Growing Human(kind)ness by Karly Randolph Pitman

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How marriage can help heal addiction

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A few years ago I was asked to write an essay about addiction and marriage. I’d love to share this piece with you.

There’s a scene in the movie Shall We Dance? where Susan Sarandon’s character meets with a private investigator.  She’d hired the investigator to follow her husband, as she was certain he’d been having an affair.  Instead she learns – surprise – that he’s been taking dancing lessons.

This revelation leads to a mix of emotions – a disruption to her sense of how well she knows her husband, a bit of envy towards his beautiful dance partner and their shared passion, and a desire to support him as he weathers the internal crisis that led him to seek solace in dancing.

At one point, she asks the investigator, “Why do we marry?” and offers her own theory in response:  we marry to bear witness to each other’s lives.

Making each other count

Her desire to bear witness reminds me of a line from a Mary Oliver poem, where she writes about how each life is “a flower, as common as a field day, and as singular.”  Where each body is “a lion of courage, and something precious to the earth.”

In any loving relationship, we bear witness to each other’s courage, to the singularness, the uniqueness, the preciousness of our lives.  These things matter because they belong to someone we love.  We make each other count.

With that love comes reverence – we care about the minutia of their day as well as the larger unfolding of their human life, the myths that shape their particular story.  As the partner, the observer, the witness, we give greater meaning to these myths.

Journeying into darkness

Now, this sounds good and noble when we’re talking about the hero’s journey – something that has a ring of victory to it.  But what happens when this journey ventures into darkness, when we linger in the underworld?  Do we bear witness at those times?

Most of us express some version of the vow “to love one another in sickness and health” when we marry.  When that vow is tested – and tested to the utmost – it can fray the most fervent desire to bear witness.  Is this any more poignant than with addiction? With mental illness?

Facing our compulsions

I wish I could say that I’ve used something as harmless as dancing to cope with life’s pain.  But my coping strategies haven’t been nearly as elegant.  For most of my life, I’ve been an addict.  The fact that my chosen addiction was food – something that’s relatively socially acceptable, as long as you “control” your weight – doesn’t alter the suffering.

The shame, the self loathing, the guilt, the fear, the desperate, clinging neediness, the desire to heal and the hopelessness that keeps the addiction going – are the same.

I’ve had other, more subtle compulsions, layers underneath the food:  people pleasing, wanting to look good, controlling, and judging.  When life gets painful, uncertain, or hard, I want to run to one of these “false refuges,” as Tara Brach calls them.  It’s my own personal version of fight or flight, how I flee – into food, into control, into one obsession or another.

The pain of addiction

These patterns can cause all sorts of challenge, particularly in my relationships.  While I would say that my relationship with myself has suffered the most of all, my relationship with my spouse is a close second.

When I gorged on food, I was absent from my life.  I ignored my children’s plea for a bedtime snuggle; I avoided making love with my husband to inhale a pound of raisins.  I closed down my heart.  I got pissy and jealous and cared more about getting my fix than noticing the needs of those around me.  I was wrapped around my own pain, and yet consumed with wanting more of what never satisfied.

Intellectually, of course I knew better.  I knew that stuffing myself with 5,000 calories of food won’t solve my problems; it will not make me happy.  But intellect was not the problem.

Finding healing

On my two decade journey of healing my food addiction, I tried just about everything to change. If I’m honest, I was really searching for a “magic bullet” – the spiritual, psychological, or dietary tool that would finally control my addiction. It’s all I knew how to do.

But control wasn’t the problem, nor the solution. What finally brought peace was something quite radical.  Instead of running from my addiction, I turned towards it and listened.

I stopped making myself, my pain or my addiction wrong. In this space of acceptance, of unconditional love, my relationship to my food addiction – and to my very self – changed.

Coming to the rest of unconditional love

I faced the many parts of me that I’d stuffed inside.  I gathered up all my wounds and let them rest.  In so many words, I said to those hurting, tender parts of me, “Sweetheart, it’s okay.  Let me care for you.”

Rather than looking at my addiction as something terrible, grotesque, as something I needed to “cut out,” I looked at it as something tender that needed love.  I saw a wounded little girl, who so desperately wanted to be loved.

If you asked this wounded girl what she believed to be true, this would be her view of reality:  If I can only get my stuff together – with food, with my weight, in life and love – I will finally – finally – feel enough. I’ll finally feel worthy of love.

So I held that little girl in my arms, like you would hold any crying child, and I told her, “Sh, sh, it’s okay. I love all of you.”

Opening through love

When we feel loved, we open.  Through love – self love, the love of others – I opened.

Underneath my addiction, I found layers of unmet needs that I was trying to fill with food.  A need to belong, to be accepted, to know my own goodness.  A need to take up space, to feel okay with taking up space, a need to…. need.  What I most needed was to matter; to believe in my innate worthiness.

