Weight Loss for People Who Feel Too Much (17 page)

C. Get frustrated, put your head down, and work harder, inwardly berating yourself.

D. Hire a top coach to teach you this skill and rearrange your schedule so that you fix this problem now, once and for all, because damn it, failure is not an option. Ever.

8. What makes you feel self-conscious and embarrassed?

A. You'd rather not answer this. You are uncomfortable just reading the question.

B. A few things, but nothing too serious or upsetting.

C. It's a long list because you're quick to beat up on yourself. Frankly, you're kind of insecure about how insecure you are and you think about your oversensitivities a lot.

D. “Wait, are you suggesting that there's something about myself that
doesn't
make me feel self-conscious and embarrassed?”

Scoring:

Mostly A's:
Avoider.
You are afraid to step into your power and be criticized or make a mistake, so you avoid risks altogether, which is understandable. Your challenge is to aim for taking risks and owning your power to act rather than always delegating your power to others.

Mostly B's.
Balanced.
You're responsible and accountable in a balanced way.

Mostly C's:
Worrier.
You tend to worry too much and take too much responsibility for others, so watch your tendency toward perfectionism. Stop yourself from “fixing” situations and instead check in within and process your emotions.

Mostly D's:
Perfectionist.
You are so anxious about not being in control that often you are out of control with your perfectionism! Your challenge is to work on trusting yourself and trusting in Spirit to support you. Regularly affirm
I love and accept myself just as I am. Spirit is nurturing me, supporting me, and looking out for me
.

We all walk between two pillars, one called I Create My Own Reality and one called I Have to Live Life on Life's Terms. The paradox of power is this: when we accept our powerlessness to control our lives, we reclaim our true power, which is the power of co-creating our reality with the help and influence of Spirit. When we reclaim this power, we remember our value, that we are each an irreplaceable child of Spirit

Perfectionism makes us keep our eye on the clock and obsess over time, which exacerbates our anxiety, which drives us deeper into perfectionism and controlling behaviors. When you feel that time is closing in on you like the walls of a collapsing room, use the following exercise to create the perception that you have the time you need. Investing a few minutes in changing your perspective and easing your worries about time will actually save you time that you would've spent in unproductive agonizing.

SLOWING DOWN TIME

Take a long, deep breath, and focus on your breathing as you exhale, then inhale. Keep focusing on your breathing until you feel relaxed.

Now, imagine you see a large clock on the wall, the old-fashioned kind with a second hand that runs around the clock face. In front of it is a sort of elastic band of energy about a foot long that shows you how much time you have.

Just let the clock tick, tick, tick for a while. Breathe in synchronicity with its rhythm.

Slow your breathing, and imagine that the second hand begins to slow down in synch with your breathing.

Look at the band of energy in front of the clock that was supposed to be a measure of the time you have and watch it expand as you relax and the second hand slows down.

How do you feel?

When you are ready, open your eyes.

DUMPING THE GARBAGE

As you've been writing in your Dumping Grounds journal, you've surely generated a lot of trash—that is, thoughts and feelings that don't serve your well-being but, instead, keep alive your negative beliefs and painful emotions from the past. None of us is perfectly self-compassionate, kind, loving, giving, and positive all the time. Even Jesus lost his temper and kicked over a few tables, and called some people “snakes.” Sometimes, we just have to get all that anger, sadness, and fear out of us and speak our truth, whatever it is at that moment, however ugly it may be. I hope you've been using the Dumping Grounds journal to do this.

Now, however, it's important to let go of the harsh feelings and judgments and focus on what you have learned and how you've grown. At the end of the second of this program, take out your journals and have handy a yellow highlighting marker so you can highlight some passages. As you read your journal entries, use your highlighter to mark any passages that are “gems”: insights that have value and can serve you in the future. Here and there, it's good to go back and reread these parts of your Dumping Grounds journal—and now you'll find them easily because they're in bright, sunny yellow. You'll want to write about your insights and the treasure you've found in your lessons in your Solutions and Insights journal. You'll be better able to track your real growth and progress, and less likely to sabotage yourself, when you've been able to keep these thoughts in separate physical spaces.

As you reread what you wrote, think about how much “weight” those thoughts and feelings had for you when you wrote them, and how much weight they have now. Does it seem like a lot of drama about something minor? Did you invest emotional energy in a situation or a thought or emotion that you now see really wasn't important?

Now, as you look at these passages, say aloud,
I release these thoughts and feelings with love and compassion for myself and everyone
. Imagine they are being taken to a garbage dump, then composted to serve as fertilizer for your Field of Dreams. In fact, nothing ever goes to waste! Take a moment to feel a sense of relief at having dumped the garbage.

