Body Focus Hides Emotional Pain
Body Focus Hides Emotional Pain
When we automatically focus on what we are eating or shouldn’t be eating, calorie counting, and losing weight, whenever we start to feel anxious or unsettled about anything we effectively keep ourselves in a state of denial about painful experiences in our lives. Your emphasis on body focus hides emotional pain that you don’t want to feel or aren’t sure how to manage. If you want to stop feeling so anxious, insecure and stressed about your body and food or any other harmful coping strategy like eating disorders, binging, drinking or drugs you’ve got to change the way you’re thinking about yourself and the world around you and not allow your instinctive brain to run free telling you stories of doom and gloom and of what’s wrong with you.
If you’re using any of those coping strategies I mentioned above it means you have a strong need for acceptance from others and will go out of your way to please others, even if it means sacrificing yourself.
This need for acceptance, coupled with feelings of low self-worth, keeps you stuck in a world of perfectionism, where your primary focus is on your body, how unacceptable you perceive it to be, and what life will be like when you finally have the body you desire.
As long as you believe that your body is the source of your unhappiness, you are able to stay in denial about the underlying causes of your distress.
What you fail to understand, because of past life events and your confused interpretation of them, is that you are a capable human being, who can safely be responsible for your emotions and experiences, and who can learn to feel confident and secure in yourself and to show respect for yourself and your needs, without losing the support and respect of others.
Trust this. Just because you haven’t experienced it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist or that you can’t create it. You don’t really believe you know everything there is to know do you?
You may be afraid that you can’t change but that fear is very different from an absolute fact and I know from my own experience and 20+ years as a counselling specialist that if you just show up and you’re willing to try something new, you will be amazed with how quickly and simply patterns that may have plagued you for decades change for good.
Reach out and let me show you how.
Love Michelle
mmorand@cedriccentre.com