How to stop bullying yourself. Parenting tips for your inner child

Do you remember being a kid thinking you couldn’t wait to be a grown up?  Longing for the day when school would be over and no-one would be telling you when to go to bed or that you had to eat your greens.     Didn’t it all look like so much more fun from that height?

I distinctly remember the feeling of shock when I finally realized that growing up didn’t involve some magical moment of transformation.   The sheer disbelief that adults were actually just children who had become really, really old.  Admittedly, with some people it was harder to believe than others.

Yet the truth is that inside every grown up personality you’ll find an inner child, perfectly preserved.   The facets of our identity that were forged in our early years dictate much of how we operate in the world.

Whether we are conscious of them or not, our inner child has a lot to do with both our strengths and weaknesses.   For example, the amount of praise versus criticism you experienced as a child has a lot to do with your self-esteem as an adult.

Many people survive an emotionally abusive childhood only to grow up and continue to bully themselves with internalized negative messages.    Are you guilty of this?  Here’s a quick test, would you ever speak to a child the way you speak to yourself?

Regardless of how your childhood was, you can do a better job of parenting your inner child.  Here are some tips to start you off.

1)         Find safe people to comfort you when you are feeling little

2)        If you don’t have healthy relationships with your relatives, create family for yourself from friends

3)        Sleep is important, naps can change everything

4)        Don’t over-schedule yourself, start the day slowly and gently

5)        Schedule more play-dates for yourself

6)        Make time for art or music or other creative expression

7)        Structure is comforting, create routines that nurture you

8)        Too much sugar (or fill in the blank) is a bad idea

9)        Play outside – your inner child likes fresh air, rediscover your sense of adventure

10)      Be silly and laugh often

Get the idea?  How many more can you come up with?   Above all, be gentle with yourself.  Don’t make me come down there.

“This is not what I signed up for” How talking about the sub-text can heal your relationship

One of the biggest relationship mistakes that people make is to express anger instead of fear or sadness.    That anger often arises from a sense of betrayal derived from the idea that an unwritten rule has been broken, the thought being ‘This is not what I signed up for’.    But more often than not, instead of sharing the thoughts and feelings underneath it all, we ignore the elephant in the room and fight about the symptoms instead of the causes.

For Brad and Julie it all started when they had twins, right around the time he got his big promotion.   All of a sudden their worlds were upside down.   Between recovering from the caesarian and taking care of two babies with colic, Julie was completely overwhelmed and couldn’t wait for Brad to get home from work to give her a break.

Is Food your new Sex? What’s stopping you from reaching your goals

Have you ever noticed how at the beginning of a relationship, when you are falling in love, you just don’t eat as much?  There seems to be an inverse ratio between the amount of sex had and the amount of food eaten.   The marvel of it all is that you don’t even feel deprived, you simply don’t think about food as often.

Compare that to your eating habits whilst nursing a broken heart.  Unless you are one of those rare people who just can’t eat when they are heart-broken, you have probably indulged in comfort eating on such occasions.

This came to my mind when I was remembering working with a client who had been struggling to get her weight down to an acceptable and healthy level.   She used to have an enviably athletic yet feminine physique and at that time, felt very confident about herself and thoroughly enjoyed an active sex life.   Fast forward a few years via marriage and motherhood, and she found herself in the common position of carrying more weight and having less sex.

More importantly, she didn’t feel sexy.  This was something she very much wanted to change, yet time after time, she made a sincere and determined resolution to alter her eating habits only to find that in a matter of days, she fell off the wagon and compulsively consumed what I like to refer to as “consolation calories”.

What’s the pay off?

Clearly this was way more complicated than needing a new diet plan, since at that point in her life with her level of experience, she could probably have written one.  Sound familiar?  So if it wasn’t about needing to learn how to do it, we needed to investigate what was getting in the way of being able to put into practice what she knew.

