What Do You Need to Release?

It’s likely that you’re holding onto thoughts, beliefs, stories, and patterns that can put a strain on your binge eating recovery. This is why it’s so important that, as you progress in your recovery journey, you take constant inventory of your mindset, intentions, and limiting beliefs. Awareness around your daily thought pattern and mindset–both of which fuel your behaviors–can not only strengthen your recovery, but help you potentially avoid any setbacks.

What are you still holding onto?

What are some of the consistent thoughts, limiting beliefs, and stories from your disordered eating days that are still plaguing you? In order to release what’s holding you back and what may block your recovery, you need to be aware of what’s real for you. Take inventory of your current life and pinpoint the areas where you are struggling.

Perhaps your career is an area that is causing you chronic stress and overwhelm. Maybe it’s your relationship, or lack thereof, that fuels your limiting beliefs, patterns and behaviors. Sometimes we don’t realize that a majority of our struggle and suffering comes from a few specific facets of our lives, which is why taking a release inventory is so important and informative. Once you get clear on the struggle areas, you can start to peel back the layers to figure out the underlying belief, story, or issue that is keeping you stuck, and then release it.

How to Do a Release Inventory

Here is an example of a Release Inventory to help you get granular in this method. If wanted, you can tweak this or reinvent it altogether with a practice that feels more aligned for you.

Step One:

Outline the major areas of your life, such as: health/wellness, love/relationships, career/money, expression/creativity, spirituality/personal fulfillment.

Step Two:

For each area, list the pain points with which you constantly struggle.

Step Three:

For each pain point, uncover the underlying belief or story. For example, if in the area of love/relationships, a pain point is consistent low quality romantic relationships that make you miserable and unfulfilled, perhaps the underlying belief is, “I’m unlovable and will never have a relationship that makes me happy.”

Step Four:

For each underlying belief, create a shifted belief. So for “I’m unlovable and will never have a relationship that makes me happy,” the opposite, shifted belief could be, “I am lovable just the way I am, and I deserve a relationship that is fulfilling and makes me happy.”

Step Five:

Once you have the beliefs you want to release, and the shifted versions of them, you can focus on one area of your life, and shifting each pain point individually to release the old ways that are no longer serving you. Perhaps with health/wellness, you have three pain points that need to be released, so you can focus on each one for a week or two, until you really shift it and embody the new belief and way of being.

Conclusion

When it comes to recovery and constant progress and transformation, it’s imperative to release the beliefs, patterns, and stories that are holding you back. Limiting beliefs in particular can be a powerful block to progress and recovery, because it’s so easy to spin stories of why we aren’t worthy, why we’re going to fail, etc. when we are only living in the ego-centric mind. Having awareness, which stems from a deeper more conscious part of yourself (vs. the ego-centric monkey mind), is pivotal in this type of work. It’s this perspective that will help you separate yourself from old patterns and identities that you fulfilled for so long.

A huge part of recovery–and successful recovery at that–is the firm belief that we are not only worthy of living the life we most want, but that we are capable of doing so. We must first believe in order to achieve. If we allow ourselves to stay trapped in old ways of thinking and being, like the identity we had at the height of our struggle with binge eating, and the behaviors to go along with it, we will never be able to successfully maintain recovery. Nothing changes if nothing changes – which is why releasing what is doing you a disservice is so important.

The fact that you have reached recovery in your journey is incredible. You have done the hard work, committed to healing and transformation, and you are staying steadfast in that commitment to yourself. A great way to acknowledge how far you’ve come is to be super cognizant of maintaining your recovery and continue to do the work. Take inventory of the things that may be holding you back, and allow yourself to let them go. There is no finish line when it comes to recovery – the journey is ongoing, so set yourself up for success.