Home Archive by category 'Recovery' (Page 4)

Recovery

  • Anxiety, Blogvember, Body Image, Recovery, Self Confidence

    7 – Take courage – Bravely move forward into food freedom now

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    My guess is that if you want to find food freedom, and love your body exactly as it is in every moment of every day you’re going to need to seriously transform the way you are currently living your life and how you think about yourself. In order to enter into the terrifying territory (and those first steps can be incredibly scary) of radically loving yourself fully exactly as you are you’ll need a lot of courage. Trust me.

    Yes it should be something we do naturally but we are conditioned over our whole lives to believe we are not good enough as we are, we need to be thinner, taller, prettier, funnier, sexier, smarter…the list goes on. You need bravery to stand up strong against those stories.

    The amazing thing about bravery is that you can cultivate it in one area of life and then watch that new found bravery carry over into others.

    Let me explain with an example.

    You want the courage to rock that bikini on the beach and not give a crap what anyone thinks. If this is something you are truly afraid of it will probably be too big a hurdle for you to expect that one day you’ll suddenly be able to strut right on to that beach. For you the fear is real. So instead we find something else that is a little less terrifying and face our fear in that area instead. Let’s say making new friends is a fear, but less so than the bikini beach scenario. Instead of standing crying in the bikini we forget that for the time being. Instead we find places where you can meet new people and make new friends, for example a new art class or group expedition. At first you might feel a bit afraid but then you get there and start speaking to people and then after a while the fear is gone and you’re having a good time. You could start even smaller, like going to a new coffee shop, trying something new at your favourite restaurant (these may not sound like a big deal but these are real life example of things I genuinely found to be scary in my life…I lived with a LOT of anxiety…)

    The point here is that this is a marathon not a sprint, facing your fears takes practice, so start small! Every time you face one of these fears your confidence grows. We keep knocking of these fears until one day you look at your bikini and think ‘hell yea of course I can rock that on the beach, why not? I have faced all these other fears, I am a strong warrior woman and I can do whatever I want!’

    Pushing yourself out of your comfort zone doesn’t have to be related to food and your body to start with. These are where your biggest fears lay right?

    It’s like that common analogy ‘trying to run before you can walk’…So pick some other fears. The important thing is to get into the habit of pushing outside of your comfort zone in some way in life. Take this step-by-step. Remember, this is your journey. There is no rush.

    If you want to understand more about how to push through comfort zone read this post on letting go of control.

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  • Blogvember, Body Image, Recovery, Self Confidence, Self Love

    6 – Stop comparing yourself to others now – two top tips

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    You’ve heard it before – comparison is the thief of joy. In this post I am not talking specifically about our bodies (although this is of course a MASSIVE one) this is comparison across the board, across all areas of our lives, career, relationships, family, friends…everything.

    You’ve probably experienced it many times in your life. You get a new jacket that you think is amazing and you feel a million dollars in it then you go and meet your friend who has a more luxurious, better fitting, more stylish new jacket and suddenly yours feels cheap and ugly and that you look crappy compared to her.

    As soon as we start comparing ourselves to others we often start to think we have less than, that we are not as good as them, not as lucky, not as abundant, less loved. We don’t often look at other people and think how wonderful it is that they seem happier than us right?

    We usually can’t help this – even if we want to. It is in our conditioning, from growing up in a society where we are always trying to ‘keep up with the Jones’. But all that happens when we do this is that we feel bad about ourselves. Suddenly we look at our lives, or bodies, and think ‘crap, I wish I had her life rather than mine, I wish I had her body rather mine’.

    It makes sense that a quick way to make yourself instantly happier is to stop comparing yourself to others right? I know you’ve heard this before, the trickier thing is how do we do this…I’m going to share with you two simple actions you can take right now to stop ‘comparison-itis’…let’s dive straight in.

    The best, quickest way to stop comparing yourself is to change the kind of media you consume i.e. detox your social media. By that I mean unfollow anyone who you compare yourself unfavourably to. That girl who you think has perfect hair? a better looking partner than you? straighter teeth? has more friends? unfollow, unfollow, unfollow.