Behind every act of self-sabotage is a hidden benefit that keeps you hooked in to the status quo.    There is always a reason you resist desired change and that reason is to do with what you are getting out of leaving things as they are.  In order to make any progress, you need to discover what pay-off you’re getting from not changing.

In order to start investigating your subconscious blocks and motivations behind your behavior,  grab a pen and paper and start to write down the messages you give to yourself.   Externalizing the beliefs that are hiding inside your head is the first step to being able to become conscious about why you are doing what you do, which is the prerequisite to being able to change.

What’s the risk?

Often, the thing that stops us from being able to get out of an unwanted situation is a subconscious fear about the unknown alternative that could result.   Sometimes, as Marianne Williamson said, it’s a fear of just how powerful we might be if we gave up a limiting behavior that can keep us from moving forwards.    If we actually did lose that ten pounds, quit the job we hate, start to exercise,- fill in the blank – things might have to change and change is scary.

Or it can be a protective mechanism based on a bad experience in the past, (the subconscious is always forgetting that now is not then).  The message that “it’s better not let your creative side out again in case you get devastated by criticism” – may be based on the time your kindergarten teacher said you couldn’t draw.

In the case in question, we came up with a couple of factors that were causing her to eat excessive amounts of things she should avoid whilst really wanting to lose weight.     Number one was the  subconscious belief that losing weight would mean becoming attractive to men again which would invite intimacy which carries a risk of getting hurt emotionally.   Rather than being a self-destructive urge, this impulse came from a misguided sense of self-protection.

The vicious cycle

But the heart of the matter came to light when, looking at where she used to be and where she is now, I felt compelled to ask “Is Food your new Sex?”   What we discovered was that she was in the grip of a vicious cycle revolving around a rebellious reaction to a lack of pleasure in her life.

This big picture involved a cumulative effect of feeling overly burdened with responsibilities, dealing with a lot of stress, having a punishing schedule of doing too much at a relentless pace, always giving and having self-care at the bottom of her priorities.  It’s really tough to feel sexy in survival mode, which is how she had been leading her life.

No wonder she saw the chocolate (but it could have been the cigarette) as the only fun she got and was determined to hold on to it for dear life.   And so she reacted out of a sense of deprivation.  She comfort ate to fill the void of pleasure,  which in turn created the weight issue which made her feel cut off from her sexuality (which could have provide a healthy, non-fattening source of pleasure) and so feeling deprived, she used food as an outlet for her need to experience pleasure – which started the whole cycle once again.

A new approach

Rather than beating herself up, I encouraged her to recognize that there was a positive side to this revelation.    She agreed to consider appreciating the fact that there was some part of her that longed for a better quality of life.    In making peace with this aspect, she could understand why this part of herself would be so mad that there wasn’t enough joy and pleasure going around and would insist on hanging on to whatever she could cling to.    That part of her needed reassurance that there would be some other, better, more healthy alternatives to choose from in order to begin to let go.

Once it was clear what the motivation was, it was easy to come up with a whole new approach to the issue, which involved a conscious campaign to reduce her stress and to create a lot more opportunities to experience pleasure in her life.

In the beginning it was even hard for her to come up with a list of what might constitute alternate sources of joy and pleasure in her life.  So I gave her the assignment to investigate the matter.   She scheduled a series of Saturday afternoon play-dates for herself, to explore, either alone or with friends what might please her.

Daily pleasure practice

The resulting list, ‘Making time to take a bath by candlelight, buying flowers, touching fabrics that pleased her, singing, dancing, working out’ – became the basis of a new daily pleasure practice.   And it was from this change in lifestyle, that gradually she found herself able to make better eating choices without even having to try that hard.

So, next time you find yourself beating lamenting your unmet goals and beating yourself up unmercilessly, might I suggest that instead you try an alternate approach?   Take the time to get to know your demons and you may discover that, in fact, all they really want to do is to help you.   Once you figure this out, it’s a whole lot easier to thank them, let them know you will no longer be needing their services and either retire them or reassign them to another duty somewhere else in your life that will actually serve you.