As with Step One, you'll have some daily questions to answer in your Solutions and Insights journal, too. There aren't as many questions this week, so you'll only have to answer about two a day. If you finish up before the end of the week, that's okay. Just write in your journal about your feelings, how your day went, and what insights you're experiencing. Remember, you can vent as well, spilling all your hurt and anger onto the pages of your Dumping Grounds journal.

DAILY JOURNALING FOR STEP TWO: OWN YOUR TRUTH

Write the answers to the following questions in your journal, and answer at least two questions a day.

1. Do you have an issue with trust? Anger? Jealousy? Envy? Procrastination?

2. Have you been dishonest with yourself or others in any way? Why?

3. Have you noticed that some of what you were feeling has little to do with you, that others in your environment have affected you?

4. Looking over what happened during Step One, what were you stimulated by?

5. Did you watch the news?

6. Was your work environment stressful?

7. Do the things that were bugging you for the past two weeks still affect you the same way today?

8. Would you choose to feel these things again?

9. If not, how would you choose to feel?

10. If you could change anything here, what would it be?

11. If you have no power to change anything here, can you imagine a higher power holding this burden for you? What if it was not a burden at all but only a perception of one?

12. What activities make you feel joyous and happy? What makes you laugh? How can you fit these activities into your life more often?

13. How do your usual surroundings (home, office) make you feel? How can you change your surroundings to make them more supportive of your joy?

14. In what ways does your body serve you well, despite any medical or health conditions you might have?

15. Write a letter of thanks to your body for how it has served you.

Step Two is definitely challenging, but if you practice self-compassion and are kind to yourself, it will be easier. Be sure to “dump the garbage,” sending it love and releasing it, at the end of the second week before you start on Step Three. Then your mind and heart will be clear and you'll be ready to enter the second half of the program.

KEEP IN MIND …

• During Step Two, you're likely to experience resistance as you start to realize you really do have a lot of work ahead of you, and that you can no longer deny that managing your porous boundaries has to be a priority if you're going to release the weight.

• Making the changes in this program will take you through the stages of denial, anger, bargaining, and sadness to acceptance. Recognize that transformation is a process and be patient with yourself at every stage.

• Establish a new habit of experiencing joy. Do what makes you happy and make feeling joyful a top priority. Redecorate and rearrange your space, getting rid of anything in it that doesn't support your joy.

• Establish a new habit of feeling gratitude toward your body. Listen to its needs and honor it with affirmations and by treating it well. Loving yourself means loving your body.

• Establish a new habit of connecting with Spirit. Use meditation, time spent in nature, prayer, and the Sacred Box. Then it will be easier to feel the support of your higher power as you work the program.

• Perfectionism and stressing out about time are common detours because people who feel too much hate feeling out of control and are scared of criticism. Use the Slowing Down Time exercise to help you let go of these habits.

• When writing in your Dumping Grounds journal, feel free to vent about what is going on. You will release any “garbage” at the end of your processing week, and highlight any insights that will build your confidence, esteem, and self-compassion whenever you reread them, and write about these in your Solutions and Insights journal.

6

Step Three: Reclaim Your Power to Choose (“There's a difference between a compulsion and a choice!”)

You are halfway through the program; and I'm guessing you no longer feel at the mercy of an out-of-control world, and you've stopped frantically swimming about in the turbulent seas of unrestrained emotions. At last, you can drop your hyper-vigilance and relax. It's much easier to make conscious decisions about what you're going to focus on and what actions you're going to take. Who wouldn't want to embrace the freedom to choose what to think about, feel, and do?

You will always have some strong emotions that seem to have a life of their own, which make it hard to think clearly and make good decisions, but by now you've realized you have more control over them than you thought you did. You let yourself feel anger or fear, but you don't exacerbate those emotions by allowing your thoughts to run wild—you stop and correct yourself. Those automatic, negative beliefs about yourself are being replaced by new, positive ones that you affirm daily. Inadequacy and low self-worth are on the wane. Enough of that!

You also have a better, more accurate perspective on your past battles with weight, food, and empathy overload. Now you see that you weren't armed with the wisdom you needed to disengage from fruitless obsessions over your weight, the shape of your body, or what you snacked on, so you aren't experiencing guilt or self-hatred as often as you used to. The old beliefs and feelings that go along with the guilt and self-hatred don't disappear overnight, but you have experienced their fading in intensity. Isn't it a relief to have quieter emotions?

When strong emotions do crop up, you now know what to do: you use the IN-Vizion Process to check in with yourself and see where you are, what's happening, and where you want to be. You know how to avoid empathy overload by doing your 4:00
P
.
M
. salt baths, EFT, and affirmations, keeping the news and media stimulation to a minimum, and sticking to quiet foods rather than the noisy ones that trigger a strong, emotional reaction. Life is a lot calmer than it was just four weeks ago!