    Remember you can always follow them again in the future. This is just a temporary measure to change the type of images and information you are consuming. The beauty of social media is that you are in charge of the content you see. You can choose who you want to follow so take responsibility for that and choose accounts that spread love, happiness and acceptance. Accounts that share messages or values that are important to you. And cute animals if that kind of thing floats your boat!

    Cleansing your social media is one thing, but what about people in real life who you can’t ‘detox’ from?

    Here comes tip number two. When you come across someone who you compare yourself negatively to send them good wishes. If jealousy comes up, send them love or kindness instead. Send them good will, send a prayer to them if that is something you resonate with.

    The point here is to change your negative reaction or negative emotion into something positive. Rather than seeing someone and then reflecting back on how unworthy you are in comparison, instead you are going to keep looking towards them and send them good energy.

    You might then come up against your own critic saying ‘why are you sending that person who “has it all” good vibes?’ To that you can respond to yourself by asking ‘well why can’t I send those good vibes to myself instead then?’ It’s an amazing question to pose to yourself – which covers two huge themes – Why don’t I love myself? and why do I value others more highly than myself? If you want to go deep with this sit and journal on those questions.

    The point of this exercise is to pattern interrupt. Where normally we would start comparing ourselves and spiral into a self-hatred/pity party instead we are going to send positive vibes. This is not healing the root cause, that needs to be done through your individual work or working with a coach or therapist. But it is stopping you in your tracks and will help you stop comparing yourself negatively to others in the moment.

    The idea is not to ‘pretend’ we didn’t just compare ourselves negatively but instead to recognise, accept and then introduce a new narrative into our minds. We are reconditioning our instinctive responses to others we see as better than us.

    In doing these two things you will have made a great leap forward in stopping the many negative comparisons we make on a daily basis. Let me know how you get on with these in the comments below! If you’d like more support please please reach out, you do not need to struggle on your own, just drop a comment below or email me here sasha@sashafardell.com

    Lots of love to you xxx

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  • Blogvember, Dieting, Exercise, Recovery, Uncategorized

    5 – Take a break – transform your relationship with exercise now

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    I am a fully qualified personal trainer and up until 7 months ago that was how I spent most of my time – training people in the gym, teaching gym-based classes and training myself. However I only did that job for around 18 months after quitting my corporate job in finance before I realised that while I thought I had made my passion my job I had actually made my obsession my job and it got pretty unhealthy very quickly (read more on my story here).

    Coming to Bali was supposed to be a brief break from London living, get some sun, sea, sand and space. I never envisaged my whole life changing, definitely not going from training nearly everyday to not at all for 2 months. I used to live in the gym, literally. At one point I had memberships to 3 different gyms. I was completely obsessed, addicted even, it was my whole life.

    Exercise was my escape, my release, my ‘me-time’. It was my meditation, it was what ‘kept me sane’.

    I see this all over social media – we use exercise to ‘de-stress’, to forget about our problems for an hour, to make ourselves feel better. For a lot of people this can be totally healthy, but for anyone who has struggled with food or their body image, has emotional trauma from their past (or present) they are trying to run from, exercise as an escape is just another way to not deal with your life. Another way to avoid feeling what you need to feel in order to be ok, in order to accept who you are. When everything around me was falling apart and I got bored of dieting I made exercise my absolute compulsion. I claimed that it was good for my mental, emotional and physical health.

    However it got to the point that anytime I went to train in the gym I would get physically ill. I would train and then have to lie in bed for 2 days after as I was completely exhausted, suffering from flu-like symptoms. I went to the doctor and tests showed my kidneys were not functioning properly, unable to cope with the strain I was putting them under with my lifestyle. At this point I had cut my training down to once or twice a week, or even less. I was definitely not over-exercising by any stretch of the imagination.

    But exercise was still hurting me. And not just physically.

