Relationships 101 Week 5

Posted by mmorand on March 12, 2011

This article is part of a series: Relationships 101: Week 1, Week 2, Week 3, Week 4. Oh yeah!!! We’re back with Week 5 of Relationships 101: Seeking to Understand Relationships This series is my gift to you because I want you to have the greatest happiness and peace you possibly can in all your relationships. If you read and re-read this series until you really get it, and practice these key tools, you will find that all your connections get simpler, easier, deeper and more pleasurable for you and almost all of that happens without you having to have any “big” conversations and confrontations. This week’s article and homework assignment (should you choose to explore it) will prove this, and you’ll be so amazed at how easy and safe relating to others can be. Oh yeah!!! This week’s article “Seeking to understand” could just as aptly be called: “Allowing for the possibility that you have misunderstood someone.” (more…)

Tags: co-dependent relationships, exploring, forgiveness, grounding, growing, healing, insecurity, past, present, rebalancing, relationships, self care, self esteem

Posted in: CEDRIC Centre, Relationships 101

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Contemplating compassion

Posted by Cedric on March 10, 2011 Many of us have a hard time with the concept of offering ourselves compassion. It could be because we never received compassion growing up, or we had no positive role model for compassion. It could be that no matter how troubled our past, we feel that we are undeserving or wasting our time being compassionate toward ourselves; others have had it worse. There are many other reasons why we may resist compassion toward ourselves. Some of us may view self-compassion as a pity party and see it as a sure path to wallowing, depression, and complete powerlessness and victim-hood. Some of us may feel that we can only be motivated by criticism and pressure. Being compassionate and supportive toward ourselves is as though we are admitting defeat or inviting complacency. The truth is, if pressure or criticism worked for you as a motivational tactic, you would have achieved your goal ten times over by now.

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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.

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Future focus

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.

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Feelings indicate needs

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.

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What Does Self-Care Mean?

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.

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Intrusive Ideation

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.

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When I Use My Tools, They Work! – Revisited

Posted by mmorand on March 5, 2011 “When I use my tools, they work! Things are easier, more peaceful. I just don’t feel the need to use food to cope when I use my tools.” I hear this a lot from clients. And it’s true. However, from clients who are a little new with the process, there is usually a “…but” attached to the end of it and the rest of the statement sounds something like, “…it’s just so hard to use my tools.” Or “….it takes too long and I don’t have the time or energy to do anything other than eat.” Or even “….what if they stop working? I need to hang on to my use of food to cope, just in case my new tools stop working.” This is such an important topic, that we did an audio podcast on the subject as well. Read the original When I Use My Tools, They Work! article here. Listen to the When I Use My Tools, They Work! audio podcast here.

Tags: eating disorder clinics, eating disorder treatment, eating disorders, unmet needs

Posted in: CEDRIC Centre, newsletter, Relationship with Food, Relationship with Others, Relationship with Self

The cycle of pressure and procrastination

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.

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Social engagements

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.

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