Now, in Step Three, you reclaim your power to consciously make good decisions instead of allowing your subconscious fear, anger, sadness, and agitation to take over your thoughts and whip up a frenzy of feelings that make you discombobulated. The first choice I know you'll want to make is to tame the whirlwind of emotion when it threatens to sweep you up. It's too stressful to be so reactive to what's going on around you and to get so agitated that you lose your power to make conscious choices.

One of the reasons people who feel too much become caught up in the emotional whirlwind is their habit of taking care of others. As I said earlier, because it's easy for you to tune in to others' emotions, you probably are a natural healer, nurturer, teacher, advocate, or caregiver (or a combination of these). Helping others is wonderful, but when you start to detour into enmeshment, codependency, and taking care of other people emotionally, it's a problem. You take on the weight of all their troubles and their painful emotions and hold them inside you while your rational mind tries to sort it out. Wouldn't it be better to turn all of this over to a higher power instead of turning it over in your head? You can also use the IN-Vizion Process to sort out your own emotions to deal with and let go of the rest, putting them in the Sacred Box.

KEEP HEALTHY BOUNDARIES: DON'T SHARE THE GARBAGE!

Another choice you might want to make, now that you have greater clarity, objectivity, and self-compassion, is to use isolation in a positive way—not as a detour, but as a means of self-protection when you know you need a break from others' emotions. In other words, when you start to feel overwhelmed, you don't have to avoid everyone and take to your bed, but you also don't have to continue to subject yourself to other people's strong emotions. You can choose to temporarily isolate yourself from their emotions—or in some cases, from them.

Don't spend too much time around people who overstimulate you and distract you from your priorities, or around people who suck up your energy and attention because of their neediness or anger. These “energy vampires” don't necessarily mean to hurt you or wear you down. They may love you very much and want the best for you, but they are unable to understand that you truly can't handle all the emotion and upsetting information they dump on you.

One thing I hope you've learned by emptying, then sorting, your own garbage is that a lot of emotional crap swirls around inside of you until you get it out and away from you. You are probably drawn to other empathic people who have their own emotional agitation going on, in addition to empathy overload. Together, you and they are constantly exchanging energetic garbage. Understanding each other intellectually is great. But “understanding” each other by taking on each other's emotional turmoil is going to exhaust both of you. You need to clear out your own garbage before engaging with others, or you'll end up sharing it just as you would cold germs. If someone in your life is not ready to let you set some boundaries, and is hurt when you won't listen to the venting and dramas, you may have to avoid that person until she or he is ready to recognize that sharing anger, frustration, grief, and the like are about as useful as sneezing in each other's faces.

Bond with people over solutions, not problems, and the gems of insight, not garbage. Instead of telling your sister-in-law about your hellish day at work, loading her up with every awful detail in order to trigger an empathetic reaction, just summarize what you experienced, without drama. Talk about what you learned, keep your sense of humor tuned up, and bond over how we all have “those days.” The payoff of hearing “Oh, you poor thing!” is dwarfed by the payoff of not reliving every wretched moment of your day and then experiencing your friend's garbage dumping on you, (“How awful! Let me tell you about how my terrible boss tortured me all day long—have I got a frustrating story to match yours!”) Stop the garbage flinging that has all of us, including you, covered in rotting banana peels and burnt toast scrapings.

Sometimes we have a sense that others have connected to us in an energetic way, almost as if we have a magnetic attraction to them (and their garbage!). We might want to unplug from the other's energy, but how do we do it? The Cord Unplugging exercise that follows offers a way to break the energy bonds that generate a feeling of being enmeshed with others.

CORD UNPLUGGING

Find a spot where you can be comfortable for about 5 to 10 minutes maximum.

Ask your body to relax. Feel each part of you release its tension—your neck, your shoulders, your arms, and so on. Next, ask your body to show you any place where you have connected to someone else's energy and created a feeling that the other person is inside your boundaries. Scan your body from your toes up to the top of your head. If you find a spot that seems to be enmeshed with energies outside of you, imagine that you have a little cord of energy hooked on to you in this place. Visualize it as a kind of electrical cord that, once unplugged from the outlet, can quickly retract back into the other person. See yourself unplugging the chord and having it recoil back into to whoever owns it.

Now, look to see if there's a cord coming from you that is plugged into someone else. If so, unplug it at their end and bring the cord back into yourself. Then seal yourself with a ball of light at each place where a cord was attached.

You will feel refreshed!

Now, did you notice any resistance to unplugging the chord?

Who were you plugged into? Who was plugged into you?

Why do you want to be bound to this person?

What, if anything, are you afraid to lose by unplugging?

What would it feel like to be separate and independent from him or her?

Ponder the answers to these questions, then take out your journal and write about your experiences doing this exercise.

WHOSE STUFF IS THIS?

