The thing with addiction is when an unpleasant emotion arises you are focused on feeling better. The panic, the discomfort then the craving to feel better. When feeling better becomes your only focus, you are off the mark, on the wrong road so to speak. Whereas when you know there is a dynamic at play with the arising of an uncomfortable emotion, you are in a more authentic position from which to relate to that emotion. The uncomfortable emotion must be experienced, felt, and gone through in order to get to the feeling better. This going through the uncomfortable emotion is necessary to avoid addiction and also the way to give up addiction. We go through rather than suppress . Why is going through an emotion preferable to suppressing it? Well, when you suppress anything, it gets worse. The uncomfortable emotion looks to an issue in need of resolving. To suppress it is to ignore it, not address it; and we all know that issues ignored or dismissed as unimpo...
When I gave up compulsive eating I thought it was the end - a goal achieved, a long awaited destination finally reached. I discovered in fact it was the start of a new life for me. For to actually live a life free from the compulsion to eat when full changes things. One of the first things to change was I left my family home to live with my boyfriend and six months later to move to London. When you change from being a person who eats when full to a person who stops when full, you are actually becoming a person who switches from suppressing their emotional stuff to someone who is aware of and resolves their emotional stuff. This is a huge difference. You change from not really being aware of how you feel about things to being someone who is very aware about how you feel about things. You change from someone who does not really take into consideration what you deeply know to be true and become someone who actively asks yourself what you would want and like from any given situation. You ...
I have to say the old timers in positive thinking are the masters. My first introduction into positive thinking (I was raised by a very negative thinking father) was through the books of Norman Vincent Peale and Catherine Ponder among others. Yes, they talked of God, and yes, I often replaced the word ''God'' with the word ''Love'' for that was my God. But, what they did, was teach me of the power of my thinking mind. To reverse it from negative to positive and thus reap the positive benefits in my life. I was a young woman woman living in a rented room in London. My family (who were wealthy) were of no financial help whatsoever; nor were they of any emotional help, but that is another story (see my biography My Life My Way) My Life My Way So why now in these interesting times am I yet again drawn to talk about these great teachers? Well, they lived in times, dare I say it, even more difficult than these. They spoke to people who had suffered and we...
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