Archive for CEDRIC Centre
Posted by Cedric on July 3, 2011
Feeling Safe is The Key to Eating Disorder Recovery
It is a fact that feeling safe is the key to eating disorder recovery. And the key to feeling safe is to have a way of trusting that you are thinking clearly, seeing the situation / person at hand clearly; that you have a set of values that are reasonable and principles that make sense that guide your actions towards yourself and others and which you see yourself turning to whenever you feel anxious or unsettled or have sensitive decisions to make.
If you don’t have that package of trust in your clear thinking and values that ground you you will continue to feel insecure and anxious in the world and in your relationships with others and you will continue to lean on coping strategies – confused stress management tools like eating disorders, binging, dieting, drinking, isolating and procrastination to try to numb and soothe yourself.
Invite yourself, if you feel up to it to ask yourself what you remember about your younger years (childhood, adolescence, young adulthood). Who were your primary role models for relationships? What kinds of things did they do and say to you, themselves, or others when they were angry or sad or scared or wanted you or someone else to do something for them?
How respectful, direct and clear were they?
And how did they respond to requests from you? Did they shame you, berate you, judge you? Or did they acknowledge your need and discuss the different ways that they would be willing to meet your need, in a respectful, calm manner?
Verbal and physical abuses are traumas.
Most everyone has experienced the humiliation and damaging effects of verbal abuse.
If our ego strength and our sense of esteem are solid when these events occur (ie. we are an adult, solid in ourselves; or a teen with very good support and these events are an extreme exception and not the norm), we can slough it off or work through it with some help.
If we are already feeling a lack of security and acceptance in our world, every experience of verbal abuse, for example: Judgements, name-calling, put-downs, and yelling will constitute a drama.
Physical abuse; slapping, hitting, spanking and outright beatings, or threats of the same, regardless of their purpose in the eyes of the punisher, are traumatic events.
Neglect is trauma. The act of having your needs and your Self ignored or devalued is traumatic.
So, don’t tell yourself that you were never abused or traumatized. Sexual assault or beatings are just the most extreme forms of trauma we experience as young and powerless people. There are many forms of behaviour that will not meet our needs for safety and respect and which will lead us to feel hurt and traumatized.
The more dependent on the person we are, the greater the experience of the trauma and the more our mind will seek to both self-blame (make it about us) and to numb ourselves from the situation (through the use of coping strategies like binging, dieting, eating disorders, drinking etc.).
If you’re stuck still, feeling a lack of confidence in yourself or in relationships that trigger you to feel unsafe or insecure, let me help you step free of that pattern of thinking that is keeping you stuck.
Change can be fast and simple when you have simple tools that work and a skilled guide.
Reach out and let’s get started creating healthy relationships, solid self-esteem and get you trusting yourself to see the world clearly and handle things fairly.
Love Michelle
Posted by Cedric on July 1, 2011
A quick definition of All-or-Nothing thinking: We tend to believe that things, including ourselves, are either right or wrong, good or bad. Typically, this kind of thinking comes from your child brain which learned that right and wrong, good or bad were the hallmarks of life and were the benchmarks by which you (and others) were judged. The truth is that there are few absolutes in the world, very few things we can know for certain, and very few things for which there is only one right answer or one right way of thinking or approaching something. Life is subjective, after all. No two people experience the the same situation in exactly the same way.
Posted by Cedric on June 27, 2011
How Sexual Abuse Triggers Binging
This article will explore briefly the dynamic of how sexual abuse triggers binging. I hope it helps you to feel more understood and supported and hopeful that you can change this pattern of binging in your life, no matter what you binge on or how long it`s been happening.
Many people consider the term “sexual abuse” to refer to the assault of a child.
The reality is that sexual abuse can range from any unwanted verbal innuendo, gesture, or physical contact, to rape.
Many people who use food and body-image focus to cope have had one of these experiences. Many do, but not one-hundred percent, so don’t rack your brain trying to recall an assault if you aren’t already aware of this in your history.
The most harmful byproduct of sexual abuse is that it turns us against our bodies. It makes us feel like our body is not our own, that others have more right to it than we do and thus it undermines our sense of safety in our very being.
Sadly, many humans, after a sexual assault violation naturally default to a though process we call self-blame. In this form of thought we play and replay the event(s) in our heads looking for ways that we could have changed the outcome and looking for details about what we did that caused it in the first place.
`I shouldn`t have sat next to that person`.
“I shouldn`t have walked down that street.“
`I should have screamed louder.`
`I should have screamed.`
These thoughts are the brain`s way of helping you to feel some degree of empowerment over the situation so that you don`t feel so scared and overwhelmed. If you had some power then you can feel more confident that you can prevent it from happening again and that makes you feel better. So the brain sets about finding all the ways you may have been at fault.
This is fine for a day or two but any longer than that and your brain really starts to believe you were at fault which sets you up to have a very confused perspective on relationships, on your body and sexuality, and on other people`s rights to your body.
People typically head for one of two extremes in these situations – they become withdrawn and intensely sensitive to any potential sexual innuendo and avoid any physical intimacy in relationships; or they give themselves away to anyone who shows the slightest interest or expectation.
It is natural to feel insecure and anxious if you`ve been attacked or abused and you haven`t yet come to understand what your part in it really was and how to trust yourself to take good care of yourself now.
And it`s natural to binge or get preoccupied with weight and dieting as a way of coping with feelings of anxiety and insecurity. Those feelings are not about your body really, they are about your thinking. Change your thinking and you will find that your relationship to food, and therefore,naturally your weight, will change without effort.
