Archive for CEDRIC Centre
Posted by Cedric on April 11, 2011
Disconnect leads to emotional overwhelm
The more overwhelmed and anxious you become in social situations or when facing something new or an unexpected change of plans, the more you can trust that your thinking gets stuck in worst-case-scenario land. The emotional disconnect leads to emotional overwhelm.
This stuck thinking leads you to feel immediately overwhelmed at the thought of anything new or unexpected and makes life much harder than it needs to be. Disconnect leads to emotional overwhelm when you have learned, over time, to assume the worst and to automatically shut down to what is actually happening in the moment. And hey, if you’re telling yourself you’re doomed, why wouldn’t you press the shut down button?
And if, without even realizing it, you have lived your life disconnected from your feelings for the most part, you are very likely wondering what the value of being connected to them would be.
In fact, your Drill Sgt. may be saying something such as “Feelings make you weak.” “Other people won’t respect you if you let your feelings show.” “You’re just a cry baby if you can’t control your feelings.”
Check in with yourself for a moment and ask where in the past you may have either heard these very words spoken, or if you witnessed significant people in your life modeling the behaviour of hiding, discounting, or denying their feelings.
Have you ever had the experience of suddenly feeling totally overwhelmed?
You are certain you are overreacting because you don’t know where all this emotion came from, and maybe others around you aren’t reacting as strongly or aren’t so demonstrative.
In addition to feeling emotional, you are compounding your pain by judging and berating yourself for this feeling.
You are certain there is nothing going on in your life to justify your strong reaction in that moment.
Does this experience sound familiar?
Well, hundreds of millions of people worldwide struggle with this one. It’s all about confused thinking and confused stress responses. It’s the cause of binging, eating disorders, addictions and every other harmful coping strategy humans engage in.
If you’d like to change this pattern in yourself let me know – I”m here to help.
Love Michelle
mmorand@cedriccentre.com
Posted by mmorand on April 9, 2011
So! 2 weeks ago we looked at The Diet Mentality in detail. Last week, we looked at the definition and characteristics of Natural Eating. This week, I’m going to be brief. Really, I am!
What happened with your answers to the questions about your goals and your definitions of success from last week? Did you take the time to answer those questions and really get clear on what you would consider a successful outcome of our work together? I hope so.
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Tags: anorexia, anxiety, binge eating, body image, bulimia, compulsive eating, diet mentality, eating disorders, healing, nurturing, overeating, self care, self esteem, self love, self worth
Posted in: CEDRIC Centre, Natural Eating 101
Posted by Cedric on April 8, 2011
Co-dependence is a Learned Behaviour
Co-dependence is a Learned Behaviour not an innate trait. So don’t give yourself a hard time if you find yourself prioritizing the feelings and needs of others or if you struggle to feel entitled to ask for what you need. Instead get the support and tools you need to learn how to approach your relationships in a functional, rational, interdependent way. Co-dependence is a learned behaviour – find out more:
If your process of individuation was thwarted by your caregivers, either through their own resistance to allowing you to mature; through a death or divorce; through physical or sexual abuse; or through emotional abuse or neglect (guilt trips, manipulation, silent treatment, yelling, judging or labeling, etc.), your needs for dependence were unmet as a child, and you have come to engage in a self-defeating style of relationship called co-dependence.
In co-dependence, you focus all your energy on meeting the other person’s needs. Your happiness feels completely dependent on their happiness and, as such, you are very emotionally vulnerable and have no real sense of security or control in your life.
If your partner is unhappy, you also become unhappy or engage in some emotional and psychological gymnastics in an attempt to determine and correct “what you did”.
It is unbelievable to you that someone’s bad mood or frown doesn’t have anything to do with you. The co-dependent perspective is that you are responsible for everything people think, feel and do.
Wow! That’s a lot of responsibility. You can’t relax until everyone is okay.
And that’s why you’re so anxious and insecure and stressed all the time. That’s why you binge and feel so self-conscious about your body and that’s why your diets don’t work and you struggle day after day, year after year to get a grip on food or alcohol or money etc.
I can teach you what is really true about relationships and how to create relationships that are fulfilling and healthy.
I can show you how to do your best to create that kind of relationship with people who are already in your life and you’ll be amazed at how simple and obvious it is to do this.