Nearly every person I’ve ever met who’s struggled with addiction shares these core wounds. And we can only heal our addictive patterns when we heal these beliefs about how we matter.  We’re not just trying to see the food, the drug, the hit differently.  We work to see ourselves differently

“I see you.”

This is where loving relationship can step in. One of the greatest gifts we can give each other is to say, “I see you. I see your goodness.”  To mirror their strength, essence, their suchness back to them – particularly when they’ve lost the thread on their own.

Poet Nikki Giovanni wrote about this in her poem “Love In Place,” when she described coming across a photo of herself at a much younger age.  While she sees her beauty, her youth, and her eagerness, the memory is her lover’s:  “What I mostly see is me through your eyes.”

It is a mercy to look at ourselves through the eyes of love.  Thankfully, we don’t have to do this on our own.  When we can’t do this for ourselves, friends, lovers, and our communities can do this for us.  It is a noble endeavor.

Standing in the gap

My husband stood in the gap for me.  Over and over, as I tripped and fell in my wilderness, he reminded me of my essence, my goodness.

He did this, first and foremost, by staying in our marriage, even when it wasn’t fun.  He couldn’t have said it any more clearly:  You’re worthy of my love.  I love you and I want you and I choose you.

With this mercy, I could find mercy for my own heart.

The hardest thing I’ve ever done – beyond facing the helplessness I had over food – was to stop hating myself for being an addict.  Once I stopped blaming myself (and blaming others), I had no choice but to face the pain I’d long been avoiding.  What I found was all the myriad ways I tried to avoid hurting.

It’s much easier to eat than to say I’m sorry.

It’s much easier to eat than to have a difficult conversation about what isn’t working.

It’s much easier to eat than to admit that I can’t control life, that I’m not in charge, that my smarts and good grades and beauty and even “doing all the right things” aren’t an inoculation against pain.  There are no guarantees.

It’s much easier to eat than to be this…alive.

And we rise

And this is why I now turn inwards, over and over and over again.  To feel my vulnerability is to feel my life; to live it fully, and this means living the regrets as thoroughly as I live the joys.

Opening to my vulnerability in addiction is not that different from opening to my vulnerability in relationship.  In both we can open, trust, and let go, knowing full well the risk of being hurt.  In both we can look honestly at what’s going on, to see the truth of what’s there.

No, relationships are not easy.  Opening our hearts and shedding our armor is not easy. Dropping our defenses or our desire for control is not easy – or comfortable. And yet, we can and we do and we dare.

To love this fully is to live the hero’s journey.  Along the way we will be broken – yes. And yet, our hearts open, and open, and open – through and to each other.

Thank God.

Wanting more hands on help?

  • How to break free from the broken self trance
  • Learn about the alchemy of self acceptance
  • If you’re wanting support to heal your relationship with food, with you overeating, and with your very self, I recommend my overeating program, Heal Overeating:  Untangled. In this audio based program, you’ll learn how to release the shame of overeating, care for your emotions under the food, and find the deepest rest of unconditional love.

Photo credit: AlicePopkorn / Foter / CC BY-NC-ND

4 ways to soothe a reactive brain

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With self acceptance and self compassion, our reactive brains "come down" and come to rest.
With self acceptance and self compassion, our reactive brains “come down” to rest.

One of the most powerful tools for healing is self acceptance. When we understand and know ourselves deeply, we find that we can respond to our habitual tendencies from a deeper well of wisdom – and with greater mercy. We can care for ourselves as we are – and not how we wish we were.

This acceptance is a gift to ourselves:  a gentle nod that says, “This is how it is right now.” We make space for all parts of ourselves, and for all our human messiness.

In particular, I’ve found self acceptance to be very helpful in caring for ourselves when we’re caught in our lower, reptilian brain. This is the part of us that can overreact, freak out, and see everything as, “danger.” We all have this lower brain. But some of us have more reactive brains – and more reactive lower brains – than others.

Are you highly reactive?

In Susan Cain’s thoughtful book Quiet, she describes the research of Jerome Kagan. Dr. Kagan and others have found that some people have more reactive brains than others. In those who are high reactive, there’s higher activity in the amygdala (a part of the lower brain) when confronted with a new stimulus. (I would use the words “highly sensitive” interchangeably with “highly reactive” here, because both point to a highly sensitive nervous system.)

In everyday language, what this means is that if you have a highly reactive brain, your brain perceives new things as more stimulating or even more threatening than those with low reactive brains.

On the surface, this high reactivity/high sensitivity can look like:

  • anxiety
  • feeling easily frustrated
  • having challenges with change and transitions
  • imagining worst case scenarios or focusing on the negative
  • feeling easily overwhelmed or overstimulated
  • and feeling threatened by change or newness

What high reactivity can look like

I’ll give you some concrete examples of how this can play out. One of my dear children – who is high reactive (um, I don’t know where he got it!) – approaches anything new with, “No.” This could be something he really, really, really enjoys – like an art class, a playdate with a friend, gymnastics, or swimming. But if the idea doesn’t come from his brain – which feels safe to him, as he’s prepared himself for it – he reacts to it as a threat and says, “No.”

