CEDRIC Client Q and A


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Core Beliefs and the Drill Sergeant - What a relationship there!
When I first began my work at quieting the drill sergeant within, I had to look at the foundation of my self-esteem because that's where the good old Drill Sgt. gets all his material! Core beliefs are just that because they form the nucleus of who we are. What I've learned from exploring the CEDRIC Centre's approach to healing is that most of us who find that life stress sends us running to food to cope have been unconsciously buying into harmful old Core Beliefs. Those beliefs were often imposed on us by people in our past who were responsible for our maturation and development, and we unwittingly accepted those imposed beliefs as law without questioning them and their validity. As children that's impossible to expect of ourselves, we just don't have the awhem with a set of Core Beliefs that accurately portray who we are now.areness, but as adults, we can revisit those old stories we're still carrying and, if we choose, replace them.Tina Budeweit-Weeks is a member of the CEDRIC Success Team in the role of staff writer and executive assistant for Michelle Morand. Her philosophy has always been one of self-nurturance and dignity. In support of the complex difficulties clients may experience around regaining a healthy balance, Tina’s writing is designed to sympathize, support, encourage and inform. Although there are many similarities in Tina’s process, she is not a client, but a hard working, behind-the-scenes member of the team, dedicated to helping the CEDRIC Centre stay current and effective.
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Leave a Comment (0) →Alcohol and drugs as coping strategies are right up there together with Eating Disorders as among the most life-threatening, harmful ways to deal with life. The definition of a coping strategy is: Any thought, feeling or behaviour that allows us to remain in an uncomfortable situation without being aware of how uncomfortable we are.
It’s clear, from that definition, that food, alcohol and drugs can fit the bill.
Now to be fair, food, alcohol and some drugs also have their place in a healthy, balanced life. Obviously we need to eat to live – and, while they’re fine in moderation, we don’t need doughnuts and certainly not 12 of them at once. Likewise, not permitting our body to have the nutrients it requires to keep us in optimum health isn’t serving us either.
A drink every now and then at a special function or social gathering is no big deal, even if we’re doing it to loosen up a little.Needing to drink in order to go to a function, or drinking on a daily basis, or drinking to get drunk is definitely a sign of coping rather than balance.
And sometimes we do need prescription drugs to deal with chemical imbalances or other concerns. The body is a complex organism and sometimes certain things don’t work the way they should. I encourage you to release any shame or judgement you may be carrying toward yourself for needing any sort of medication to deal with something that our body needs help to do naturally. Where drugs become a problem is when:
Certain kinds of drugs make us want to eat when we’re not hungry. Others make us forget that we even have a body and send us into orbit where, for days, we can completely tune out to any signals of hunger we may be receiving. Others still, make us feel so queasy or unsettled in the various stages of getting high and coming down that we don’t want to eat because we don’t trust we could keep it down. Or we feel drawn to eat foods that are high in sugar and fat content but low in any nutrient value just to shut our body up so that we can keep on drinking, toking, snorting or shooting.
Either way, we’re certainly not honoring ourselves or our body when we ignore its natural signals of hunger, fullness, fatigue and pain in favor of completely numbing out to the world as we experience it. (Here, I’m inviting you to consider the possibility that the way you perceive the world may not be entirely accurate and may actually be harming you.)
But, if we come back to our definition of a coping strategy we see that as mechanisms to help us not be aware of the underlying disease and discomfort in our lives, alcohol and drugs work like a hot damn. The only problem is they don’t resolve anything and they create problems of their own – just like the use of food to cope: It doesn’t make the original problem better and it creates its own overwhelming stress and depression which leads us to need to numb out even more.
If you know that you are drinking or using some form of drug, whether prescription or street, to keep you detached from your life then on some level you’ve bought in to some “Learned Helplessness.”
Learned Helplessness is a way of perceiving the world that underlies everything you do, say, think and feel. There are variations on the theme but over all it sounds something like this:
“I can’t do anything to change X.”
“I am powerless to do anything about X”
“There is nothing I can do about X so I just have to find a way to be okay with it.”
This learned helplessness story is at the root of our use of harmful coping strategies. Remember, a coping strategy is anything that allows us to remain in a harmful situation without being aware of how harmful it is. So, if you are telling yourself that there is something that is bothering you in some way but that you are powerless to do anything about it, what are your options?
Neither is a really exciting option. Neither option is going to make us feel better in any meaningful, lasting way. But, if those are the only options we believe we have we’ll take #2 any day any time – we all would.
