be acceptable. His all-or-nothing thinking, his constant messages that we are so far from acceptable now, lead us to feel more overwhelmed and less capable; more frightened to take any step in any direction lest we fail and receive more criticism.
This is where we turn to the coping strategy of procrastination. It’s a tool we use to avoid having to experience the failure that we are certain is imminent. After all, we have tried and failed so many times. The unrealistic expectations and complete lack of empathy and compassion of the Drill Sgt. create the certainty that we can never attain our goals, so our Authentic Self responds with, “Why bother?” The feelings of despair and hopelessness, along with the fear of the Drill Sgt.’s criticism, paralyze us, and we turn to food to help us numb out and distance ourselves from the intense feelings we are experiencing.
Posted by Cedric on March 3, 2011
Social engagements, when you live in the Diet Mentality, are always first and foremost about how you will look at the event, whose approval you seek and what you must look like or wear in order to get this approval. At some point, after you have exhausted yourself planning how you are going to achieve this miraculous weight loss or toning in the few short days, weeks or months you have before the big event, you may actually find yourself asking if you really want to go.
Making decisions to attend or not attend social events based predominantly on how you look or how you expect others will judge your physical appearance is total and complete Diet Mentality. It is buying hook, line and sinker into the story that you are nothing more than a body, and your appearance is what gives you value. Ultimately, we all get to a place where, either by conscious choice or by believing we have no choice at all, we let go of our belief that we need external approval or validation, and we allow ourselves to risk experimenting with validating and approving of ourselves.
Posted by Cedric on March 2, 2011
Frequently, you will find that you resist being conscious about what you feel and think and need; yet, if you were just to check within, you would be able to identify quite clearly what is and isn’t working for you in that moment. If you resist being conscious, it is likely because your Drill Sgt. tells you that, if you are conscious, you must attend to whatever is going on now.
So you are scaring yourself out of consciousness with the threat that you must then take immediate action regardless of what is going on or how you feel about it. The fear of having to take action, once you become conscious, typically comes from one of two beliefs. 1. You believe that you don’t possess a tool which will work effectively, so it’s better to be “semi-conscious”. You can then pretend you didn’t know what was going on. You are certain failure will come. 2. And/or you believe that taking action to honour yourself or meet your need(s) will create such stress and strife in your relationship(s) that it’s just not worth it.
Posted by Cedric on March 1, 2011
We have an undeveloped brain until we reach the age of about 19 to 21. The last parts of our brain to fully develop are our frontal lobes. These lobes house our capacity for rational thinking, allowing us a broader perspective on the world. Prior to age 21, we are predominantly driven by our old brain, which is totally immersed in all-or-nothing thinking. When we experience situations as children, for example; rejection, punishment, lack of interest or verbal, physical, emotional and sexual abuse, our old brain tells us we are in danger, and we go into flight or fight mode.
However, since we can’t very well fight (until we are older) or leave the situation as dependent children, we must find a way to deal with it that best meets our fundamental needs for security and approval. We make it about us and in order to feel some degree of control and safety in our environment, we also use the coping strategy of going within. This means there is no one left to challenge those old thoughts and stories you’ve told yourself. Your old brain told you a story to make sense of a situation as best it could, and now, many years later, you are still living as though this story were true.
Posted by Cedric on February 27, 2011
The Diet Mentality is all about the future. The Drill Sgt. is only interested in what you have done that wasn’t good enough and what you are going to do to make it better – to redeem yourself, so to speak. So your goal setting and your thoughts about life in general will be centered around what you are going to do in the minutes, hours, days and months to come that will finally make you an acceptable human being, bringing you all that you desire and deserve.
Some of that future focus exists in you because it is just too painful right now to be in the present moment. You have the Drill Sgt. on your case constantly; you have your memories of past pain and hurt that have yet to be healed and moved through; you also have the day-to-day chores and responsibilities of life with their own trials and tribulations that, on top of the mountain of unfinished business, make the present moment a bit of a drag to say the least. What wants to hang out there? Clearly some part of you does. Some part of you knows, on a gut level, that gently challenging yourself to be present and identifying what is really going on for you is the only way which will enable you to really change those old thoughts, feelings, and behaviours that keep you stuck.
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