Archive for CEDRIC Centre
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 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.
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.
Posted by mmorand on February 26, 2011
This article is part of a series: Relationships 101: Week 1, Week 2, Week 3, Week 4.
This week in our Relationships 101 series, I want to chat a bit about flags in a relationship.
If I do say so myself, I wrote a pretty smokin’ section on this in my book so if you’ve got access to “Food is not the Problem: Deal With What Is!“ I encourage you to check out Chapter 23. It’s got lots of good education and tools on communication in relationships.
I’m going to present an abridged and updated version of the section on flags here so you can get a good feel for the concept and begin to experiment with it yourself.
The Flag System
I am about to share with you a concept that is not in and of itself a communication tool. However, it is a fundamental tool for assessing the information you are receiving verbally and non-verbally from people in your life. Once you have assessed this information, you will be in a stronger and clearer place to determine for yourself how you want and need to proceed. By that, I mean whether or not you need to speak to the other person, and if so, what you need to say. (We’ll address the what to say and how to say it in the next 2 weeks of this series of articles).
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Tags: all-or-nothing thinking, binge eating, co-dependence, co-dependency, co-dependent, compulsive eating, eating disorders, overeating, purging, relationships, self confidence
Posted in: CEDRIC Centre, newsletter, Relationship with Food, Relationship with Others, Relationship with Self, Relationships 101
Posted by Cedric on February 25, 2011
Remember that a coping strategy allows us to remain in an uncomfortable situation without being aware of how uncomfortable we are. Well, what if the uncomfortable situation is now within us? It is years after our trauma, and we have turned against ourselves because of years of feeling the anxiety and distress of that trauma. These were perfectly appropriate responses at the time, but no one ever validated or acknowledged them. We are tired of feeling anxious and constantly insecure. Nothing we try seems to make a difference. We must get away from ourselves because we can’t seem to find a way to live with ourselves.
Bring on the behaviours. Bring on the big guns. Take my mind off my feelings and thoughts that keep me stressed and preoccupied. It can be a relationship so I can now focus on the other person and project my feelings of anxiety and frustration onto them. It can be food or drugs so I can numb out. Whatever! Just get me out of myself! This is how many of us come to find ourselves obsessed with and enmeshed in substances, in other people’s lives, and in food. It’s something obvious in the present to which we can attach this distress. Maybe even something we have some power over.
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