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Hello Beautiful Souls!

 

This is Lauren from healingforeatingdisorders.com and today i am so excited to make this video for you all about feelings and emotions. Woo!!!

 

I know this is the most dreaded topic in eating disorder recovery because recovery means that we need to learn how to feel again. And so for some of us in recovery this is a very new and sometimes foreign area to step into.

 

I know you’ve probably encountered this in your recovery as you’re going through it you know that when you stop doing the eating disorder behaviors that all of your emotions start to come up and you start to feel again and a lot of times thats when we go into relapse bc we don’t want to feel the feelings we don’t want them to come up, we want to number them out, we want to maintain a sense of control over ourselves.

 

So in my process we go through with my clients in working on healing all the different levels on the physical level, the emotional level, mental level and spiritual level in that order typically.

 

So if you’re just starting out your recovery and you’re thinking that it’s all about the food well you are dead wrong :-).
Because there are many other aspects of recovery that you need to work on if you want to get to full recovery and healing and be permanently free of having the eating disorder.

 

One of the things that we need to do in recovery is we need to learn how to feel our feelings.

 

The first step is really maintaining and working on your physical health, learning how to eat again, learning how to have a healthy relationship with food, working on having a good relationship with your body, feeling comfortable in your body, accepting yourself and having a plan for food whether its having a meal plan, doing more of an intuitive eating approach or the exchange system or whatever it is.

 

So the physical level is really the foundation. So then once you have that in place then you can start to look at the emotional needs and the emotional urges that will come up that will sometimes trigger you into using the eating disorder behaviors.

 

So in traditional treatment centers you’ll talk about coping skills and typical we talk about emotions and when you’re feeling certain emotions you get triggered to use the eating disorder behaviors.

 

So some very common feelings that trigger the ED behaviors are typically anxiety — women with ED we have SUCH HIGH ANXIETY and perfectionism and criticism! The anxiety is a huge one that will cause us to numb ourselves out by starving or restricting or binging, purging whatever it is, overeating, usually we can say that anxiety is a big trigger.

 

A lot of times women will say: “I’m just really overwhelmed.” I find that overwhelm is one of those words that is like a catch-all for a lot of different emotions. So usually once we start to break it down we start to see really what is going on underneath the anxiety and underneath the overwhelm.
There will be lots of other things, there might be fear or sadness or disappointment or dissatisfaction or any emotion there are hundreds and even thousands of words for emotions that we could name.

 

But today I want to give you a 3 step process on how to deal with your emotions because this can sometimes be tricky waters to navigate.
So its very important to heal emotionally because I’ve found that if you don’t heal your emotions, they are always going to feel out of control. When i was in my eating disorder, I always felt like I was at the mercy of my emotions, “oh gosh make sure I don’t feel this emotion bc I’m just going to get triggered and spiral.” So its very important that we learn how to feel them and we heal ourselves emotionally.

 

So what does that mean exactly?

 

Healing yourself emotionally means that you learn how to feel again. That you allow your feelings to come up. No matter if they are negative or positive — we allow all of them to come up and we experience them and we go THROUGH them without using the eating disorder behaviors to cope.

 

So what emotions are we talking about here?

 

We’re talking about a couple different levels here. We’re talking about emotions that come up from things that have happened in the past and also things that are happening in the present right now.

 

Many women with eating disorders have these traumas or things in their past that have emotional residue from them. They’ve never felt the emotions from the trauma they’re still holding onto. The trauma is still stuck in their bodies, stuck in their energy fields and its blocking them.

 

A lot of times when we go in and do the deeper healing work like healing a trauma from a rape or trauma from abuse or something like that, we actually go THROUGH it and heal it and we release the emotions associated with that trauma and these women feel a great deal of relief and freedom.

 

When we can do that, when we can release the emotions, we can feel Freer. We free up our energy channels and we are free to be in the present moment. A lot of time we use the ED behaviors to distract ourselves from feeling a range of emotions that we just don’t want to feel.

 

So healing yourself emotionally is a HUGE part of recovery. What are the pros — why should we do this, Lauren? Why should we work on healing ourselves emotionally?

 

Well learning how to experience the emotions, like I said, can allow you to be more in the moment. You can live fully knowing that you can handle whatever happens. Whatever comes up. You can handle it. You can feel it and you can process through it in a way that is healthy and you know that you don’t have to use the eating disorder behaviors to cope with those feelings.