Fortunately, I understand what’s going on. So I don’t take his no personally – I know it’s just his sweet brain trying to protect him from what it perceives as danger. I know a part of him does want to try what I’m suggesting – it’s just his lower brain talking to him and saying no.

Here’s another example. A few weeks ago, my family and I were going out to see Despicable Me 2. I’m not sure how I managed this, but somehow I got the wrong theater and(!) the wrong time for our outing. If we wanted to see the movie, we’d have to wait until nearly 10 p.m. – super late for our 6 year old, and find something to do for the next 90 minutes. My brain started going into the worst case scenario – what I call “The sky is falling, the sky is falling!” – about how we wouldn’t be able to see the movie after all. Exhibit A of my reactive brain talking.

But it ended up working out fine – we got a snack at Whole Foods and spent some time at REI. We ended up buying a frisbee in REI and playing frisbee in the parking lot, as the lot was empty, and felt silly and connected. What my brain imagined as a terrible night turned out to be just fine – pretty fun, in fact.

How do you relate to your high reactive brain?

So, yes, in my own life, I certainly see all of these tendencies of the highly reactive, and they can be challenging to live with! (And I’m just talking about myself here – not to mention how this may be challenging for those who live with me!)

For many, many years I despised these tendencies in myself. I felt embarrassed and ashamed about what I saw as “character flaws” that felt out of my control. But no matter what I did to change, at some point – usually when I was under chronic stress, tired, overhungry, or in pain – my reactive brain would take over. I’d be overly reactive, anxious, or overly emotional – and then ashamed of my intensity.

Healing the shame of reactivity

When I studied the work of Dr. Gordon Neufeld, I found peace. He taught me that when you have a sensitive nervous system, your brain goes into self protection mode more easily. It is more reactive, and more likely to see new things as threatening or scary. Because a highly sensitive brain processes more sensory information than a non-sensitive brain, it is more easily overwhelmed.

This was incredibly healing for me. It was this huge a ha for me – I’m not a terrible person, I’m simply highly sensitive, and highly reactive!

With this knowledge, I began befriending my dear brain. I accepted:  this is how I’m wired. Instead of fighting against my brain’s tendencies, I accepted them. With this acceptance, I found a space:  a space to work with my brain as a co-partner, as a loving friend, and not as my enemy.

When I deeply understood that my sensitivity is not something I can change, I discovered love – and forgiveness – for myself. I changed because my relationship to my sensitivity changed.

Here’s how that befriending played out.

4 steps to soothe your reactive brain:

1. Name it. When you notice yourself feeling overwhelmed, reactive or threatened, simply notice and name it. I know this may sound silly, but this is how I talk to myself:  “Oh, sweet brain. I hear you. I hear you talking to me.” I’ve found that this tender, light touch creates spaciousness, nurturing, and levity about how I relate to my reactivity.

2. Practice acceptance. Drop any judgment about how you’re feeling. Simply accept your reactivity:  this is how it is right now.

3. Validate and accept the feelings underneath your reactivity. You don’t have to stuff, transmute, ignore your feelings or make them wrong. Instead, validate them. It sounds counterintuitive, but validating your feelings – even those from the reactive brain, like fear, worry, doubt, or anxiety – soothes them.

I like to gently say to myself, “I see you anxiety. I see you fear. It’s okay.” I don’t fight them – I just let them be. This creates a space for them to soften and move.

To go back to the example of my son and the art class, I told him, “It sounds like you’re feeling scared you won’t like it, or you’re feeling nervous about drawing in front of the other kids.” I didn’t make him wrong for feeling scared or try to talk him out of it – “There’s nothing to be scared about.” In validating his feelings, he felt calmed, and ironically, empowered.

4. Practice “and.” This is where we find our realm of power, choice and action. I learned about the power of “and” from Dr. Gordon Neufeld. He calls “and” integrative functioning. This is when you’re able to take all your feelings – your fear, anxiety, doubt – and – move forward into action.

In the case of my son, I told him, “I hear that you’re feeling scared. And I also know that you’re often really excited – and glad you did it! – after trying new things. So let’s just try it and see what happens. You may end up really liking it!”

This is an example of and – honoring our reactivity and finding the deeper pull of our yes – the yes that wants to try something new. I talk more about integrative functioning in The 30 Day Lift, my compassion based audio coaching program on how to eat less sugar.

Thich Nhat Hanh says that “understanding is the foundation of love.” When we understand our reactive brains, we can view ourselves – and our behavior – with softer, gentler eyes. We stop making ourselves – our reactivity, our personality, our humanity itself – wrong. We open our hearts to this part of ourselves, and from this space, we grow:  not only our integrative functioning or our resilience, but also our capacity to love ourselves, unconditionally.

