How many times have you been told to just stop worrying, or stop feeling anxious or depressed or being addicted to…..whatever your chose was?

And how many of those times did you just feel worse about your behavior and feelings, because to others they seemed so easy to change?

You remember the Beatles song, “All you need is love?”

What if that were really true. What if you don’t need to change at all?

(Disclaimer: This is for people who want to feel better and don’t want to take medication the rest of their lives. If you’re on medication for…. whatever, and you like it, great! I’m not saying medication is bad. It’s just not for me and many others. This is another way.)

 Have you had someone tell you, “just don’t feel anxious”, or if they think you’re too skinny, “just eat, what do you want I’ll make it for you.”  And you just want to scream “it just isn’t that easy!”

And yet at the same time you can’t really tell them WHY it’s not that easy to just do the thing that seems so reasonable to others? And really it just makes you feel even worse, like ” what’s wrong with me that this is so easy for everyone else, but not me?”

I was first diagnosed as being anorexic when I was 12. Neither I or my Mom had ever heard of it. I went through years of therapy, years of people begging and pleading and making deals with me just to eat. But I couldn’t make myself eat.

When I was 23  I met a couple who invited me to walk with them in the evenings. We would walk and have these wonderful talks about life. They never once said anything about how skinny I was. One day they asked me to come to dinner. They told me what they were having, and said “we don’t care if you eat or not, we’d just enjoy your company.”

“What?” I thought to myself. What’s the catch. No one invites you to dinner and not care if you eat. Really am I that interesting that they’d want me to come over just for fun? Usually people bent over backwards to try to find something I would eat (it was a very short list), and that just made me feel worse, not better.

I turned them down the first couple of times, because I was sure there was a catch.

The third time I said ok. I had grown to like and trust them.

I have no one idea what they served for dinner that night or if I ate. I do remember having a great time and relieved of the pressure of if, what or how much I ate.

Mike and Tama saved my life.

(I was 23 years old, weighed 60 lbs and was five foot five inches tall.)

 

What happened? How did they save my life?

They cared about me, not my outward appearance or label.

This is an important piece that no one is talking about. We’re all so busy trying to fix each other and pretending we know what’s best for someone else.

What would happen if we just stopped and accepted people as they are?

What if we didn’t tell people to stop acting like this or that, just because it makes us uncomfortable (disguised in the belief that it’d be better for them).

How would you feel differently if people and you, stopped focusing on your anxiety and instead focused on how funny you are, or what a good listener you are?

What’s the REAL reason we hold on to anxiety or addiction, or whatever thing we feel certain we can’t do anything about but truly makes us feel like $%&@!?

It’s resistance, and the pursuit of control.

I know, I know, when you’re in it, it feels like you have anything but control. But what if what we’re doing is hanging on to the one thing no one can take from us?

Is it possible that somewhere along the way we felt so utterly unsafe and out of control of everything in our life that we searched for the one thing that gave us some sense of control no matter how uncomfortable that thing was?

Sounds crazy, doesn’t it?

But what if that one thing we hang onto gives us our identity in a time where we felt it was the only way we’d get through whatever trauma or pain we were experiencing?

We see this happen in prison. In an effort to survive very tough conditions prisoners will become hyper masculine or take on a new sexual stance.

Where have you taken on a habit or persona because of circumstances but the persona doesn’t really feel like you?

 So how did I go from not being able to eat and chronic angst?

I made a decision to feel better.

Instead of resisting what others wanted or expected of me, I decided I wanted to be happy.

I realized the food and anxiety were controlling me. What began as a survival mechanism, as an effort to find something to feel I had control over, ended up being the thing that controlled me.

And let me be clear, this decision to feel better is not something you do once and it’s done. It’s a daily, sometimes moment by moment decision.

I start my day using the power of visualization. This technique is backed by Neuroscience. We have mirror neurons in our brain that look for what we feel and see whether we’re feeling or seeing it in our mind or in the physical world. (See a list of resources here.)

I wish I had known about the power of visualization then. I wouldn’t had to wait until someone came along to see past my self-imposed label. I could’ve created that feeling for myself.)

Within a few months of that first dinner with my friends, I stopped being anorexic. I no longer needed the label or the crutch. I had met people who saw me for who I was. And that inspired me to be more than an anorexic.

The same happened with the chronic anxiety. Someone saw me through the chronic anxiety and emotional outburst. They didn’t tell me to stop or change they just loved me for who I was and enjoyed who I was other than these behaviors.  I owned how I felt and I had someone who could see past how I felt. And it was shortly after that the I made a decision to feel better. To live in a constant place of choosing a better thought.

This was also the time when I became trained in visualization and used it’s power to change other areas of my life. I’d fall asleep each night feeling the way I wanted to feel and seeing how happy and free I felt being that way.

 

So what do you do if you don’t have the kind of person in your life that sees past your anxiety, anger, depression or addiction?

Can you be that person for someone else?

Most importantly, can you be that person for yourself?

And most important of all, you get to Decide. You get to make a choice of how you want to feel. There is and always will be things out of our control, but how we feel about them we always have control over.

This includes anxiety and addictions.

Once you make that decision to feel better, to take back control over how you feel, you can use visualization, Squeeze Hands, and your choice to look for a thought that makes you feel better.

That may be going from anxiety to anger, or anger to frustration. But in each of those cases that is a better place than feeling completely trapped isn’t it?

In the comments below let us know how’s it felt for people to keep telling you to change or feel how you feel.

Have a great week, and keep looking for the joy!

Much love,
Holly

(Please note that any links to any other posts, videos etc will be removed.)