    The gym had been another place I went to escape from the things in my life which I didn’t know how to deal with, like my parents divorce. I had absolutely no tools to deal with any difficult emotions in my life, so I avoided them.

    The stress of storing all of my negative emotions in my body on top of a gruelling fitness regime I had put myself under for the previous 3 years led me to completely crumble.

    So I quit everything. I quit every single thing I was doing to avoid my emotions and instead started feeling them. Quitting the gym was one of the toughest because I am naturally an active person (…I was a Personal Trainer!), but also because there is a powerful message coming from the media that exercise is a healthy way to handle your emotions. I was left feeling like such a failure that I couldn’t exercise. I didn’t feel like myself anymore. I saw so many messages from fitness influencers saying exercise was so good for their mental health/anxiety/depression. It felt like I lost part of my identity and one of my main coping mechanisms.

    But actually while I had to give up a big part of my life for a few months I didn’t realise that this was the best thing I could do for my relationship with myself and with exercise.

    The beauty of dealing with my real issues, feeling into them rather than trying to escape them with exercise, is that I have been able to come back to exercise with a fresh perspective. Coming back to it I am now able to enjoy it in a new, different and much more liberated way. Actually enjoy it for what it is, which is a way of keeping my physical body healthy so that I can enjoy a long, happy life.

    Truly if you know you are using the gym to escape from deep painful emotions and dissatisfaction with your life than you are setting yourself up for disaster. You are kicking the can down the road and potentially destroying your body in the process.

    The only reason we should be in the gym is to keep our physical bodies fit and healthy so that we can enjoy our lives.

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  • Blogvember, Dieting, Intuitive Eating, Recovery, Restriction

    4 – Why structured diet plans are always wrong for you long-term

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    What I am about to say you already know intuitively because you are a human being with a physical body you have had since birth. And when you read it, hopefully a little light bulb somewhere inside will go off and you will realise you have always known this (!)

    One of the most fundamental things that rigid diet and exercise plans fail to take into account is that you’re human. Humans are living beings who’s energy requirements CHANGE all the time.

    The amount of food, water, sleep and activity you need changes pretty much on a daily basis. It depends on your environment, the stress you’re under, your emotional state, your menstrual cycle…I don’t mean drastic changes, these are subtle and unique to you. Some days you might just not feel like breakfast and other times you’ll need an extra afternoon snack. If you do hard exercise you’ll want some extra nourishment and if you sit around doing nothing on a Sunday you’ll likely be less hungry.

    A random structured diet plan you found on the internet that says you need to eat 1800 calories a day across 4 meals everyday is going to be incompatible with your energy requirements pretty much the majority of the time…this kind of prescription can’t work long term for anyone. It simply doesn’t make sense as a way of eating because of the constant changes in our energy requirements. Our lives evolve and ask different things from our physical bodies all the time.

    Once you understand this and honestly truly believe it for yourself will come to realise, on your own, that the only sensible way to work out how much food is optimal for you to eat for good health is by listening to your body every single day and eating in line with your own body’s requirements.

    If you are not sure what intuitive eating is or how to get started look out for the blog post coming soon! Or please get in touch sasha@sashafardell.com I would love to help.

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  • Blogvember, Body Image, Emotional Eating, Recovery

    1 – Uncovering the REAL reasons behind your emotional eating and how to stop it

    Hello! Welcome to Blogvember, where I’ll be posting a new blog every single day of November covering everything you want to know about emotional eating, binge eating, body-confidence and self-love.

    As this is post number one we are starting off with the biggest, juiciest question of all – why do we emotionally eat and, more importantly, how can we stop?

    Just to warn you this is a pretty long post but I promise it is absolutely worth it and gets right to the root of the problem…if you’re pushed for time you can skip to the end 😉 Please come back tomorrow, and every day this month for more.

    So let’s get straight to business…why do we emotionally eat and how can we stop?