Thriving as a sensitive being

If you’re wanting more support to thrive as a sensitive being, my dear friend Fiona Moore, spiritual teacher and healer, and I are hosting a call in September. The call is free, but you’ll need to register for the call here.

Wanting more hands on help?

Photo credit: *Zephyrance – don’t wake me up. / Foter / CC BY-ND

 

 

How opening to discomfort can set us free

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As I was thinking about recording today’s podcast, I had something entirely different that I was going to share with you, and then life with all its ups and downs brought some sickness for me today. I’ve had an off and on kind of bug all week, and I was going to put off this podcast, but then I thought, ‘no, let’s just go with what is.’ So I wanted to talk today about what my sickness taught me, and that is that if I really want to have a peaceful relationship with life, I need to make room in my heart for things like sickness, things that I don’t want to have.

I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t like being sick and it’s not so much the physical pain that I dislike about being sick. What’s harder for me, and this is just my own experience, is the emotional pain that comes up. For whatever reason, whenever I get sick, it brings up this real tender vulnerability. It’s almost like with being sick my filters are gone.

I have really, really, really vivid, intense dreams, dreams that are often really disturbing and painful. It’s like my psyche just kind of opens up, and all the unprocessed stuff in my life just kind of comes out. I feel kind of separate and alone. I feel really lonely. It’s just a really tough emotional space for me that goes beyond just the physical discomfort, whether I’ve got a sore throat or a stomachache or whatever is going on.

So in being sick this week, I’ve just kind of observed myself and noticed this emotional pain that I’ve been experiencing, and the hardest part hasn’t been the emotional pain itself, it’s been my fight against it. I had a week last week where there were a lot of real breakthroughs for me, and I felt a lot of peace in my life, and I was riding at the crest of one of those waves. It was time of a real high.

So then this week watching myself ebb and go the bottom of this wave in an experience that wasn’t quite as blissful, an experience that wasn’t a high of connection, but rather this place of vulnerability and pain. I noticed how much I was clinging and how much I really wanted to go back to how I was feeling last week.

I wanted to be doing my yoga, and I wanted to be feeling really great, and instead I’m sleeping, and I’m having these intense, vivid, painful dreams, and I’m not going to yoga, and I’m not really doing these things that make me feel really connected and alive. So it’s just not really a joyful ride right now. That’s what the true message for me in being sick was: Can I drop this fight against reality itself, and can I just accept I’m not feeling well and accept how I am feeling, and even open my heart to the vulnerability I’m feeling that I don’t want to feel?

So throughout my day I noticed that I started telling myself when I stop and pause and become aware that there’s this fight going on. I offer a couple different phrases to myself that I found particularly helpful that you might find helpful in your own life when you’re facing things that you don’t want to include inside your circle of compassion and acceptance.

So one of those phrases is from Father Thomas Keating, who is a contemplative monk, and he teaches something called centering prayer. I love how Thomas Keating puts it. It’s a little bow where you just say, “Ah, this, too.” So it’s this reminder of, well, I can accept the vulnerability and emotional pain I’m experiencing right now, and the physical discomfort, I can include that. I can say, “Ah, this, too.” I really love that, because it’s a bowing to life as it is, and it’s a gentle reminder for me that there are some things that are out of control.

I live in a human body, and it is going to get sick at times. At some point, it will die. I’m going to feel the full myriad of the human experience. I’m going to feel joy and pain. I’m going to feel happiness and sorrow. I’m going to feel all those different possibilities.

In the same way that if we look outside and we see that the weather encompasses lots of different permutations. It can be sunny. It can be cloudy. It can be snowing. It can be raining. It can be windy. It can be calm. It can be hot. It can be cold. It can be rainy, and 10,000 different kinds of rain. It can be downpouring. It can be flooding. It can be drizzling. It can be hailing. In the same way that life flows in all those different ways around us, our own lives, they all flow, as well, in many,
many different ways.

The hitch, for many of us, is that while we don’t feel like we should be able to control the weather outside, there are often a lot of “shoulds” about how we should control our own internal weather.I should control how I’m feeling, whether it’s physically, emotionally, spiritually. Or instead, if we look at life not as something to control, but something that is flowing through us, then that subtle bow and that opening to, oh, this is how it is right now, the “this, too” that Father Thomas Keating talks about.

We can bow to the fact that there is something much bigger than our small little minds or our human selves at work here. That in turn, in my experience, brings a peace, because I recognize that I’m held a bigger wave and a bigger ocean than just my small experience. So in this moment, yes, I may not be feeling well, but I am being held by something greater. It’s not my human self that’s controlling that, and so I can let go. I can let go, and I can ride the wave and not look at it as proof that I’m somehow doing life bad or wrong.