The 7 Habits of Highly Dramatic People by Scott Kalechstein Grace

Since laughter, along with love, is such great medicine, I thought you would enjoy this piece by Scott Kalechstein Grace.    Thanks to Lauren Rutten for sharing it with me.

Do gratitude, contentment, and inner peace sometimes creep up on you and undermine your ability to indulge your anxiety?

Here’s a quick and handy two-step process to make sure you get your M.D.R. (minimum daily requirements) of worry and chaos.

1. Believe and act like your safety, security, and happiness are dependent on people and forces outside of you that you can’t control.
2. Try to control them.

For those of you who prefer to keep it complex, here are seven habits to develop that will help you go deeper into your practice and guarantee a daily overdose of adrenaline. Allow me to be your drama director as we shout out the traditional opening words “Lights! Camera!! RE-ACTION!!!”

#1. Harness The Power Of Negative Thinking – Everybody accentuates the negative on occasion. What if I can’t pay my bills? What if I lose my house? What if I get sick? What if I’m alone for life? What if I’m in this relationship for life? But as your drama coach, I want to inspire you to master ‘The Secret’ by focusing all of your attention on the most negative possible outcomes all of the time. When this discipline has been achieved, you can relax into the certainty that you will always find something to freak out about in any situation, and fear will never abandon you again.

#2. Be Busy Till You’re Dizzy – Being too busy to still your mind and take good care of your body is essential on the path to drama-realization. Temptation is everywhere these days – health food stores, spas, gyms, yoga studios, meditation classes, and it takes courage to maintain abstinence while the whole world is stretching, sweating, chanting, and going organic. Remember, as our parents tried to warn us, engaging in meditation can lead to blindness, losing sight of all the things right in front of you to worry about. So wake up every morning painfully early, splash cold water on your face, brew up your caffeine, and go, speed racer, go! Have you answered all your emails? Who needs a shoulder to lean on? Is there something on TV? Always make sure your life and your mind are filled with clutter and free of those annoying empty spaces between your thoughts that can disturb your absence of peace.

#3. Have A Swinging Good Time – In the 60′s and 70′s, a swinger was a person who relieved the monotony of monogamy by attending a variety of extra-curricular relationships. Nowadays, the term swingers has broadened, and is often used to refer to drama majors when they are found swinging like a pendulum from one extreme to another, churning with the thrill of constant crises, skillfully sidestepping the boredom of emotional stability. Would you like to be able to create, at the snap your fingers, a soap opera drenched in drama anytime you want? All you need to do is to stuff your feelings till you can’t hold them in any longer, and then explode without restraint or care for anyone, especially the ones you care most about. As a practice, try being 100% nice and sweet. Stretch yourself to accommodate someone as much and as long as you can, and then take the lid off and let the steam out, like Mt. Saint Helens does once in a while. There is nothing as satisfying as having a good eruption after being good and silent for a spell.

#4. Leave Your Inner Child Alone Without Parental Guidance – When the child inside the adult gets scared, some really juicy drama can happen, but only if we withhold our compassion, re-assurance, and loving boundaries. When we can resist such mushy self-help nonsense, our inner children will wreak havoc trying to get those things from others, usually through some very exciting acting out in the drama department. When two or more people abandon their little kids at the same time, oh boy, that’s when the fun begins. The adults have left the vehicle, and you can guess who’s in the front seat, banging on the horn, flooding the accelerator, yelling out the window, and playing extreme bumper cars. Yippee!

#5. Set Huge Goals, Maintain Unrealistic Expectations – There is nothing more beneficial to your lifestyle than the habit of reaching for the stars, falling short of your lofty goals, and feeling like a colossal failure. Taking big leaps and falling flat on your face is paramount for maintaining healthy low self-esteem, which is the foundation of all good drama. Go for the mountaintop, and don’t look down at your feet on your way. One step at a time is for people satisfied with proceeding at a snail’s pace, always leaving behind a slime trail of serenity, gentleness, balance, and other dismal downers that drama kings and queens take royal pains to avoid. You can do better than that!