If you’ve chosen option # 2 there is nothing wrong with you. You are doing your best to cope with a situation that you’ve told yourself you have no power over. You simply haven’t yet come across option # 3. But you’re about to!
Option #3:
If Option #3 sounds like something you’d like to experience in your life, even if you doubt your ability to have a life like the one I’ve described, let us gently guide you from where you are now to where you truly deserve to be. And know that if any part of you is doubting your ability to have a peaceful and passionate life that is free from food and body image stress or alcohol or drugs, that’s only the learned helplessness kicking in and it’s going to kick in until you prove to yourself that it’s wrong and you are capable.
Don’t let the old nasty learned helplessness mindset prevent you from reaching out and moving forward with your life. Remember we’ve been there. We know firsthand that all of these harmful coping strategies can be overcome and left behind once and for all.
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Leave a Comment (0) →Those are just some of the feelings that described my mental and physical state for so many years. I lived in that state for so long that I figured “Well, even though I am not happy, I don’t know what else to do. Losing weight is all that matters to me, and I don’t care what I have to do to achieve it” It started with a combination of many events in my life that lead me to this point. I was bullied, I was insecure, I was bigger than my other friends for most of my life, I felt bigger than anyone in the world.
I tried my first diet pill when I was 13, I went on my first diet at 14. At first it worked but soon my motivation diminished and I just went back to me old ways; sugary drinks, chips and all sorts of deep fried fast-food.
After years of feeling fat but not doing much about it, I went on a diet and ended up loosing 20lbs. That wasn’t enough, though; I was still “fat” and felt horrible. I continued to use diet pills for years, worked out and slowly weaned almost everything out of my diet. I kept losing weight over the next few years but it never made me happy inside as I had promised myself it would.
I developed this all-or-nothing thinking and decided that I needed to be strict with myself in order to get results. My strict habits turned obsessive really quickly, I figured I had to stay on top of myself or else I’d slip and gain a million pounds. It was deadly, I would go online and seek “support” when really, I was developing an even deeper eating disorder.
Soon, nothing was enough. I fasted, I cleansed, I did extreme “all vegetable” diets and worked out very, very intensely for hours at a time, budgeting myself to a few hundred calories a day and while I lost a little bit of weight, my mental state was lost faster than the weight. I would secretly cry alone in my closet, because I was so empty inside. My boyfriend was very concerned, but I had put up such a huge wall around me, no one was allowed into that area of my life. I had drawers filled with information on anorexia, pictures, and poems, anything that fed my habit. I had numerous books and logs to track every morsel of food that went into my mouth and every minute of exercise. No one knew. I hid everything. People would congratulate me on my weight-loss, as much as you’d think it felt good – it only fed my eating disorder.
I got to a point when my boyfriend turned into my fiancé, I realized I was getting older, wanted to have kids and basically said to myself “This is NOT working. I don’t feel good, everyone is worried about me and I feel so lost inside” One huge motivator was I did not want to pass on an ounce of this to my children, when I have them.
On a bit of a whim, I called up the Cedric Center and spoke with Michelle, who sounded so kind and understanding right off the bat. Through our sessions, she not only made me see certain events in my life that may have a part in why I am the way I am, but also gave me tools to use in times when I felt that lost, frustrated, alone and felt like regressing into past behaviors. Those tools are so valuable.
During my first few sessions I thought everything she was saying made perfect sense, it was logical, practical and eye opening. It wasn’t until I implemented those tools she taught me into my everyday life that I really started seeing (and feeling!) the results, for me it only took a few sessions to notice a huge change. My drill sergeant in my head has taken quite a vacation. I am now able to go out for dinner (which was NOT a pretty scene previously), cook healthy meals anxiety-free, eat lunch during the day and most importantly I am learning to do everything in moderation – exercise, natural eating, listening to my body, and also being able to have a cookie or a dessert if I’m so inclined. Before Michelle, NONE of that stuff would be able to happen. I was a ball of anxiety, always calculating calories, crunching numbers of how much I ate versus how much I had worked out. Nothing was healthy enough for me.
That is now my past. I love saying that! I look forward to a bright, happy and balanced future. I am feeling excited an optimistic. I seriously can say I would not be here, like this, today if I did not call Michelle. She is so educated, experienced and in tune, she helped me realize that I am not alone, she understands this journey.
