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Overcoming Emotional Resistance

Throughout our lives, we are given certain standards to live by. It’s only natural that some of those standards can and will be met with a certain resistance. There are various degrees of eating disorders, and they can be linked in somewhat similar ways to one another, especially when directly related to their causes. Resistance is the common denominator as it relates to the underlying reason and causation of emotional eating. But resistance to what? Well, to put it short, it’s a resistance to ourselves and our emotions.

Overcoming Self-Sabotage

This is where acceptance plays a major role in gaining the clarity that we need in our lives. When you don’t accept, you resist, and when you resist, you cause pain. Self-sabotage is a form of pain that can occur through binge eating. Perhaps you binge eat because of the pain that you’re not allowing yourself to feel because you’re afraid of accepting who you really are, the emotions that you feel, and the reasons behind why you feel the way that you do. What’s needed in times of self-sabotage and emotional turmoil is compassion and peace. But how can we achieve these states? Here are a few tips to get you started…

  • Journal about all the things that are triggering you and get committed to hearing them and being with them, don’t push them away.
  • Meditate on self-love and acceptance and be with what comes up.
  • Take a quiet walk, preferably in nature, and practice forgiving yourself. Forgive yourself for the pain you’ve caused yourself and others. You are learning, growing, and evolving and that’s nothing to be ashamed of. Mistakes are part of the contract we signed with being alive. It’s how we become better than we were before. Releasing these regrets will set you free and send you into a state of compassion for yourself. Remember, you can only ever do your best, even when your best doesn’t seem good enough. Give yourself space to be a human that makes mistakes. It’s okay.

The cause behind emotional resistance can vary between all of us because our paths leading up to this point have been different. But regardless of how our paths differ from one another, our upbringings play a major factor in how we react to the world around us and interact with ourselves and others. Our experience is a direct correlation to the stuck emotions that reside within. When we harbor emotions, especially negative ones, they get stuck in our bodies and translate to behaviors like binge eating. It’s important to understand why something is happening or has happened to access mastery of your Self. When we are clear where our emotions are coming from, we can get clear on how they are making us feel, and ultimately get clear on how we want to shift our experience.

Emotional Resistance and Disordered Eating

When it comes to disordered eating, there is always an underlying cause. Whether we care to admit it or not. Your binge eating is the result of unresolved emotions that are stuck inside of you with nowhere to go but deeper within. What do I mean by this? Well, as you hold onto emotions, you create turbulence within your body that translates into patterns and behaviors that don’t serve you. There is always a reason behind why we are doing something or why something is being done to us. This emotional resistance to the truth is a direct correlation to the eating patterns that can develop over time.Overcoming emotional resistance

Something that I learned on my own journey that served me well is that our emotions drive our subconscious. We are constantly programming thoughts, behaviors, and patterns into our subconscious through our emotions. How we feel is an important factor behind the things that we do. When we are in need of healing and fail to give ourselves the attention needed to actually heal, we are programming the emotion and state of “I’m not good enough” into our subconscious. We are unintentionally telling our subconscious that we aren’t good enough for healing, and this then creates a state of emotional resistance. This is what can ultimately lead to disordered behaviors like binge eating.

When you’re in recovery from binge eating, it can at times feel easy to revert back to old behaviors as a defense mechanism. These defenses have been developed over time and can hold onto you like a hostage. When we suppress things like our pain, it can show itself as a misalignment in the body and cause further misalignments. What you resist persists. That’s a quote that I think about often because when we are routinely faced with challenges in life, we often decide to resist the truth. So, ask yourself, what is my truth? The answer to this question is needed to get clear on what it is that you want in this life and what is holding you back from that reality. When you’re in recovery, it’s important to stay committed to understanding your truth because it’s the path to uncovering the reasoning behind why you act and think in certain ways.

Finding a New Way in Recovery

Opening your awareness is key to becoming aware of yourself, your triggers, your past, etc. Awareness of yourself can help you get clear on the judgments that you pass on yourself (and others) daily. Take note of how you treat yourself and realize that your emotions don’t have to be a source of pain, but rather, they can be used to fuel positivity. Your pain is your power. Pain can be transformed and used for good. It can be used as a source of power, inspiration, drive, and commitment. If you remember one thing from this, remember that your pain is your power. Use your pain to step up, grow, and commit to your own evolution.

As you go about your path of recovery, start each day from a place of pure honesty. Your acceptance of yourself and your experience is crucial in your ability to discover happiness on your journey. And while acceptance is an important factor, it certainly doesn’t mean complacency. Your power lies in your ability to see things as they are and choose to step into something that works for you. Your acceptance to the present moment and what is will serve you in your path of recovery.

Turn off your world and go inward. It’s where the magic lives.

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