#6. Judge Your Judgments – Every human being judges, but only the ones who have learned the art of judging their own judgments excel in creating melodrama. Have you ever been known to shame and blame yourself for feeling afraid and stuck, telling yourself that there is something really wrong with you for not moving forward? Good! You are on the right track. Now, take your next step. Judge your judgments! Tell yourself that you should know better than to shame and blame yourself. Heap truckloads of guilt on yourself for stooping so low to the curb of self-criticism, yet again. This will make you quite an energetic downer that can’t help but suck energy from those around you. You’ll be the lifelessness of the party!

#7. Get Grounded In The 3 B’s. Blame, Blame, & Blame – Blaming yourself has already been covered. But don’t rest there. Blame everyone else too. Life’s not going the way you want? Blame, blame, blame! Blame first, ask questions and take responsibility later, if at all. Appropriate targets are Mom and Dad, friends (if you still have any), your mate (if they are still around), the Bush administration, the Clinton administration, big corporations, small minds, and, of course, God. Self-responsibility can lead to issues finding solutions, which flushes good drama right down the drain. Instead, be generous with the blame dispenser, letting it overflow on everyone, uncontained, uncensored, unedited. Blame, Blame, Blame!

Affirmations For Good Drama

• Every day in every way I am stressing out over everything, real or imagined.

• Everything is working together to conspire to bring the worst possible outcome to my doorstep.

• Life is against me and I am doomed.

• This, or something worse, is now manifesting for the highest cost to all concerned.

• I no longer have to work to create drama. Drama happens effortlessly and naturally, all around me.

• Whatever calamity I can conceive, I can achieve.

• I always have everything I need to manifest everything I don’t want, and all is hell in my world.

Scott Kalechstein Grace is an author, speaker and modern day troubadour.   You can learn more about him at www.scottsongs.com.

How many people are in your relationship?

Today’s post at LifeHack talks about the influence that our childhood and other relationships have on our intimate relationships.    Does this ring true for you?

http://www.lifehack.org/articles/lifestyle/how-many-people-are-in-your-relationship.html

Forgiveness

“Refusing to forgive someone is like continually drinking poison, hoping the other person will die.” Anon.

If I had to pick one practice that can effect the most spiritual, physical and emotional healing, it would have to be forgiveness. Yet the idea of forgiveness is frequently met with major resistance. Rather than allowing a painful memory to fade, people often feel compelled to tell and re-tell the story, either to themselves or others, as a way of reinforcing that wrong was done to them.

What they fail to realize is that this verbal or mental re-creation of the incident has significant dangerous consequences. Neurobiology shows us that reliving the memory of a frightening event can trigger the same hormonal and chemical reactions in the body as experiencing it in reality would. Now that science has been able to prove the connection between emotional stress and disease, deliberately putting ourselves through the emotions of that event can be seen as very self-destructive. Ironically, in the attempt to underline our identity as victim, we become yet another perpetrator against ourselves.

One of the reasons that people are unwilling to let go of their terrible experiences, is because they feel that “forgiving and forgetting” is somehow letting the perpetrator off the hook. Yet, if you think about it, by not forgiving we just keep feeding the energetic connection between us. Do you want to be so intimately and permanently bonded to this person? Can you look at forgiving them as being not so much about releasing them, as cutting yourself free?

Sometimes it helps to simply re-frame it as a choice. The one thing that no-one else can do to us is to control how we react to what happens to us. Try to see forgiving as the act of taking back your power and choosing not to allow this person to fill you with literally toxic, negative emotions.  Sometimes, in the words of George Herbert,  ‘Living well is the best revenge’.