I`ve been there – I know. And I`ve helped many other men and women to get past this and live truly satisfying lives in which they feel confident and secure.
Reach out and let me show you the tools to create the change you seek. You deserve to feel confident in yourself and trusting in your ability to relate to others and take good care of yourself. I can help.
Love Michelle
Posted by mmorand on June 25, 2011
Okay folks, we’re coming to the end of this series of Natural Eating Q&A articles and today I want to focus on releasing all or nothing thoughts.
This week, we have a little twist on the theme, with a specific focus on how our learned helplessness and the irrational, all-or-nothing thinking that’s at the root of it, makes this process of recovery so much harder and longer than it has to be. In fact, if you put even a few minutes of effort a day into catching the all-or-nothing stories we’ll be reviewing over the next few weeks, and responding as I suggest, you will see an immediate – I mean immediate – shift in your anxiety level and in your focus on food and use of food to cope. Not only that, but those stories just won’t come up anymore. You’ll never have to hear them again!
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Tags: all-or-nothing thinking, anorexia, anxiety, binge eating, body image, bulimia, compulsive eating, core beliefs, diet mentality, drill sergeant, eating disorder treatment, eating disorders, learned helplessness, self care, self esteem, self love, self worth
Posted in: CEDRIC Centre, Natural Eating 101
Posted by mmorand on June 18, 2011
If there’s one place, where, even more so than at insanely packed and over stimulating amusement parks like Disneyland, one will witness the entire spectrum of human emotions, it’s a large airport like good ol’ LAX.
As a counsellor and woman who has always been naturally predisposed to empathy and curiosity, perhaps it would even be more apt to say, hyper-vigilance, when it comes to the emotions of others (this I attribute to my years of trauma – vicarious and otherwise – as a child, where adeptly reading the emotional state of my father could often mean the difference between an evening without abuse and one with), I seem to be unable to be out and about anywhere without being acutely aware of the energy, emotions, and needs of the people around me.
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Posted by Cedric on June 16, 2011
As fragmenters, we might feel proud of this talent: we can get along with anyone is the way we see it. Hey, that’s great. You can get along with anyone. At what cost to you? What is the payoff if you must keep your Authentic Self hidden and feel that you cannot truly bring all of yourself to a relationship? What benefit is there to being friends with someone who you believe won’t accept you as you are? On some level, if you fragment, it is because you believe that who you really are is unacceptable. You would rather have this person in your life and be inauthentic and squash your true self than have them possibly reject you.
Posted by Cedric on June 11, 2011
The When to Eat Dilemma
One of the biggest problems people have when they are trying to stop binging, dieting, eating disorders and – or weight loss struggles, is the pattern that I call the when to eat dilemma.
Basically, if you`ve been dieting or binging or both for any length of time to the point that you feel anxious and preoccupied with food and – or with your weight, or you feel guilty about what you`re eating or what you`d like to eat, you are stuck in what I call The Diet Mentality.
In the Diet Mentality you are supposed to listen to people and cues outside of your body to decide how much to eat and when. Aside from being completely irrational this is also completely unhelpful.
How can anyone outside of you know how much you need to eat, of what foods and when
The Drill Sgt. and his Diet Mentality will always tell you that you really should not be eating unless it is a socially prescribed mealtime. It doesn’t matter how little you may have eaten beforehand or how many activities you have performed that require the energy and sustenance which food provides, he operates from the outside in, and every good Diet Mentality follower knows that you only eat at certain times, and certainly not just before bed! So restriction continues to be enforced, even if just in the mind and not the behaviour. If this is the case and you choose to override the Drill Sgt. and eat anyway, unless you do this from a place of deservedness and knowing that it is okay to take care of your body, you are going to feel as though you are doing something dishonest. You will feel as if you are being bad and lack integrity simply because you chose to nourish your body when you were hungry.
Posted by mmorand on June 11, 2011
Hello all. We are moving through our series of questions on the in’s and out’s of Natural Eating with this week’s question:
How can I trust myself around certain foods when every time I get around them or have them in the house I binge?
This is such a common question in my work with clients. Regardless of whether they restrict, binge or purge, I am confident it will hit home with anyone who uses food to cope.
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Tags: acceptance, all-or-nothing thinking, anorexia, anxiety, binge eating, body image, bulimia, CEDRIC Centre, compulsive eating, core beliefs, eating disorder treatment, eating disorders, exploring, learned helplessness, overeating, recovery, self care, self esteem, self love, self worth, triggers
Posted in: CEDRIC Centre, Natural Eating 101
Posted by Cedric on June 9, 2011
With any behavioral change, the process is the same for each of us. If you were a hunt-and-peck typist and then learned to type properly, you would go through this process of initially feeling forced and uncomfortable, to arriving at a place where the new is so much more peaceful, effective and life-enhancing. You will choose to use it exclusively, and it becomes second nature to the point where hunting and pecking takes too long for it to even be considered an option. This is the exact process which you will experience with food, body image, substance abuse, co-dependency, anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress and other common coping strategies of our society.
Posted by Cedric on June 8, 2011
When you notice that you’re thinking about eating and you’re not hungry, you’re hungry and you’re not allowing yourself to eat, or when you eat out of true hunger and eat beyond being full, do the following:
a) Stop and take a deep breath. Really. Stop…Breathe…
b) Invite yourself to be aware of what your thoughts are. Do not get carried away by them, just notice them.
c) Notice what you’re feeling in your body and any emotions you can identify.
d) Now ask yourself: “What just happened?” “What might I have just experienced or thought of from the past, present or future which could have impacted me and led to feeling the need to use food to cope?”
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