Thanks so much T. for this wonderful feedback. If any of you readers can relate and would like some support to let go of your food and body image stress, contact The CEDRIC Centre and begin your healing today.
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Leave a Comment (0) →1. Anxiety (fear, resistance, desire to flee or avoid a person or situation).
2. Anger (irritation, annoyance, frustration, judgement, blame).
3. Sadness (feel teary and down, pain or heaviness in chest).
4. Depression (disinterest, fatigue, isolation, hopelessness).
The sense of a lack of safety that triggers emotional stress arises from a real or perceived threat to our physical, psychological, emotional and/or spiritual well-being. In other words, as long as we lack trust in our ability to keep ourselves safe with any one or in any particular situation we will experience emotional stress, which then, if unchecked, can trigger the use of food to cope. The following are some examples of situations where we undermine our sense of safety and trust in our ability to keep ourselves safe:· We have a relative who frequently makes comments about our weight but we don’t say anything because we don’t want to “make a scene” or hurt their feelings.
· We’re in a meeting at work and a colleague has just said something that we believe is untrue but we don’t call them on it because we don’t want them to be angry with us.
· We know we aren’t that interested in dating a certain someone but we agree to go out with them because we don’t want to hurt their feelings.
Notice the theme? It’s all about what others are going to think and feel. We’re so very concerned with what others think of us and feel about us that we’ll compromise ourselves time and time again just to avoid any possibility of judgement or rejection. We can’t possibly begin to feel safe in the world and to feel the sense of peace and happiness and trust in ourselves that we need in order to cease using food to cope if we’re going to keep putting what others think of us ahead of how we feel and what we need. Where does that seemingly insatiable need for external approval come from? It comes from the belief that we are not good enough as we are. Thus we desperately need everyone’s constant approval, regardless of what we have to do to get it, or we will feel the painful sting of the “not good enough” story. One of the primary experiences in childhood/young adulthood that sets us up to believe that we are not good enough is Emotional Abuse. You’ve probably heard the term but you may not truly understand what it is and how it impacts you – specifically how it is the most significant contributor to your lack of trust and safety in yourself and in the world around you.Posted in: Uncategorized
Leave a Comment (0) →Overcoming difficult tasks. One of the primary coping strategies that all humans use from time to time is procrastination: The art of leaving to tomorrow what you could and possibly even “should” do today. When we procrastinate every now and then with things that aren’t so big it has no harmful or lingering impact on our lives. We’ve simply chosen to pick up the dry cleaning Friday rather than Thursday and it’s stuff we don’t need until Monday so no biggie.
However, those of us who use food to cope in any way also typically struggle with procrastination in a big way and that has a nasty impact on our overall sense of peace and trust in ourselves. This inevitably leads us to need to use food to cope even more to numb out or to feel that at least we’re on top of something.
The underlying triggers that cause us to reach for food to cope or to restrict set off a chain reaction that looks something like this:
Not the most life-enhancing course of action when we’re coming from a rational and balanced mind.
But….it makes perfect sense when we really believe at our core that we are incapable; that we are not good enough; that we are undeserving of love and success and freedom and peace and all that we desire. From that standpoint it seems perfectly reasonable to assume we won’t be successful and to just give up before we even start.
Ironically this typically leads us to have to rush around at the last minute and stress ourselves out much much more than we needed to in order to complete whatever “it” is. Or we just get so overwhelmed and we buy so fully into the story that we can’t do it/won’t be successful that we don’t do “it” at all and then have to live with feelings of shame and guilt and embarrassment and all the self-judgment and the “I told you so’s” from within our own head and perhaps even from some key people in our lives.
Procrastination is a killer of peace and of self-esteem and it’s also caused by a diminished sense of self-esteem and the nasty belief that: We just aren’t good enough and we never will be so there’s no point in even trying.
A great place to start to attend to our use of procrastination to cope is to notice that we’re procrastinating and to ask ourselves the following questions:
“What specifically am I telling myself about this thing/event/task that is leading me to procrastinate?”
“Is there any all or nothing thinking in that story?”
“What are some other possible ways that that thing/event/task could be handled or could turn out?”
“Could I allow myself to choose to believe and act on one of those other stories instead of the original, all or nothing, one?”
Give that a go and see what you discover about your thought processes and what happens to your use of procrastination to cope.
If you’re ready to break free of the cycle of procrastination and learn to meet new and old challenges from a place of excitement and self-confidence it’s time to contact The CEDRIC Centre and let us support you to be the best you can be in all ways.
Love M
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