One of my long-time clients, Elaina, was feeling overwhelmed and anxious, and she was giving me a detailed description about all that was going wrong in her life—a situation at her daughter's school, a fight with her husband, her stepson being arrested in another state. So, I had her do the IN-Vizion Process. I asked her where she was, and she described a finished basement in a large house where a toilet was overflowing. In her mind's eye, Elaina was alone in the basement, trying to unplug the toilet and find a way to clean up before anyone else came down and spotted the mess. She was grossed out by all the crap coming up from the toilet, and I told her to transport herself to the outside of the house. As soon as she found herself on the lawn, looking over at the house she had just escaped, she felt a sense of relief, and I told her to stay there for a few moments before re-entering the basement. Then I asked her what was happening.

“I'm looking at the overflowing toilet and realizing,
This is not my shit! I don't have to clean it up!
She felt herself walking up the stairs to the first floor of the house.

Not all of our landscapes are so obvious, but this is a perfect example of how we can become completely absorbed in trying to mop up shit and strategize the cleanup—without realizing it's not our shit. When Elaina used her rational mind to try to identify the shit, she intuitively understood that she was worrying too much about trying to get everyone in her child's school to become better educated on how to teach their children to manage their emotions so the bullying and teasing her daughter reported seeing would stop. (Remember, people who feel too much are often distressed when seeing others being bullied—that was the case with both Elaina and her highly sensitive daughter.) Elaina was able to see more clearly what her choices were and where her power lay—namely, in training her daughter to be bully-proof and to stand up for other children when they were being picked on, and in attending some school meetings about the bullying issue and expressing her opinion. What Elaina had to let go of was taking on responsibility for other people's denial, the other children's distress (which she kept imagining and worrying about), and fixing the problem single-handedly. She couldn't see where to draw boundaries when she was overwhelmed with empathy, and she actually could do more for the other children at the school by letting go of the useless obsessing over how they must feel being teased. An hour in the middle of the night spent losing sleep over their pain wasn't doing anything for anyone—the children or Elaina.

The IN-Vizion Process allows us to experience neutrality and nonreactivity. In this quiet state of observation, we can see more than our strong emotions will allow us to see. When we're upset, we're too focused on our feelings to notice that things aren't quite as bad as we make them out to be—and we've got others helping to address the problems that worry us. The story of “But I have to rescue those children or no one else will!” doesn't trap us because we see that helping to protect them from being hurt is a responsibility shared by many. We start to see evidence that we're not the only ones who care and are making an effort to help them. Perfectionistic, controlling, anxious behavior no longer has us in its grip.

However, the overflowing toilet in Elaina's IN-Vizion exercise represented more than the mess at Elaina's daughter's school. Elaina also told me that when she started fighting with her husband, he said, “I don't want to talk about this and sort out why you're mad at me and what I did. I think you're upset about something else.” She was angry at his response, but sensed he was right, which is why she called me to sort it all out. I asked her about her stepson, and she said he had called four days before to tell her he had been arrested again for using drugs. Elaina had been avoiding calling her ex-husband and going to see her stepson, who was asking for her help.

I pointed out that the timing of all these problems was interesting: was it possible that she was overreacting to something in order to detour from her feelings about her stepson? In fact, that's exactly what was happening. It was less painful for Elaina to get herself all worked up about the hurt she imagined some children were feeling, and to avoid the pain of facing her drug-addicted stepson and alcoholic ex-husband again, as well as the pain of acknowledging that she could not control her stepson's addiction. She needed to feel like a successful rescuer, and the bullying incident at the school had been a distraction. Another distraction was her anger at her husband for pointing out that she was confused about her feelings.

Elaina needed to stop running away from
her
“stuff” and feel her emotions, and leave the rest for the Sacred Box. Once she made a conscious choice about how much to intervene with her stepson, and she spent some time crying about him, it was much easier for her to let go of her obsessive thoughts and her free-floating anger and anxiety about everything else.

In the past, Elaina would not have called me. She would have spent countless hours thinking about what was upsetting her and what to do, and would have lost sleep, eaten whatever was available instead of sticking with her commitment to eat healthfully, and completely lost herself in the detour of her emotional caregiving. With the storm quieted, she could exercise her power of choice. She chose to drop the argument with her husband, let her stepson walk his own path, and take specific actions to address the situation at her daughter's school without becoming an angel of righteousness swooping in with her sword of justice.

A VISION EMERGES FROM THE QUIET

From the quiet and calm of nonreactivity and neutrality, a vision of what your life could be can arise. Try the following exercise to help you envision the life you'd like to create for yourself.

CREATING AN EXPERIENCE BOARD

An Experience Board is like a dream board, in that you arrange photographs and words that evoke what you would like to bring into your life. But it's different in that the focus is on the
emotions
you want to create, not on the
things
you want to manifest (money, marriage, a thinner and healthier body, and so on).