Weight Loss for People Who Feel Too Much (18 page)

Using a computer dream board program or an actual piece of poster board and photographs, create an Experience Board with images and words that express the emotions you would like to feel, such as joy, contentment, harmony, pride, confidence, and so on.

Every day, look at your Experience Board, and as your eyes focus on each image or word, feel the corresponding emotions rise in you. You can let your subconscious mind add to the image, too, making it into a mini movie. You might be surprised by the images your subconscious mind generates when you meditate on contentment or pride. If you find yourself resisting the emotion, or associating it with self-sacrifice instead of a balance between self-nurturing and caring for others, be glad that you made a discovery about your discomfort with that emotion. You may need to spend more time imagining how you might experience that emotion and what you could co-create in your life that would match up with that emotional experience. Can you imagine feeling confident even if you are doing something others might not understand or have an easy time accepting? Can you imagine feeling harmonious with someone without a drama of rescuer and rescued being played out between the two of you?

If you have trouble coming up with images, think about movies or television programs you have seen. Is there a sequence, scene, or image that evokes a powerful, positive emotion for you? Use it on your Experience Board and continue to work with the board, creating the emotions you would like to feel.

THE NEW YOU, EXERCISING THE POWER TO CHOOSE

Because we people who feel too much can quickly become overwhelmed by our emotions, we don't handle transition and uncertainty well. We like to know what we're dealing with, down to the last detail. It's what causes us to be perfectionists and to avoid change. We not only have our own anxiety to deal with, we also have the emotions of other people who are involved in the transition or change we are a part of—because those feelings seep in through our porous boundaries.

You might be eager to step into being a person who no longer detours through unhealthy caregiving of others, mindless eating, perfectionism, and so on. But are the people around you
ready
to support you? And can you handle their responses if they are jealous or angry toward you?

Let's say you are feeling excited about your new choice to nurture yourself by spending time alone, thereby enjoying activities that infuse you with optimism and energy, and this takes time away from your family. Your partner responds with resentment, your children become anxious because you aren't hovering over them catering to their every need, your mother is cynical and criticizes you for being selfish, and your best friend is encouraging (yay!). Of course, you want to take in your friend's encouragement and happiness for you, but how do you do that without taking on everyone else's emotions, which can intimidate and upset you?

Hmm, maybe you should spend more time with your best friend and avoid your family! Seriously, you do need to create boundaries with people who trigger your feelings of disempowerment and low self-worth. It's loving to listen to the feelings of the people you care about, but it's important to disengage from the negative emotional energy they generate in you. You can't always take on other people's anger or frustrations and you shouldn't have to.

If your partner is resentful of how much time you are now spending on self-care, explain why your new habits are important to you. It may be that simply acknowledging that change in your life is difficult will be enough to get your partner on board. If the complaining or sighing continues, you're going to have to set a boundary: other people's feelings are theirs to manage and deal with, not to dump on you. The people who care about you ought to be happy for you if you are becoming healthier and more joyful. If they aren't, you need to talk to them about that and ask for their support.

If your family is having trouble adjusting to your new, less sacrificing self, they can use some of the techniques you've learned to manage their own difficult emotions as they transition to being less dependent on you. Talk through practical solutions if they're unhappy with how you aren't catering to them. Be creative about getting around any problems that come up. For example, maybe you and your partner can cook meals ahead of time so that when you come home on weeknights, you can take the 20 minutes for a bath without pushing back dinner for everyone.

Don't let yourself get drawn into the same unproductive, upsetting conversations again and again if your teenagers are working through their own uncertainty about the changes and are resistant to taking on more responsibility for themselves. Get your children involved in preparing healthier meals and make it a fun family time instead of a chore. Talk about what part of food preparation everyone likes best. One of my clients always loved to sit with her mother and snip the ends off of green beans when she was growing up; but later she learned that her own daughter would rather do just about anything than snip green beans, so was given the job of corn shucking and table setting. Trade off the food preparation chores and make sure everyone's preferences are heard.

At the end of a long day, anyone can be stressed out. When home, dinner time should be nourishing to the body, mind, and spirit. If a family member or partner has to take a few minutes to process and let go of irritation, frustration, or deep funk, give the person leeway to do so, just as that person accommodates you by leaving you alone for 20 minutes while you do your salt bath and EFT. While chopping vegetables, setting the table, and cooking, talk about nonemotional topics. You might even play word games with the kids to keep the conversation light, so that you don't start taking on other people's emotions while you're around food. When you are eating, keep the conversation positive and encourage everyone to be mindful as they eat. Remark on how delicious the salad looks, or how tasty the in-season asparagus is. If anyone starts talking about how hard the day was, listen with sympathy but don't let him or her “dump garbage” all over your communal table! Make it a family rule that during meals, people can ask for emotional support but can't go into a rant about how awful today was.

Family time at the table should be about bonding, not about burdening each other. I remember family dinners, especially on Sundays, being highly valued in my home, but whenever there was tension between us or someone was in a bad mood, it was hard to eat. Still, it made us all closer to break bread together. If I could go back in time, I would teach everyone how to process his or her emotions without bringing them to the table and serving them up with the soup.

The old habit of “balancing” your needs with your family's by flushing yours down the drain and endlessly catering to others has come to an end. You have the choice not to slip back into that behavior. Set rules for sharing meal preparation and eating together without bringing in drama.

As for what you eat, you might hear a lot of noise when you stop cooking, buying, and serving foods that aren't healthy for you. One of my weight-loss clients told her husband to keep his cookies and chips in his garage workshop, out of her sight. He needed to lose weight as well, but it wasn't her responsibility to get him to cut out the junk food. They stopped having regular conflicts about food once she set the boundary and the noisy foods weren't around to tempt her.

