Don’t Eat That Cookie! Are You Healing or Avoiding?

When you were young did your mother use to say, ‘Don’t cry. Here have a cookie and you’ll feel better.’

And you ate the cookie, got distracted and yes you did actually feel a bit better. For ten minutes. Then the pain came back, and it was time for another cookie.

Does this sound at all familiar? If that child was you, perhaps you grew up to associate fixing your emotions with food, or other short term distractions. Instead of facing the pain and actually healing properly. The fact is:

If you don’t confront your emotions, you’ll never heal!

The example of the daughter and her cookie comes from John James and Russell Friedman’s great book ‘The Grief Recovery Handbook’, where they talk about confronting your emotions rather than filling your life with things that fill your time, but only provide a short-term relief.

When you eat that cookie the fact is there’s no emotional completion of the pain caused by the event. The event and all the feelings associated with it are simply buried. Ready to keep coming up throughout your life no matter how many cookies you eat.

What are Your Short Term Emotion Avoidance Tactics?

Short Term Emotion Avoidance Tactics (STEATs) are things you do to avoid feeling the pain, numb the pain, or to take the pain away in the short term. They are often escapism-type activities where you keep SO focused and busy that there is no time to think.

They help you feel better in each moment BUT you’re not feeling better for real – it’s a false sense of security – a false feeling of recovery. And if you fill your life up with lots of STEATs your healing will not progress.

STEATs are so common after divorce

The sad thing is that for most people struggling to get over their divorce they’re engaging in a cycle of feeling the pain, applying a STEAT, feeling the pain, applying another STEAT, until over time they feel numb and they think this numbness is them healed from their divorce.

STEATs prolong the emotional roller-coaster of your divorce. So you never fully grieve for long enough or experience the loss critical to healing for real. Your emotional roller coaster will go up and down, up and down. Until you stop. And start to heal for real.

Your recovery exercise – which of these common STEATs do you use?

It’s time to be brutally honest with yourself.

Try to identify two short-term relief activities you’ve been doing to distract yourself and displace your feelings since your divorce or break up. This can be a lot harder than it seems, but it’s going to take your absolute commitment to honesty to truly heal.

Here are some common examples: Excessive socializing. Over-exercising. Fantasy or escapism activities (books, TV, movies). Shopping/retail therapy. Work and becoming a workaholic. Pretending something hasn’t happened. Overeating. Eating foods loaded with sugar and fat (‘comfort eating’). Excessive drinking of alcohol. Excessive use of recreational drugs. Using prescription drugs such as tranquilizers or antidepressants.

The list is endless, and it could be something totally unique for you.

So, what STEATs do You use?

Can you share a few with the world?

I’d love to hear them!

New Year, New You: Create a Healing Goal To Move On!

Every New Year is an opportunity to become clean, fresh, new and shiny bright. It’s a chance to wipe the slate clean and make some decisions about your life. It’s all about believing it’s possible and then going out there and making it happen. First step is to have a HEALING GOAL.

This is a vivid movie in your mind that you can day-dream about and work on every single day. It has colors, sounds, feelings and a beginning, middle and ending. It’s a little vision of yourself healed, better, living a wonderful life.

So, here it is – my gift to you to use and enjoy:

HEALING GOAL EXERCISE

1. Choose a very specific HEALING GOAL that you will work with on a daily basis. Make sure that this goal is something that is really important and meaningful to you. It should make you feel good imagining yourself having achieved that goal.

2. Create a picture in your mind’s eye that would indicate to you that your goal has already been accomplished. For example, if your goal is to heal from your past relationship and be even better off than you were before, your inspiring outcome might be that you are walking down the street, your head held high, looking gorgeous and feeling empowered, amazing, light and free. Your ex walks past you and calls your name. You wave and feel grateful and inspired. There is no worry or angst remaining as you go over to say hello. Your inspiring outcome is the end result. (You don’t have to have your ex in your goal, this is just an example).

3. To find your inspiring outcome, ask yourself the following three questions:

a. “How would I know that my goal had been accomplished?”

b. “Where would I be and what would I be doing when my goal has been accomplished?”

c. “What will I see, hear, and feel when my goal has been accomplished that will indicate to me that my goal is realized?”

4. Write out your HEALING GOAL describing in exact detail what you will see, hear, feel (emotionally and physically), taste and smell when your goal is complete.

Express your goal in all five senses:

• V – Visual (sight)

• A – Auditory (sound)

• K – Kinesthetic (feeling, both touch and emotion)

• G – Gustatory (taste)

• O – Olfactory (smell)

As your mind experiences reality, it filters reality through your five senses i.e. it receives input from what you are seeing, hearing, feeling, tasting and smelling.

Research shows that when you use your imagination like this, you can create an imagined experience so real that your mind cannot tell the difference between your imagined experience and reality. When this happens and your mind believes that your imagined experience is actually real, chemical reactions take place in your brain, effectively storing your imagined experience into your memory banks as if it were a real memory.

As you repeat this process of imagining over time, you can program new false memories into your mind. Your mind can then use these false memories as the basis for creating your reality.The end result of all this is that you can begin to think, feel and behave in new, more productive ways that will lead you closer to your goals. New ways of thinking, feeling and behaving have you attract new opportunities and resources into your life to help bring your dreams and goals into reality.

Note: You can hear each suggestion and can RELAX in the knowledge that YOU are making POSITIVE changes to your subconscious mind.