    The simple answer that you may have bumped up against multiple times before is ‘I eat because I’m sad/stressed/angry/annoyed/hormonal and eating chocolate/cake/crisps makes me feel better’. If this is you maybe once a month or once every few months, then this is absolutely fine, go ahead and indulge, your emotional eating is not having a big impact on your life. If however this is you every single day, maybe multiple times a day, and emotional eating is affecting the quality of your life then we can’t settle with this for our answer and we need to dig deeper.

    If you want to stop emotional eating it is likely because it feels compulsive, out of control, one of your only sources of solace, one of the highlights and/or lowlights of your day/week, it is isolating, you are keeping it a secret and it’s making you feel lonely and miserable.

    In order to get to the real reasons behind our emotional eating and how to stop, lets unpick some of the arguments floating around at the moment on this topic.

    There is one line of argument that says particular food, high in sugar, salt, fat, in and of itself has chemical properties which affect our hormones and boost our mood. It gives us a physical rush and therefore we get addicted and come to rely on this high when we are feeling low. This argument goes even further to say that our low moods are partially triggered by the crash after eating these foods so we end up in a rollercoaster cycle of constantly craving these foods and feeling grumpy and down when we aren’t eating them. This argument puts a lot of blame on food companies for producing this ‘addictive’ food and is the argument that has led to the demonisation of certain foods, sugar in particular.

    This is a legitimate argument for how these foods affect us and therefore might temporarily cheer us up when we’re down but for me barely scratches the surface of why we feel such a compulsion to drown ourselves in food rather than face our feelings. The reason we can’t quit sugar is not because it is chemically addictive but it is because the underlying reason for us eating it, i.e. that we feel low, hasn’t been resolved. Even if you disagree with this…the real question remains – why are we feeling so bad in the first place?

    Let’s explore another line of reasoning that is popular right now on how we have got to this place with our food. This argument says that the reason we emotionally eat is because we feel bad about our bodies. The media and diet culture are telling us we need to look a certain way and most of us don’t therefore most of us are unhappy with our bodies and want them to look more like what is portrayed in the media and by those selling us diets. In this paradox the more we hate our bodies the more we want to emotionally eat and therefore the more we hate our bodies. It’s a trap and we can’t escape. The solution? Let’s not hate our bodies. Then we won’t feel upset about them and we won’t emotionally eat or if sometimes we do emotionally eat it’s ok because we love our bodies anyway.

    I personally like this approach for its body positive message, inclusivity, diversity, and acceptance of all body shapes and sizes. It decriminalises emotional eating and empowers individuals to eat what they want whenever they want and love themselves anyway. We can see media slowly changing with more body-diversity messages coming through and it appears more people are catching on. They love their bodies, emotional eating or not.

    But it begs the question

    …if we love our bodies as they are but we are still emotionally eating then wanting our bodies to change can’t be the reason for emotional eating right?

    We have to look again and ask the questions are you really loving yourself if you’re emotionally eating all the time? Are you really comfortable with yourself if you are still seeking solace in food? Maybe you are the most body positive person of all time, you absolutely love your cellulite, stretch marks and how your body looks in the mirror…but what if you are still eating to hide from yourself?

    Here we get to the crux of this post. Why we are still emotionally eating and how we can stop.

    We eat emotionally because we are trying to run away from ourselves. We are doing anything to avoid feeling our feelings. We have totally disconnected our minds and bodies and are letting our mind control everything. We are not listening to our bodies and are in fact avoiding all the signals they are sending us instead letting our minds run the show.

    Surprise, our minds do not want us to feel particular emotions in our body and that’s where food comes in. We have been taught in our society that pain is bad and pleasure is good. Therefore our minds have been programmed to chase the pleasure and repress/hide from/push away/bury the pain. Food is an excellent tool for us to do both at the same time, it is safe (mostly), legal, convenient and socially acceptable.

    Example – We have an argument with our friend because they are always late and caused us to miss our restaurant reservation, so seething with frustration, we head home. We feel angry and upset at our friend and rather than take the time to put together a nutritious meal we ‘cant be bothered’ because our evening is ruined so we sit down with half a tub of ice-cream and some cake and forget about it.

