Good Life Cuisine

I've gone through different phases on my moderation journey. After learning about practice, I set myself a goal to drink BTB for 30 days. The 30 days were extended to 6 months. Then I started noticing the negative effects of setting myself strict rules.

This morning I had a light bulb moment. I recognized a pattern in all my bad habits, past and present: drinking, smoking, over-eating, pot-smoking. They are in a way all a form of self-care, or taking care my needs are met. I had this clear image in my head of different instances of the feelings and situations that preceded drinking, eating, and smoking. There was often a period of difficulty, either emotional difficulty, or stressful times. I then felt a need to recover; to heal the hurt; or a need for fun; for relaxing — a need to be taken care of.

I spent the last year learning about issues related to our feelings of self-worth, our self-esteem. After reading and thinking about it, I finally figured out what for me seemed to be a key: "I can make myself feel better".

In previous posts on self-esteem, we learned about the inner critic and the devastating effect he can have on us. The weird thing is that the critic plays an important role in our lives, in meeting our basic needs: he either helps us feel or do stuff, or protects us from negative feelings. This is also an important clue in learning how to catch the critic when she strikes. And being able to catch him is the first step in gaining control over her.

As we have seen in a previous post, attacks of the inner critic are devastating. An important question then is: why do we keep doing this to our selves?

So you tried to change, and you slipped. Take a deep breath. And exhale.

It's easier said than done I know, but try to focus on the learning process. All the practice and effort did not go out of the window. What would you say to a child learning to walk if it stumbles, or falls? Would you think she is never going to learn to walk, or that he just sucks at it, or that there's something wrong with her? Of course not. You would know falling down is a natural part of learning to walk.

I was triggered by a discussion about the importance of rules in self change. I think there is a very important aspect about rules not to be ignored. If not carefully formulated, rules can be used by our inner critic to undermine our self-esteem. When this happens, not only we feel bad, but we also undermine our change process. We may feel like a failure, and not worthy any further efforts to change.

When things way down on you, you feel low, there are different self-caring things you can try to do. A trick is to remember that not to always try doing the same thing but to reach to our creativity and imagination and pull new things out of there. Having a list as an inspiration may help. Here are some ideas. You can make such a list for your self.

The time has come to dive into the second chapter of McKay's book on self-esteem. It's about "The pathological critic". Sometimes also called the "inner critic", it's the negative inner voice that attacks and judges us. Everyone seems to have one, but for people with low self-esteem it tends to be more vicious and vocal. In this post, I will focus on describing the critic and it's origines. In the following post, we'll see what is the reason we listen to it, and try to do an exrecise to help us to "catch our critic" when he strikes.

I discovered this theory about Highly Sensitive Person (HSP), promoted by Dr. Aron in her books (see her website: http://www.hsperson.com). This is a "distinct personality trait that affects as many as one out of every five people. According to Dr. Aron's definition, the Highly Sensitive Person (HSP) has a sensitive nervous system, is aware of subtleties in his/her surroundings, and is more easily overwhelmed when in a highly stimulating environment".