Let me help you to have healthy, fulfilling relationships and to stop stressing about food and weight and look and feel great while you’re at it.
Change can be speedy and simple when you have simple, effective tools and a skilled teacher.
Email me and let’s begin some individual counselling or join the online program and get started today.
Love Michelle
mmorand@cedriccentre.com
Posted by Cedric on April 3, 2011
Healthful boundaries are a fundamental piece of creating balance in our lives. The things which we allow and don’t allow to happen around us, and to us, tell people a lot about our self-esteem and how we regard ourselves and, ultimately, what they can get away with in their relationship with us! In other words, if you have good self-esteem, you have strong and healthful boundaries. You feel capable of asking for what you need and letting people know clearly and directly when your needs are unmet. This lets the people in relationship with you know that you expect honesty and integrity from others, and you are willing to bring this to the table yourself. You wouldn’t be able or willing to tolerate dishonesty or a lack of responsibility in any relationship.
If your self-esteem is low and you question your worth or deservedness to have what you need and want, you will be less able to clearly ask for what you need and will often feel as though everyone else gets what they want while you don’t. You will often beat around the bush, or not say anything, then feel hurt and frustrated when the other person didn’t intuit your need. Depending on your level of self-esteem and what you have been taught by role models in your life, you may see getting what you want and need as beyond your control.
Posted by Cedric on April 2, 2011
When we come from our old Drill Sgt.’s all-or-nothing mindset, we are always making assumptions about what’s going on; what people are thinking, feeling, doing; what they really intended to do or say; what they really want from us, and so on. This is such a great shame and also the cause of much of your current distress around any relationships. What makes it worse is that, like so many of your other coping strategies, you have mastered the art of assumption to such a degree that you are unaware that an assumption has been made. To you, it’s the absolute truth. In many cases, you will defend your perspective to the death (of the relationship, that is).
Once you lock yourself into the story that your perception is the truth and that there is no other explanation for a person’s actions or any other interpretation for their words, you have done yourself great harm. In essence, you have just said to yourself, and to the person you are in relationship with, that your perspective is the only perspective. You are right and they are wrong. And that’s that! You are also sending the message loud and clear that you don’t trust this person. You don’t believe them. Where is the other person to go with this? How do they deal with their feelings of hurt, and their needs for trust and safety in the relationship, if there is only one way or one answer, and it’s yours?
Posted by mmorand on April 2, 2011
Well hullooooo out there! It’s week 2 of our Natural Eating series and about time we fully looked at natural eating defined. Last week, we explored the antithesis or maybe we could even say, “the nemesis” of Natural eating…..(insert ominous theme music here….): The Diet Mentality. This nasty way of thinking turns you against your body and against yourself, and sets you on a vicious cycle of diminished self-esteem and increased self-harm and loathing. It’s got to go people!! But if you’re reading this then you’re already on it!
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Tags: anorexia, anxiety, body image, body/mind/spirit, bulimia, CEDRIC Centre, compulsive eating, core beliefs, diet mentality, eating disorders, natural eating, self care, self esteem, self love
Posted in: CEDRIC Centre, Natural Eating 101, Relationship with Self
Posted by Cedric on March 31, 2011
Building A Balanced Life is Key to Recovery
It’s possible that you are feeling anxious and insecure often in your life, or that you hear yourself say things about your frustrationg with certain situations and relationship(s) which are clear indicators of unmet needs, and yet you are still ignoring those emotional cues of unmet needs which leads you to feel overrun, unbalanced, and to use food or other substances to cope. If you’d like to stop binging or struggling with diets and weight loss, or drinking, or any other harmful coping strategy then it’s important that you know that building a balanced life is key to recovery.
It’s a simple fact, like it or lump it, that as long as any aspect of your life remains unbalanced or your needs are unmet in certain areas, you will use your coping strategies.
For example. Those of you who have a disordered relationship with food, unconsciously use thoughts about eating or about what you weigh, and the act of eating or of restricting (and possibly purging through extreme diets, laxatives, exercise or vomiting) as a means of self-medicating and self-soothing. The chemistry you create in your body with the thoughts, sensations, and behaviours associated with your coping strategy of choice (drinking, binging, purging, drugs, t.v. etc.) raises your dopamine level artificially and temporarily triggers feelings of release, peace, nurturing and comfort.