    In this example we are choosing not to sit with and process our feelings of anger and sadness towards our friend, i.e. our pain in this situation, but instead look towards food to bring us pleasure to replace this pain. What this pattern does is repeatedly teach us that feeling anger or sadness is not ok and it is better to find something to numb those feelings and replace them with something more pleasurable. As an isolated incident ok this is not a big deal. But what happens with chronic emotional eating is that we do this in every scenario in our lives.

    Every single time we feel any emotion that is slightly painful we look to food to soothe ourselves. This is when emotional eating begins to take over our lives. Someone sends you a rude email? Reach for a biscuit. You spill your coffee on yourself? Have a little chocolate to make yourself feel better. Your train is late? Pick up a croissant while you wait. You start doing this subconsciously until you literally find yourself in an emotional eating minefield that you can’t get out of.

    This is not to mention the full on blow-outs when something really crappy happens and we find ourselves in bed with junk food wrappers strewn around us wondering how our life ended up like this.

    So how we do stop it?

    There are two things we need to do if we want to stop emotional eating. And trust me, you do.

    This emotional eating is a problem, even if you love your body and don’t want to change it, because you are not feeling your feelings. You are not being honest with yourself and you are storing up pent up, often painful, emotion.

    This emotion will need to come out at some point and hiding it with food is only kicking the can down the road.

    Coming back to our example, you know that anger and sadness you didn’t allow yourself to feel towards your friend? Guess what, those feelings are going to keep coming up every time someone is late…think about it. Every single time someone is late you are going to get more and more angry and upset because your body is reminding you of the emotions you didn’t let come out that time your friend was late and caused you to miss dinner until one day you will explode at someone for running 5 minutes late and they will be completely shocked and probably hurt by your lack of understanding and disproportionate response to such a minor transgression.

    So first things first, to stop emotional eating we need to replace the eating with what we should be doing in the first place, which is…

    …feeling our feelings as they happen.

    This includes pain, especially emotional pain. We need to feel those feelings and let them be what they are without trying to hide from them by face planting a cake.

    This is more difficult than it sounds. For something that is so natural we humans have done an excellent job of stopping ourselves from being able to do this. We stop ourselves crying when we’re sad, screaming when we’re angry, even hugging each other when we feel love. If you are very expressive but still emotionally eat then try tapping in to the exact feeling you feel the moment when you are reaching for food. This will show you exactly what feeling you are repressing (hint: it is probably something like loneliness, emptiness or sadness). The reason so many of us emotionally eat rather than do this is because the feelings we are hiding from hurt. They are powerful and we have often been hiding them for a long time. If you are looking to explore deep emotional pain I would highly recommend you find support, in a friend, therapist, teacher or coach, to be with you as you uncover these feelings.

    So that is part one, get on board with feeling your feelings rather than hiding from them. Perhaps more painful in the short term but will lead you to food freedom and a far more fulfilling life in the long run.

    And this leads us to the second thing.

    In order to do number one, we also need to do number two and that is learn to accept that painful feelings are not bad and are actually safe for us to feel.

    Painful feelings are just that…feelings. We do not need to be scared of them or hide from them. Painful feelings are showing us what we find uncomfortable in life, they are our markers for maintaining our emotional health. They are the guide ropes we need to heal past wounds. Or if you don’t have past wounds (newsflash: if you struggle with emotional eating you probably do) then they are a signal for what you need to respond to now in your life, even though it is uncomfortable.

    Again, this is not easy for we have been taught that pain is bad. But it is something that we can change the more we practice feeling and accepting all of our emotions.

    If you do these two things, practice them consistently in your life, emotional eating will become a thing of the past. You will no longer need to eat cake to run away from yourself because there will be nothing to run away from. You will be living in the moment, facing all your feelings and dealing with them as they arise. Now wouldn’t that be an easier way to live?

    Please come back tomorrow and every day this month for more.