The other phrase I love to use and I notice that I’m resisting, a part of my experience, is to just do that gentle bow and name it. I love Dr. Brene Brown’s way of describing that, of that, “Oh, this, too.” In her latest book, “Daring Greatly,” she talks about when she’s feeling super vulnerable, she’ll actually just tell herself, “Vulnerability, vulnerability, vulnerability.”

I love this phrase, to just honor that, yes, we have these tender, tender human hearts. So myself, I can also just say, “Oh, vulnerability,” or I can name it, “Oh, loneliness,” “Sadness,” “Fear,” “Grief,” “Anxiety,” whatever it is, just that naming it and naming it not as an, “Oh, you’re my enemy, go away,” but just naming it with a real compassionate, loving touch, like,
“Oh, there you are fear. Oh, I see you. I see you.” So vulnerability, vulnerability, yes.

Again what this does, when we connect with whatever it is we’re experiencing in this moment, rather than feeling separate and alone in our pain or our discomfort, we find that we can rest in our greater connectedness, to know that every human being feels vulnerable. Everyone knows what it feels like to feel lonely. Everyone knows what it feels like to be in pain. Everyone knows what it feels to feel sorrow.

So rather than becoming something that we feel isolated or separate, we find that, no, this human connectedness is the soil we all share, so rather than feeling alone in our pain and our discomfort, we come home. We come home, and we rest in this greater belonging.

Photo credit: …-Wink-… / Foter / CC BY-NC-ND

How “allowing” our feelings graces us with greater peace

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When we practice allowing, space opens up.
In this week’s podcast episode and blog post, I talk about the practice of “allowing.” By allowing our feelings to be what they are, in all of their messiness, we will ultimately find a surprising amount of release and greater peace. The audio excerpt comes from a call for Heal Overeating: Untangled students.

“I’ve found the practice of allowing to be incredibly powerful, and it’s the idea that whatever we’re feeling, whatever we’re needing, to allow it. I know that sounds kind of radical, because there are a lot of feelings that come up that we don’t want to feel. I really had to learn the practice of allowing anxiety. If you have read my blog or read my books you know that anxiety has been kind of an ongoing challenge for me in my life.

I have done everything to try to soothe my anxiety, and I know all the tools and tricks to use, and I take supplements, and I know to take deep breaths, but there are sometimes that I can do all these things to help myself, but anxiety is still there.

Then, what would happen is that I would feel incredibly shamed, again like I was failing this spiritual test, failing the human test, because I know all this stuff intellectually and yet, emotionally, my anxiety is still there.

It’s still present. I felt ashamed because I couldn’t make it go away. So what I learned to do instead, was to allow it, to surrender to it. To say in so many words, this is how it is right now.

I will actually use the word allowing, so when I notice that there is a lot of anxiety in my body, I practice soft belly with it. I just open up to it, and I will say to it, ‘It’s okay, anxiety, I see you, I allow it.‘ Immediately, there is all this space, because what happens then is that I’m feeling anxious about feeling anxious, if that makes sense.

So we have that original feeling, that anxiety, but then we start attacking it, so we’ve got two feelings then. We’ve got hatred of our hatred, or we are feeling angry because we are feeling angry, or we are feeling anxious because we are feeling anxious. So, you get a double feeling.

We may not be able to control that first feeling of anxiety, or that feeling of anger, but we can shift how we relate to it. We can relate to it by just allowing it, by softening it, by not feeling like we have to armor our self against it.

If we armor our self against our feelings, or our needs, or our emotions, we feel physically awful because we’re so tight and tense. We will do anything to keep from feeling that feeling, like eating. We will use food as a buffer. We can use all kinds of things as a buffer. We will try to control our lives so that we don’t feel that feeling, and so we kind of white knuckle our way through life. We are not really free.

By contrast, allowing, remember that the brain can only protect itself or grow, so we are not caught in that self-protection mode and we are in that soft space of allowing. We can grow, we can open, we can learn, we can be, we can just let it be. There is a saying from Jung, ‘What we resist, persists.’

The more I resists whatever I am feeling, the larger and louder it grows, because there is something I am fighting against.

Allowing is like being a martial arts master where you are just engaging something rather than fighting against it; you are stepping aside. You are just stepping aside. So the allowing of our feelings and needs is what allows them to flow — it’s what drops that tension.

So, as we drop that tension, we can hold onto that and relax, contentedly. It’s not a matter of life or death. It’s not the end of the world that we are feeling angry, or we are feeling anxious. It’s just like the weather. Like, ‘okay, there is a thunderstorm outside.’

As we move with that flow, we start to trust, not because someone tells us we should, but because we experience it. All these feelings ebb and flow, and we start to trust that, ‘oh, feelings don’t last forever.’ It’s uncomfortable, for sure, but it eventually ebbs and flows.”

Wanting more hands on help?