As you're make changes in how you eat, you are also making changes in how much you are isolating yourself. Welcome back to civilization! However, don't be surprised if a few people don't greet your return with welcoming arms. They may not trust that you really do care about connecting with them emotionally, and that you're not going to avoid intimacy and isolate again. It may take some time to rebuild your relationships with your partner, your siblings, your kids, and so on. Again, be sure to do your daily journal writing and the exercises in this chapter to begin imagining what your relationships will look like; now, you aren't disappearing on people as soon as they become emotional, or engaging in codependent behavior that has them feeling smothered and controlled.

In a sense, you're re-entering that middle-school, awkward age again when you try on new behaviors and discover who you are, reclaiming pieces of yourself that got lost along the way or that you were afraid to look at. Remember discovering your rebellious self for the first time? Did you hold on to that aspect of yourself, or did you run from it, afraid of what might happen if you allowed yourself to step off the straight-and-narrow path? Now that you are older, wiser, stronger, and armed with many techniques for managing your painful emotions, you can take a relook at the aspects of yourself that you were afraid to claim or hold on to. You can choose to reincorporate them into your life. Rebelliousness can take many forms in your life, some of which can be very positive. How might it manifest in your life now, if you choose to reclaim it?

ASSERTING YOURSELF: YOU DON'T HAVE TO BE ALLERGIC TO CONFRONTATION!

To some of you, assertive behavior may come naturally, but to many of you, the people-pleasing habit is so engrained that you would rather die of salmonella poisoning than tell the waitress to return your undercooked eggs to the kitchen—you don't want to hurt anyone's feelings. Does reading the word
confrontation
make your stomach tighten? I know it does for me. I hate confrontation and will do anything to avoid it, but that approach has got me into a lot of trouble in the past. It took me many years to heal from being gang-raped at age 19, which set in motion a strange possum-playing behavior when faced with someone else's anger or drama. It took me years to stand up for myself when I was being abused because I had been so traumatized by the event; it was easier to just shut down and ignore whatever was happening.

I could write a whole other book about all of that, but suffice it to say that people pleasing can be a survival skill that the subconscious mind has mastered. It takes a lot of practice and self-compassion to retrain your brain to allow your subconscious mind to speak its piece—
Ooo, are you sure you want to do that? Remember what happened in the past!
—and have your conscious mind override it:
Yes, but that's not going to dictate what I do in the present or future. Thanks for the warning, but I'm safe right now, and making a good decision.
Whether you grew up experiencing abuse or trauma, or you simply are oversensitive, you probably hate confrontation just as much as I do. Unfortunately, avoiding confrontation often creates the very situations you are trying to avoid.

My client Douglas was a lifelong people pleaser. He would do anything to avoid making someone angry, resentful, jealous, hurt, or sad. He didn't understand that we are
not
responsible for other people's feelings, just for our own behavior. Douglas would not tell his business partner bad news, even when it was important that he be aware of problems. He hid the fact that one of their company's clients was asking for far more than Douglas and his partner had agreed to in their contract with the client. In fact, the client threatened to pull his business if they didn't provide the extra services. Douglas worked long hours to keep the client happy and he hid from his partner how bad the situation was. Finally, he was so overworked and stressed out that he made a major blunder and the client refused to pay his bill anyway.

Douglas's partner was stunned to find out what was going on, and he nearly ended his partnership with Douglas over the deception. They had many options early on: they could have let go of the customer, could have tried reasoning with him and found a compromise, spoken to their lawyer about the contract. But Douglas removed all those options by avoiding a confrontation with either the client or his partner. In the end, they were both furious with him!

Our fear of confrontation is a major factor in our high tolerance for insanity. Many of us put up with far more craziness than the average person would, either because “crazy” feels normal to us, given our backgrounds, or because we are sensitive to other people's pain, shame, and embarrassment. How can we possibly confront the person or reject him? What if he gets mad at us? The thought is stomach churning. We're equally unnerved if we're confronted by the person because we didn't call or follow through on the foolish promise we made earlier, when we were willing to do anything to avoid confrontation or disapproval.

As you stop taking on the weight of other people's emotions, it becomes easier to confront people nicely and right away, instead of waiting until a situation is disastrous. It becomes easier to take risks and ask for what you need
and
what you want. You can simply
want
more information, more control, and more predictability, and you can ask for it without going into a long explanation of why you need and deserve it. Assertiveness means not launching into a dissertation whenever you make a request. For instance, don't tell the waitress about your fear of salmonella and your low immunity because you just got over the flu (even though it's a white lie you've invented to make a stronger case for the righteousness of your cause). Don't apologize profusely for the inconvenience. Just say, “Excuse me. These eggs are undercooked and I'd like to send them back. Thanks.” That's it—no speech or bowing and scraping required. Afterward, if you find yourself overstimulated and hyper because you finally stood up for yourself, or you are stressing out because even though the waitress was nice, maybe the cook hates you now,
stop
. Use your techniques for letting go of the empathy and emotional overload.

Let's consider the worst case: the other person responds badly to your assertiveness. Don't give her feelings more weight than she does, then take those feelings on! You might ignore the mild resistance or ask for more information. I think many sensitive people have gotten into the habit of being intimidated by any grumbling or eyeball rolling from the person who is resisting. Ignoring mild resistance can often be a good choice, regardless of what your gender is or who is unhappy with your request, especially if you know that person well and you know what you are asking is reasonable. Remember,
nonreactivity
and
neutrality
are your goals when confronted with someone's anger, frustration, or fear—or grumbling.