    Sending you lots of love and strength xxx

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  • Anxiety, Recovery

    Facing The Stories

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    Sometimes I get scared that it won’t work. That whatever I am doing is not going to work. Generally I know it will. But on bad days I remember all those times I tried to diet and exercise my way out of this, I tried to girlboss my way out of this, I tried to shop and clothe and tan myself out of this, I tried to “hipster” my way out of this, I tried intoxicating myself out of this. I spent my whole life trying to avoid this. it now feels crazy to be doing a complete 180 and trying to tackle it head on. It’s almost like I’m trying to fool myself.

    I didn’t use to believe in paradoxes, it was simply too confusing. I couldn’t believe that someone could be good and bad, that some things can sometimes be right and other times wrong, that light and dark come hand in hand. But to be healthy you have to know this. The world is a paradox, we have known this for millennia.

    I never used to identify as a black and white thinker, I always thought I believed in the grey area, in the middle way. But actually I just believed in the black. The blackness was all I ever knew. Everything to me was scary and therefore evil and most likely harmful. So things were just more or less evil depending on what the people around me thought.
    This is what the bad days feel like. That it’s not worth leaving the house. That it is just too scary and unpredictable. On those days I still have to leave the house, sometimes I have to get food or I need to run an errand. So I go. Because I know now that what I’m feeling is not real. It feels real but it is just the stories speaking.

    And generally nothing bad happens but I am trying so hard to not engage, to not feel because otherwise I know I will freeze or need to run home. The stories can be so unbelievably powerful I freeze sometimes on the street. I just stop walking. To an outsider it must look strange. But my brain is processing so much that I literally can’t walk and think at the same time. Or I walk really fast and people inevitably get in my way and I get so angry, like ‘don’t they understand I am terrified and need to move as fast as possible?’. It is like moving through a computer game where everyone on the street is an enemy you have to dodge. They have an entire arsenal and could strike at any moment but you have no weapons at all.

    But in repeatedly facing and unpicking the stories that deliver me these bad days I have found good days. Where my brain and body know that if I want to go somewhere I can and it will be fine whatever I choose to do. Because I am in charge. The real me who knows that I will live regardless of what other people are doing. I might still be a little scared. But I know I can take precautions and protect myself from pretty much every normal everyday threat. I know now that actually if I let my guard down there is a glorious beautiful world out there to see, I just have to trust myself to step out into it.

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  • Anxiety, Recovery

    Finding Your Triggers

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    Triggers. A surprisingly difficult topic. My triggers are not clear to me at all, it feels like nearly everything could be a trigger (and to some extent with Complex-PTSD that is true) through my healing I am constantly discovering new things that terrify me.

    I think I worked out why this is. I spent all of my life either dissociated, i.e. metaphorically ‘not in the room’ or at panic stations. There wasn’t really any waking moment I felt normal, although I didn’t realise this at the time. My nervous system was always in overdrive and I was constantly in self-preservation mode.

    Through intense exploration in my recovery I have started to notice the moment I start fading away from reality or when I have gone from feeling ‘normal’ (which yes, thankfully, does happen from time to time now) to being in a panic. It is these moments that have given me clues as to some of my triggers. They are completely understandable given my childhood and I’m surprised I didn’t figure them out sooner. But recovery is one surprise after another after all! Unfortunately figuring them out doesn’t mean they are no longer triggers but its a crucial first step.

    Here are a few examples of things that unbalance me, scare me, generally make me feel on edge or like I need to leave my body:

    Going to sleep
    Waking up
    Strangers looking at me (like passing people on the street, I don’t mean staring which OFC is awkward)
    Older men – anyone who appears to be around 20+ years older than me (I mean in any scenario)
    Children from around the age of 3 and up (again in any scenario)
    Uncomfortable clothes – things touching my skin in a restrictive way (luckily activewear is fine)
    Not being able to locate myself geographically (I look at google maps compulsively)

    This doesn’t mean I run screaming from older men or don’t walk down the street I just mean that these things are enough for my defences to go right up, for me to armour myself against whatever awful thing one of my inner parts has decided is going to happen. In that state I can’t experience life fully. I am in self-protection mode. So basically I never fully experienced any of my life up until the last couple of months…

    This is the curse of trying to recover from C-PTSD, which in my experience essentially boils down to the fear of being in your body in the world i.e. being alive in the fullest sense of the word, which manifested as me copying how other people acted pretending to be ‘normal’, but secretly inside being terrified that at any moment I would be completely abandoned, screamed at, fired, attacked, raped, killed etc. you get the idea.