  • You may also enjoy this post I wrote for The Daily Love on why feeling cravings more, not less, softens them.
  • If you’d like practices and tools to help you “allow,” I invite you to explore my overeating program, Heal Overeating:  Untangled. This audio and workbook program is my most popular program, and can help you heal your relationship with food and your sweet self. If it feels right to you, I encourage you to experience the healing in this program for yourself.

Photo credit: ashley rose, / Foter.com / CC BY-NC-ND

Breaking free from the “broken self” trance

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Do you believe you’re a “broken self?”
Photo credit: http://www.wylio.com/credits/Flickr/132922595

One of the most painful results of struggling with an eating disorder, addiction, depression, or any suffering is how we identify with it.

While labels can be helpful, they can also be harmful. And they become harmful when they become the way we define ourselves in the deepest sense. When we think of our eating disorder as who we are, we get tight, cramped, and small. Our identity is hitched around this idea of, “I’m an addict,” or “I’m a binge eater,” or “I’m depressed.”

While you may binge eat, and while you may struggle with depression, is this who you are? Is this the sum of who you are?

My “broken self” trance

I struggled with decades of eating disorders. I’ve also coped with a highly sensitive nervous system, chronic depression and anxiety for nearly all of my life. Some combination of biology, psychology and life experience has intertwined, resulting in a tender, tender being who needs tremendous love and care. (Don’t we all?)

I care for my anxiety and depression every day. Many days, I’m fine – I laugh, I find gratitude, I find joy. I wear the mantle of “anxiety” or “depression” loosely. I tap into a greater sense of identity.

But other times – especially when I’m tired, sick, or under stress – I don’t hold onto the identity of “depressed person” lightly. Rather, I embody it – I inhabit a mental and emotional space of “a broken, deficient self.”

I start comparing myself to others – or to my own expectations of how I “should” be. When I compare myself to others, I can find 10,000 ways that I fall short:  whereas others seem to have an innate sense of belonging, optimism, and confidence, I have to consciously work to hold onto positive thoughts, to feel my belonging, and to feed my optimism. What comes naturally to them takes tremendous effort on my part.

What the “broken self” trance looks like

When I’m in the “broken self” trance, these patterns of feeling, thought and behavior play themselves out:

  • I feel less than others. I feel small, meek, powerless.
  • My posture is often small. My shoulders round. I slump. I cave in on myself like a turtle.
  • I doubt my abilities, my sense of self, or who I am. I don’t trust myself.
  • I feel too vulnerable – not vulnerable as in real and authentic and open, but vulnerable as in, “Exposed. Hurting. Raw.”
  • I doubt my own worth and goodness.
  • I feel unloved, unworthy, alone. Separate. Closed off from others. Different, deficient.

Oh, ouch.

What about you? When you’re in the broken self trance, how do you feel? What do you believe is true about yourself? How do you relate to yourself and others?

The controlling self

The broken self has a partner – “the controlling self.” In fact, the controlling self likes to go to war with the broken self – telling the broken self all the ways it “should” be different. (They then feed each other.) If you asked the controlling self what it believes to be true, the controlling self would say things like:

  • I should be in more control.
  • I should be in charge.
  • This shouldn’t be happening.
  • I should be more together.
  • There’s something wrong with you and you need to fix it.
  • And, its core  belief:  and all of this is all your fault.

Where the controlling self comes from

The controlling self is the voice of a small child – a child who believes the world revolves around him. If a 7 year old’s parents get divorced, the child might say, “It’s my fault mommy and daddy got divorced. It’s because I didn’t eat my broccoli, or because I didn’t clean my room, or because I made my mommy and daddy mad. If I would’ve been a better child they wouldn’t be divorced…”

(After my 6 year old son’s pet fish died, he refused to go to after school care – something he’d been begging to go to the week before. As it turns out, Pablo (the fish) had died while he was in after care. He believed that if he hadn’t stayed at school, then Pablo wouldn’t have died. He was believing it was all in his control, and all his fault.)

The controlling self feels guilty and at fault when things don’t go its way. It feels ashamed, as if it should’ve been able to control the outcome…

The controlling self wants so desperately to be in charge – to have everything go its way – because it doesn’t believe that it can handle the pain and loss of life. It doesn’t want to feel the inherent vulnerability of being a human being:  that our small, sweet ego selves are not in charge.

And so it does everything it can to try and extract a measure of control over life.

My controlling self

My dear, sweet momma struggled with depression throughout my childhood. And my response to the pain of her depression was self perfection. I remember being young and naive and thinking that I would certainly control and manage my life so that I never felt depressed. I certainly could do better than she did. (Oh, ouch, the arrogance….)

And I remember thinking that I would be so together – so together that I would never hurt my children or loved ones (or anybody for that matter.) I was going to arrange my life so I never had money problems, hard times, weight struggles, or health challenges.

Life had other plans. I dealt with all of these, and more. I, too, have failed to meet many (!) of my own expectations. Through these experiences, life showed me that my dear sweet momma did the best she could, and my own sweet being has done the best I could.