Example HEALING GOAL

Imagine that your inspired outcome for realizing your perfect HEALING GOAL is to see yourself dancing and looking incredible and being adored by all the men around you. You feel amazing! Here is an example of what you might write down describing your HEALING GOAL.

Visual: (sight)

Flashing lights, bodies moving to the music, smiling people, arms up in the air, catch reflection of myself in the mirror looking amazing, gorgeous guys smiling at me and making motions towards me, champagne in tall glass…

Auditory: (hearing)

Hearing the music, glasses clanking together, murmuring of voices, laughing, guy asking me to dance etc…

Kinaesthetic: (touch)

Cold champagne in hand, feel warmth of a body next to mine, the touch of the fabric against my skin etc…

Kinaesthetic: (emotions)

Happy, contented, empowered, at peace, warm heart, excited, peaceful, grateful, appreciative, joy, mind quiet etc…

Gustatory: (taste)

Salty as I lick my lips, champagne etc…

Olfactory: (smell)

Champagne, after-shave etc…

Note: Before you program your mind, it is important to get specific about what you want to program your mind with. Fill in your HEALING GOAL using single words or short phrases. An example of what a completed HEALING GOAL looks like can be found below.

VAKGO sensory elements

To help you extract the VAKGO information from your HEALING GOAL, I have included a list of some sensory elements that make up each of your five senses.If you find yourself having difficulty creating some of the sensory information in your HEALING GOAL, go through the list below for the particular sense that you are working on, and see if it jogs your imagination.

Visual elements:

Objects

People

Shape

Size – big / small

Color

Brightness

Contrast – light / shade

Texture

Auditory elements:

Volume – loud / soft

Distance – near / far

Quality – clear / distorted

Background sounds

Kinaesthetic (touch) elements:

Temperature – hot / cold

Wind / water / rain against skin?

Texture and pressure

Clothing – how your clothes feel against your skin.

Are you holding anything in your hands? / Are you touching anything?

Are you sitting or lying down – if so, what does that feel like?

Movement and posture

Kinaesthetic (emotional) elements:

Emotional quality – e.g. joy, excitement, pride, gratitude etc…

Intensity – strong / weak

Location in your body – e.g. heart area, solar plexus area, head area.

Gustatory elements:

Texture

Intensity of taste

Hot / cold

Sweet / sour / salty

Olfactory elements:

Pungency / intensity of smell

Smells good / bad

Distance – close / far

MY HEALING GOAL

Date: ……………………………………………………………………………………………………

My HEALING GOAL is (no more than a simple paragraph):

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

My inspired outcome is…

(write one or two sentences summarizing your outcome):

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

Visual (sight)

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

Auditory (hearing)

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

Kinaesthetic (touch)

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

Kinaesthetic (emotions)

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

Gustatory (taste)

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

Olfactory (smell)

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

Till next time,

Stop Saying ‘I’m Fine’ When You’re NOT

Are you always saying “I’m fine” and resisting support?

It’s so interesting that the people who struggle the most and need the most help in life, usually don’t see it. They’re the people who push help and support away.

They think needing support is weakness. That even admitting you need help is weakness.

Do you know someone like this? Perhaps you know someone like this rather… intimately?

If you do, here’s news for you:

Winners Get Help!

And they always do. Quickly, when they need it. Without complaining. And without caring one little bit about how they’re perceived for asking for support. 

Those self-aware people enjoying success in life notice when they need help sorting something out. When things don’t work out they say, ‘Woah, I need to get my head straight and because I am in my own head, I probably need some help with that.’

They then get up and go get help and just like that, they’re back in their mojo. Loving life once more. They even build a whole Dream Team of support people in their corner.

And they do it because they know they’re responsible for everything in their lives. And they avoid the common mistake in thinking I see so often among (usually very intelligent) ‘I’m fine’ people…

Stop Looking Outside Yourself for a Magic Bullet Solution

I see this pattern so often. People who think their issues in life are outside of themselves.

They think if they can just change their circumstances, their financial situation, their weight or their job, or the people around them then BOOM everything will suddenly fall into place and their life will work out.

The truth is circumstances and the people around us have nothing to do with our lives being good or bad. Our mindset, attitude and inner world absolutely shapes our outcomes in the world around us.

It’s All On You – You Are the Cause

If life ain’t working out for you, or you keep attracting drama/chaos/issues, or are just perpetually unhappy, then you have something to do with that. You, and only you.

We cannot control what happens to us in life but we can control how we react. It’s all about our mindset and our inner landscape, which shapes our outcomes.

The bottom line – we are responsible for the results we achieve in life. We have everything to do with how our lives turn out. And those who know this fact are self-aware and are usually the ones happy and enjoying success.

If You’re on an Island You’re Probably Drowning

The ones that say they never need help but continue complaining, staying on their islands being ‘fine’ are usually the ones sinking and drowning in a pit of despair.

There’s a misunderstanding that seeking support somehow makes you weak. Successful people have no concern about how they’re perceived – they simply focus everything on being empowered and driving forward.

They look at themselves, get into action, do whatever it takes. And successful people have their Dream Team to support them through everything.

Your Challenge – One Whole Day, NO COMPLAINING

Here’s my challenge to you. Firstly, take on the ‘No Complaints Day’ challenge. For one whole day you are not allowed to complain in any way, shape or form. Sounds easy? Try it. It might be the most revealing day of your life.

Secondly, start building your Dream Team of support around you. Stop saying ‘I’m fine’ when you’re not, and start saying ‘Can you help me please?’

And tell me what you discover. I’d love to hear it!