Only problem is, as you know, that sensation is short-lived and soon you’re needing another fix to numb the negative chatter in your brain and the emotional sensations of anxiety and depression that accompany it.
The key to stepping free for good from any eating disorder or addictive behaviour is to have a 2 pronged approach which teaches you how to relate to your substance/coping strategy of choice is a natural, balanced way while also teaching you how to build solid self-trust and self-esteem.
The solution is simple and can be speedy when you have a skilled guide with simple tools. I can help you step free of the chaos and create balance and passion like you’ve never known.
Reach out and let’s discuss what’s going on in your life now that you’d like to change and how we can make that a reality.
Love Michelle
mmorand@cedriccentre.com
Posted by Cedric on March 30, 2011
A great exercise for shifting your old beliefs is writing a letter of fact. A letter of fact is a letter containing only the concrete details of a situation. There is no interpretation or assumption of what the other party was thinking, feeling or intending. Just the physical truth. In other words, if there were ten people in the room at the time of the event in question, they all would have to agree on what was physically said and done. Those are the facts; however, their interpretations of why it happened would differ. This is because their interpretation, through the lens of their own beliefs and perceptions of the world, creates a distortion, and the facts become skewed. They cease to focus on the reality of what happened, but focus instead on their assumption/interpretation of why it happened. This attaches particular emotions to an event, and the thought/feeling loop continues to solidify their perspective of the event as accurate.
Any threat, real or imagined, gets logged away in our brains with powerful feelings attached. The interpretation that was formed at the time of the event, though our distorted lens, becomes a solid, irrefutable fact from our perspective. And this “fact” directly impacts all of our interactions with ourselves, and with others, until such a time as we begin to allow for the possibility that we may have misinterpreted the event. The willingness to challenge this old story requires courage. This requires enough self-love and self-respect to no longer be willing to harm yourself unnecessarily with a confused interpretation of someone else’s actions.
Posted by Cedric on March 29, 2011
The Double Standard
The double standard is a pattern of thinking where we seem to think it makes sense to hold ourselves to standards that we wouldn`t hold others to – or vice versa.
It is not a rational or reasonable thought and will only lead to anxiety and insecurity in yourself and in your connections with others.
It is important to be able to learn to spot the double standard in your thinking and in that of others so that you can question it and step free of it rather than continuing to live your life by irrational and unreasonable standards.
For example:
Allow yourself, for a moment, to gently recall one of the events which you use to support one of your old core belief(s) such as `I am unlovable` or `I am not good enough`.
Now ask yourself if you would jump on the bandwagon and judge someone else if they had had that same experience.
Would you continue, on a daily basis, to reinforce that hurtful message?
Would you rub it in?
Or might you offer them feedback about a more reasonable perspective, or at least an alternative perspective on the situation; maybe you`d tell them about the strengths and beauty that you see in them?
Would it just go without saying that you would be immediately drawn to offer your reassurance and support, and maybe even to feel angry and hurt on their behalf?
Well? What do you think?
Would you keep pouring salt in their wound? Not likely. That would be sadistic. You are far too kind and considerate for that, so why do you do it to yourself?
You`ve got to learn to be able to assess for yourself what is true and reasonable in yourself and in your relationships with others. If you keep living your life believing those old stories and old assumptions you will continue to feel anxious and to need food or dieting or drinking or isolation to cope with the stress that is, now, in large part, being created by your thinking.
Change can happen simply and quickly when you have good support and tools that work. That`s what I can offer you.
Reach out and let me show you how to step free of the double standard in your life for good.
Love Michelle
Posted by Cedric on March 28, 2011
When you live from the old pattern of buying into those old all-or-nothing thoughts, then use the coping strategies of denial and unconsciousness, you compromise yourself. Please know that there is no benefit to judging yourself for this choice. Just recognize and support it as a choice. It’s all right to say, “I know I’d really like to do…, but right now, I just feel too scared or too overwhelmed at the thought of asserting this need, so I’m choosing to go along with Mary Jane.
Speak it. Name your choice. Be proud that you are making a conscious choice which best meets your needs at that time, and let it be all right to take care of yourself in this way. You can also add a piece that says, “I’m working to get to a place where I can respond differently to this situation, and, for now, this choice feels as though it will best meet my needs.” In other words, cut yourself some slack.
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