So when difficult things show up in our lives – like depression or binge eating – how do we respond?

Unhooking from the broken self

We can start with awareness. We can stop and pause and ask ourselves, “What am I believing to be true about myself?” I’ve spent a lot of time in the broken self trance, so it’s a space that’s very familiar to me. This familiarity means that I can recognize it and name it — “Oh, this is the broken self talking.”

Just naming something gives us some space, some breathing room. We can step back and observe ourselves in the broken self trance rather than embodying it. We can unhook and find a new sense of identity – an identity that is so much greater than our challenges, or our weight, or our body, or even our health.

None of these things – depression, anxiety, the body, our health, our thoughts, feelings, or eating habits – are “me” or “you.” And if none of those things are me with a capital M, then I don’t have to take my broken self – or any of my flaws – so personally. The fact that I feel depressed, or anxious, or that I’ve had eating disorders isn’t so personal to me. It just is.

Moving from shame/guilt to loving care

And if it just is, and isn’t about me, my, or mine – a source of ownership and therefore a source of shame –  then the window opens to possibility. Instead of feeling ashamed and broken we can respond with tender, tender care. So rather than nailing ourselves or feeling ashamed of ourselves for feeling anxious, or for feeling anything that flows through our tender bodies, we can care for it as a mother cares for a child on its lap.

We can hold those tender feelings with exquisite kindness.

Which is what everything – every part of me, every part of you, every part of life – most deeply wants.

I wonder if this is how we love the world – by loving the most challenging things that flow through our lives. If we don’t love these part of ourselves, who will? If we don’t love our most challenging parts, how can we love the challenging parts in other people?

Opening to our challenges

I remember watching the Olympics this past summer, and feeling bowled over by the talents of the athletes – and the incredible amount of work and heart it took to cultivate those gifts into gold medal level excellence. We think of our talents as gifts – something we can choose to cultivate and grow. We often feel proud of those things that are “good” or that our culture lauds.

But what if our deepest struggles are also gifts? Something that is ours to cultivate – to love, to care for? Something neither good nor bad, simply something to love? Can we care for them with the same kindness and care as we do our “talents?”

Finding compassion and belonging

Unhooking from the controlling self leads us to forgiveness, and ironically, belonging. Franciscan monk Richard Rhor put it this way:  “When we fail we are merely joining the great parade of humanity that has walked ahead of us and will follow after us.”

Ah, do you feel the relief in that statement? We don’t have to make ourselves any bigger or any smaller than we are.

When I step out of the broken self trance, I remember my deepest nature. Yes, I have a small “I” self, who makes lots and lots of mistakes, and who copes with anxiety and depression, and who can be kind and cruel and all measure of in between. And this is not who I am.

My deepest nature – my true self – is my big s “Self.” This is the part of me who steps back and cares for the controlling self and the broken self – with kindness and levity and so much compassion. It’s the part of me underneath all these messy, messy layers – the part of me who says, in wonder, “If you could only see who I am…who I really am….”

It’s the part of me that love can call out, and elicit – and love back.

As I release this small identity of broken, failing self, and I inhabit this greater sense of who I am, I take my place inside the circle of belonging. I recognize our shared common humanity:  I am no better or no worse than anyone else. I am simply a part of our tender, imperfect humanity:  and I belong.

As do you.

And from that space, we find freedom. As we reconnect to our deeper belonging, our identify of “bingeing” or “broken” self softens. We, too, find that we have 10,000 ways to respond. We embody our wholeness, not our brokenness.

The alchemy of self acceptance – how acceptance makes change possible

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I often talk about how you can change your relationship with sugar through loving relationship itself:  kindness, compassion, connection, and acceptance. Many people email or ask me, “But how? How does being accepting or kind to myself help me change how I eat?”

It’s a great question! In this post, I’m going to focus on self acceptance, and how self acceptance fuels growth, healing and change.

What acceptance isn’t

When I first learned about “acceptance,” I felt skeptical and resistant. I thought acceptance meant agreement – as in, “I agree with this and I’m okay with it.” So how could I accept/find agreement with things like bingeing, gorging on sugar, overeating, judging myself and more – habits that were obviously leading to tremendous suffering in my life? And if I did accept them as “okay,” then wouldn’t accepting these habits keep me further entrenched in them? Wouldn’t it be a form of resignation – or permission?

After many years of studying and practicing acceptance, I’ve come to see that acceptance isn’t any of these things. Likewise, it’s not a value judgment of good (or bad.)

What acceptance is

Acceptance is merely an acknowledgment of what is – of what you’re experiencing in any given moment.

Let’s make this tangible. Imagine that you find yourself craving food – or following that craving and overeating. In that moment, what are you experiencing? What are the feelings, emotions, needs and sensations that are arising in your body?