    I haven’t exactly figured out how to turn triggers off completely (yet!) but there are two very important things I have learnt which are definitely helping and guiding the way.

    1)It’s not the world, it’s me.
    Whatever you believe about God or the Universe if you’re recovering from C-PTSD it is decidedly unhelpful to believe in a malevolent creator/dictator. I choose to believe wholeheartedly that the world is not out to get me, despite being abused. As an adult it has been me who was out to get me. Working on my relationship with myself is hands down the most important thing I have done. Recognising that I am even a person worthy of my own care and attention in itself was a MASSIVE step. Saying to myself “I am here, I am alive and that is a miracle” was revelatory. People unaffected by trauma, who had loving parents, may take it for granted they are worthy of being alive. But the voice in my head from my childhood that said I was disgusting, a waste of space, not worthy of love or attention was so pervasive I thought that was my intuition. That was always the voice I came back to. When everything else was quiet that was the voice I heard. Listening to and challenging that narrative has been life-changing. I know it was unfair that I was abused and unloved as a child but there is nothing that can be done now other than to love myself as much as I can to try and make up for it.

    2)The triggers are telling you what you need to heal
    Pay close attention to your reactions. Your body is constantly telling you what you need to hear, you just need to listen. I didn’t realise that I was scared of young children for a very long time because I never really came across them. However staying in a Homestay in Bali with a family with younger children I realised I was terrified of them. I would subconsciously avoid being near them or when I had to move past them playing my heart would race, I would genuinely feel scared. So what was my body telling me…of course that I had to heal my relationship with my inner child. I was so scared of letting her in and listening to her, opening myself up to her pain because I knew how awful it was. But this terror was being reenacted in real life, and if I wanted my external reactions to life to be different I had to work on what they were signalling to me.

    You can’t always notice a trigger and at that moment work through it and put it behind you. It often takes many tiny baby steps through repeated exposure, memory recovery, new experiences of that trigger etc. in order to get through it. But being aware and ready to recognise them when they come up is a massive first step towards being in charge.

    So my formula for dealing with triggers is give yourself a massive pat on the back for being here, for surviving, for being alive. Every day remember that you are a miracle and you deserve to be alive. Not only that you deserve to be loved. As Paolo Coehlo says ‘One is loved because one is loved. No reason is needed for loving’. Then from that point PAY ATTENTION. Listen to your body. Stay aware. Recognise how you are reacting to the world around you. From this point of strength you are ready to take on the hard work of processing and diluting that trigger. Good Luck friends.

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  • Anxiety, Recovery, Spirituality

    The Life Changing Magic of Mindfulness and Multiple Me’s

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    I’m way deep in my recovery journey. I have uncovered some horrific memories of sexual and emotional abuse at the hands of adults responsible for my wellbeing and have done A LOT of processing, cried oceans of tears, loved my inner child and fed my soul. I have a very deep consistent mindfulness practice, my awareness of myself, feelings and thoughts is more powerful than it has ever been (although there is always deeper to go of course). I knew it would be a long road and that recovery is often a lifetime journey but I genuinely thought I had piled up enough tools to get me through the day in a pretty normal and stable place. Until today, when I realised that I still get horrendous mood swings. Don’t get me wrong, fluctuating emotions are totally normal – throughout the day things will make you happy, things will make you cry, feel ashamed, guilty etc. this is all totally part of normal life. But today I dropped back into a day from hell, I woke up in a complete panic, full of anxiety, then I collapsed and couldn’t function, lying in my bed staring at nothing on my computer, completely exhausted only a couple of hours after waking up, then I had a surge of energy and was able to jump out of bed, shower, brush my teeth and go out for lunch. Then I spun out in a panic again, was so stressed in the cafe I wanted to scream at everyone else in there, then I totally shut down, a zombie again, and I thought this was it for today…it would just be one of those days where I couldn’t speak to anyone, where all people were evil and the world is a horrible place that I cant bear to live in. It threatened to go on until I had this massive realisation.