 

Also, when you start processing through your emotions and learning how to feel them, you are also going to be able to move up the emotional guided scale.

So what does that mean?

 

Well in my recovery when I was feeling very negative emotions, I was very far down the scale, feeling powerlessness, the hopelessness, all of the depression, anxiety, fear all of those negative emotions I was very low down on that scale feeling very low vibration emotions. It can feel very stuck and stagnant and icky there.

 

When you process through those you are allowed to start to move up the scale.

 

You can then start feeling better about yourself, you can start to feel feelings of more a positive nature. A lot of times my clients don’t even know how to feel those.

 

You have to feel the emotions associated with the negative feelings but you also are given this great gift that you get to learn how to experience the positive emotions as well.

 

Emotions like gratitude, joy, love, peace, contentment, happiness. You can bring all of these things into your life. You do have to learn how to feel them but the first thing we really need to do is to process through the things that are keeping you stuck and holding you back and making you feel depressed or anxious or fearful or hopeless or powerless — whatever it is.

 

So those are some pros of learning how to experience your emotions and another really important consideration to think about is that a lot of women don’t’ want to feel our emotions bc we feel our of control, we feel that that we’re going to get stuck in them.

 

A lot of times the emotions feel so overwhelming like “oh god we might just die if we feel this emotion! OMG I can’t sit with my anxiety because it’s so painful! And it’s so hard to just be with myself and feel this sadness, or this depression.”

 

But the most important thing that I realized in my recovery from my eating disorder was that the emotions are not me.

 

We HAVE emotions, we EXPERIENCE emotions, and if you can shift your perspective just a little big about feelings, and you can look at them as something that flows THROUGH us, and it can be a lot easier to go through this 3 step process that I’m going to teach you today so you can LET THEM GO. So they don’t have any control over you and you don’t need to use the eating disorder behaviors to cope.

So we HAVE emotions. Emotions are like waves. Waves on the ocean. Like a wave the build and build and build and eventually they peak and the subside.

 

If you can understand that that THIS TOO SHALL PASS (that was my favorite quote in recovery) that you can ALLOW yourself to feel the wave, feel the wave of emotion.

Yes, It might be intense.

 

Maybe you are stopping a binge and purge today. And you feel such anxiety and it’s building inside of you and you can’t stand it and you want to crawl out of your skin or you want to SCREAM and you don’t know what to do and you’re feeling so worked up and you can’t stand it!

 

You know?

 

SIT WITH IT!!!

 

And we’ll talk about how to process through it, but eventually it WILL peak, it WILL subside.

 

And if you can do that, Beautiful Soul, you will be on the other side. You will FEEL such gratitude, you will feel STRONGER and you will have faced a fear of yours.

 

In doing so, you can feel better about yourself, you can start to build your self esteem and self worth this way by doing what is scary to do, by facing those terrible emotions that we don’t want to face. A lot of times I never wanted to feel my emotions because I felt that I might DIE if I feel them!!

 

But the truth is, our emotions will not hurt us.

 

It’s only our REACTION to them that hurts us.

 

So, remember that.

 

The 3 step process of How to Deal with Your Emotions when they come up:

 

The first thing that you really have to be aware of, and this is the whole first step in changing anything, and we’re going to apply it to our feelings and learning how to feel our emotions, but the first thing we have to do is simply become AWARE of what is coming up right now.

 

The way that I started to do this, I had a big giant list of emotions and so whenever something would come up for me, I didn’t know what it was.

(Click here to download your Free List of Emotions for your reference.)

I could feel it in my body and I could kind of know that I was feeling something but I didn’t always have a word to put to it.

 Step 1 : Become aware of your feelings and identify them.

So the first step that you really want to take in learning how to feel your emotions is start to identify what it is that you are feeling. So it might be helpful to have that list of emotions and say okay, I’m having this feeling, okay I’m feeling really ashamed, or I’m really feeling guilty right now. Or I’m just feeling very sad. Or I’m feeling very angry.
Whatever it is, you want to identify it and you want to become aware of it. And then, you have to

allow yourself to feel it.

 

This sometimes is very difficult for women because we don’t want to feel our emotions, the whole point of using the eating disorder, the reason why we got into doing it in the first place was because it was a great emotional management technique.

 

Great meaning that it worked for a while, right? And probably the reason you’re here is because you get to a point where you were in control for a long time and you get to the point where it starts controlling you.

 

You start to perceive your emotions like you can’t control them. And so it will feel a little big out of control in the beginning, but if you can just ALLOW the feelings to come up, identify what it is and just FEEL it.

