Posted by mmorand on July 9, 2010
A topic that comes up often enough in my sessions with clients is that of not really believing or trusting the “reassuring” and “supportive” comments of the Drill Sgt. (your inner critic/champion).
What I mean is that, once you’ve identified that your Drill Sgt. is criticizing you for something and have used one of the CEDRIC tools to figure out what he’s really on about, it is common early in this healing process to want to reframe his well-intentioned but poorly-communicated support into a strong, confident statement of absolute belief and trust in our ability to succeed. This actually backfires, believe it or not, and we end up feeling just as estranged from ourselves but now we believe we don’t even have a tool we can use to help because we tried it and it didn’t work! Not quite true.
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Tags: affirmations, all-or-nothing thinking, anxiety, anxious, compulsive eating, drill sergeant, eating disorders, forgiveness, isolated, lonely, mistakes, perfect, recovery, self care, self esteem, self love, self worth, self-loathing, triggers
Posted in: 2010, CEDRIC Centre, Relationship with Others, Relationship with Self
For this week’s article I am responding to a question from a reader, Anna, who, after reading last week’s article, Back to Basics, wanted some more specific information on how to overcome nighttime binging.
“I get an overwhelming sense that I need to eat at bedtime. It is almost like an obsession. I have not figured out what thought is triggering this yet. (At other times of the day it seems easier to figure out the thoughts that precede such events.) If I assume it is really hunger and decide to have something small, I am right into a binge and cannot stop with a reasonable amount. Any ideas?”
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The theme of “making mistakes” (from the last 2 weeks) seems to have hit home with many readers, and with good reason. One of the main reasons we use food to cope is because we are so anxious all the time about saying the right thing; doing the right thing; being perceived as good and kind and generous and smart and sexy and “together.”
The pressure to perform and to conform to others’ expectations of who or what we should be creates a chronic state of anxiety that I call “the permeating level of anxiety” (PLA) and it is this chronic sense of disease or distress within that triggers us to restrict, or binge or purge.