Perhaps you’re feeling angry, or sad, or afraid. Perhaps you’re believing things like, “I’m powerless,” “I’m a flawed mess,” or “I should’ve been in more control.” Perhaps you’re telling yourself that you shouldn’t be feeling/reacting/thinking this way.

How acceptance stops the cycle of self punishment

These are all subtle forms of blame and judgment. When you tell yourself I shouldn’t be XYZ, you’re not allowing the truth of your experience to be – which is that you are craving food; that you are feeling angry, sad or afraid. This judgment tends to spiral, proliferate and grow.

Acceptance is what stops the cycle. It’s the doorway out.

Rather than judging ourselves for what’s going on inside, or telling ourselves we shouldn’t be feeling this or wanting that, acceptance is a gentle nod of, “Yes, this is how it is for me right now.” It’s making space for all our feelings, all our emotions, all our longings and needs, all our experiences – for the full width and breadth of the human experience.

“I consent.”

Acceptance is a powerful form of surrender:  an opening to what is and not what we wish were true. To quote The Beatles, acceptance is “letting it be.” Father Thomas Keating describes acceptance as saying, “I consent” or “This, too.” Yes to this, and yes to this, and yes to this….

Whew – it’s radical, isn’t it? It’s a dying to self – dying to all the ways our minds say “But it should be _____!” … dying to all the ways our minds say that we, life or others should be different. (Yes, this can feel like annihilation!)

It can take a while to get to acceptance – it took me a decade of fighting to surrender. At first, all I could see with acceptance was loss – the loss of what I wanted, imagined, or wished were different. I didn’t realize that, yes, while there’s loss in acceptance – the loss of the way we think things should be – there’s also a tremendous gain:  the freedom to feel at peace with what is.

When we practice acceptance, a few things happen:

1. Space opens up. When the heart and mind feel safe – not judged or shamed – they can open. Rather than moving into self protection and shutting down from self judgment, there’s space for curiousity and openness. We can slow down and gently inquire, “What’s really going on here?”

This soft touch of curiosity invites opening:  let’s see what’s here. We develop an understanding for why we’re overeating, or why we’re lashing out at a loved one, or why we’re judging our sadness….

2. We unhook from the idea that we’re a “flawed, bad self.”

Rather than trying so hard to defend ourselves so we look good – or scrambling to hide our “flaws” – we relax into our own imperfection. Our self esteem isn’t dependent on being the best or on being “good” all the time. Ah, the pressure to be perfect softens!

We can look at the truth of our experience and accept it without falling to pieces and thinking we’re a flawed mess. There’s room for the entire width and breadth of our human experience – the “good,” the “bad” and the “ugly.”

Likewise, our identity isn’t caught up with trying to be a “good self who doesn’t make any mistakes.” (Can you feel the tight, cramped ouch of trying to be that person?) Because we accept all our many “selves” and aren’t so identified with them, changing no longer feels like a rejection of the self. We can change and find ways of acting that better meet our needs.

3. We forgive ourselves and others, finding self compassion.

Acceptance naturally leads to compassion – an understanding of our interdependence, and the 10,000 factors that influence our day to day experience, emotions, thoughts and beliefs. Rather than shaming or judging ourselves for our conditioning – those factors that have shaped our personality and development – we move to care for these hurt parts with wise, appropriate action.

And rather than shaming or judging others for the conditioning that shaped their personality – and therefore ours –  we find more levity and space to see that they, too, are doing the best they can.

3. We don’t make ourselves wrong for feeling however we’re feeling. There is tremendous freedom in this. On a physical level, acceptance feels like a giant softening. For me, I experience this softening in my belly, jaw, and neck/shoulders, as these are the places where I hold onto the tension of “This shouldn’t be this way.”

As this tension leaves the body, you may feel a soft, relaxed warmth in the belly – similar to the positive, warm sensations that you may feel after sex/orgasm, while nursing a baby, or during a time of loving, positive connection. (In writing these examples, I’m wondering if acceptance releases endorphins or some of the feel good hormones, like oxytocin (the love hormone), as sex and breastfeeding can.) In a word, it feels really, really good!

4. New options open up. As you move out of this painful, tight, cramped space of judgment – where it’s hard to make any wise decision, as you’re feeling too hooked – and you move into this warm, relaxed field of acceptance, you move into possibility. Suddenly, things don’t feel so rigid, tight or impossible.

So rather than doing the same thing over and over – and getting stuck in the same ruts – you realize there are 10,000 ways to respond….and lo and behold, you do something different.

You put the fork down, you question the impulse for the gallon of ice cream, you leave the room when you would’ve fueled the argument. You pause. You self soothe your anxiety rather than acting on it. You respond, rather than react.

You stop walking into the same pothole. You adapt. You change. You grow. You do one thing different.

You realize that the story of, “I can’t change,” is not true. Baby step by baby step, you grow.

 

 

 

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