 

Whatever it is — and this looks very different for different women, and it also looks different according to what emotion it is.

 

For example, if you’re feeling sadness, it would make sense to cry about it. If you are feeling depressed, you might want to write about it. If you’re feeling angry, you might want to find a way to deal with your anger in a healthy way (screaming into pillows, going for a brisk walk, etc).

 

Step #2 – Process through your feelings and accept them.

 

So in step #1 you ALLOW them to come up and you FEEL them and Step #2 is that we process through them or we accept where we’re at.

 

You say “yeah, I’m feeling sad.” and processing through that for you might mean just crying. If you’re feeling anxious, some little ways you might process through that is you might call a support person and talk about how you are feeling.

There are many different ways to process through your emotions but like I said it depends on the emotion and depends who you are and what works for you.

 

You might not know what works for you so I want you to look at this as a big experiment as to what is going to help me process through my emotions?

 

What’s helpful for me, especially when I’m feeling anxious, is to meditate. I sit with it. I sit in my zen position and I close my eyes and I allow myself to go there and to FEEL the anxiety and that’s the way that I process through that.

 

If i’m feeling sad, I will cry it out. If I’m feeling mad, maybe I’ll write about it or I’ll talk about it or I’ll go on a brisk walk or I’ll do some yoga or whatever it takes for me to process through that emotion.

 

Step #3 =  simply LET THEM GO. Release your emotions.

Sometimes we do this unintentionally, this just happens as a natural process of feeling it, processing through it and letting it go.

 

So if you are feeling anxious and you talk to your support person about it to process through what you’re anxiety was about, by the end of the phone call hopefully you are feeling good enough to where you can let some of that go and you can release that emotion.

 

So sometimes it happens natural as a process our going through them, processing through them, accepting them and sometimes we do have to make a conscious choice to let them go.

 

In my coaching I do teach some techniques on how to actually let those emotions go and how to process through them quite quickly and release them so they don’t have any power over you.

 

Because that’s really what this is about, right?

 

It’s about letting them go so you can feel in control, so you can feel powerful and the paradox is that when you allow yourself to go there and experience your emotions, you might feel out of control or powerless when you’re going through them like “oh, I’m never going to get through this, this is awful,” but when you come out the other side, you come out Victorious.

 

You come out feeling refreshed, you come out feeling cleansed. Like you just lifted a weight off your shoulders.

 

There will be different emotions that you have to deal with in recovery.

 

I’m working with some women right now that have very traumatic things that have happened to them in the past. For example, I’m working with a few women that have rapes in their past, very traumatic rapes. And I was raped and so I share with them my healing process that I used with it and I had to let all of those emotions come up from the rape that I had suppressed and I had stuffed down and were causing me to use the eating disorder behaviors.

 

I was unaware of it, so there will be deeper things that you need to heal emotionally but there will also be those day to day things where maybe somebody cuts you off in traffic and you feel angry about it or you know your partner breaks up with you and you are feeling very sad and depressed.

 

There will be things that come up in present, there will also be things that you may have all these stuck emotions or might feel resentments toward your parents for example, or you might have had some experiences with ex boyfriends or abuse or whatever it is, there is so much healing work to be done in the emotional arena.

 

But the number one thing that I really like to work on with my clients as they go through this process of learning how to accept and feel their emotions, how to process through them and let them go, is that we really work on self care and self love.

 

Because allowing yourself to feel your emotions and allow them to come up and feel them and go through them is an incredible act of self love for yourself.

 

It can enrich your life just as we have these negative emotions, once you go through them it will allow you to feel the heights of joy and gratitude, you will be able to access those more positive emotions.

 

We have a range of emotions — life isn’t always perfect and even though I call myself recovered that doesn’t’ mean that I have an absence of negative emotions. Me saying I’m fully recovered just means that I deal with my emotions in a different way. And I process through them and I deal with them appropriately and I let them go.

 

Life is full of emotions and so it is imperative that we learn how to deal with them so that you can lead a calmer, more stress free life without the eating disorder.

So I hope that was helpful for you all, again I want to know what you think about this video, please comment below, try the 3 step process, let me know what works for you, let me know what doesn’t work for you.

If you do want to setup a free 30 min session with me, make sure to reach out to my assistant Blake at support {at} healingforeatingdisorders {dot} com.

Thank you so much for tuning in today!

Have a Blessed Day!

Love you! xoxo