    Sitting wracking my brains about why I was so depressed and why I couldn’t figure out what these mood swings were about and it dawned on me that each of these ‘moods’ actually had very consistent and particular voices. So rather than one me experiencing a variety of different feelings I realised it is far more like there are multiple me’s highjacking my mind and constantly competing for air time all seeking to voice their opinion when they feel like it. I was totally not in charge of these different me’s I just let them have free reign over my mind and take over my whole body. I was eaten alive by these different parts of myself so much so I had no agency to live my own life, they were dictating my every waking moment. This is where the magic happened, where my hours of mindfulness training totally came into it’s own – I realised I was observing this in myself. It was not the ‘real’ me who was high as a kite full of anxiety one moment then a complete amorphous blob with no will or energy to move the next.  I sat there in my own awareness and recognised these voices as different parts but not me. Mind. Blown.

    So I listened to the voices, I really listened to what they were telling me and I recognised different parts of myself that I had developed in order to protect myself as a child. The hyper-aroused panicked child believing that everyone was out to get her and that no-one and nowhere was safe. And then the completely hopeless, apathetic girl who believed that she would never be good enough, never get the approval she so desperately craved, never be loved, the girl who just couldn’t see a future worth living. The key thing though is that neither of these girls are the ‘real’ me, I was just allowing them to take turns controlling my adult mind and body. I was completely switched off, just sitting back and watching this show.

    As soon as I had that thought, that somewhere behind all of these feelings was the ‘real’ me aware of this, that I was allowing this, that I had handed over responsibility for my life to two scared, unloved little girls I realised I had the power to do something. Suddenly I was able to take charge. And I do mean suddenly. It just dawned on me, that I, the real me, the constant, stable me who is always there deep inside, can take charge. And that is exactly what I did. I thought today was going to be a complete write-off I had one chore on my to-do list and I wanted to write a blog post (it was not originally meant to be this one…funny how the universe works) and by 11am I thought neither of these tasks had any chance of being completed. And here we are..chore completed and blog post written.

    I never truly believed that becoming aware of my own thoughts could actually be life-changing. But what happened today has truly astonished me. I thought that my recovery journey would be logical, as though I could self-diagnose, uncover how my mind works, understand it and then apply tools to retrain it, but it is not like that at all. Everyday is a complete unknown, a complete surprise. I research things for hours try them out a bit then conclude that they are useless to me and then days or weeks later suddenly they are the key to unlocking the next part of the journey.

    Recognising myself, the constant, stable self, slightly removed from the thoughts and actually using it when in the midst of a meltdown has been a monumental step in my recovery. Actually being able to use mindfulness as a tool when in a crisis is to me the definition of taking a step in recovery. The tools are not tools if they are not embedded enough yet that your brain doesn’t think to call upon them when you are suffering. Honestly I have spent a long time cultivating a spiritual mindfulness based practice (around 3.5 years) with, I now realise, only a limited experience of how it could help me. I have spent hours and hours practicing connecting to my breath, connecting to the universe, oneness (whatever you like to call it), seeking awareness and staying present. It is only today after literally years of playing with it that it has become “useful”. Throughout all of that practice, way before I relinquished my denial and began recovering, I don’t think I had a clue what I was trying to achieve, I just knew something was wrong and mindfulness meditation was supposed to help.

    So my message from this is just keep going, even if nothing is making sense, even if nothing is “working”, one day it could be exactly the thing to help you move on in your recovery and ultimately with your life.

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