What emotions are you putting to sleep?

Comfort food is a term used to describe anything that we reach for in times of stress or anxiety. We eat it because it reminds us of when were kids, often its food that our mother made for us; macaroni and cheese, ice cream sundaes, cakes, biscuits, anything that is a little bit naughty but feels sooo good! We know we shouldn't eat it but we crave the comfort that the food brings.
I have a friend who is an alcoholic and he had been sober for  the past two years, right up until he had a very stressful experience which drove him straight to the liquor store to grab a bottle. Now you might think that his situation is entirely different from your own.
The truth is a bit different though. Often we are triggered by an emotional situation right before we develop an overwhelming urge to eat a cupcake or buy a chocolate bar - we just don't associate the emotional situation with the urge.
What’s your drug of choice?
You see we are all addicted to something; coffee, chocolate, alcohol, cake. In fact researchers are now saying that sugar is just as addictive, if not more so , than cocaine. Yes, you read that right sugar is more addictive than cocaine.   

And just like any addict we reach for our drug of choice whenever our emotional buttons get pushed. We might not do it straight away but sometime over the next couple of hours our addiction will kick in and we will feel compelled to satisfy our craving.. This is why we don’t connect it to the argument we had with our boss or the fight we had with our spouse or the way that we yelled at the kids.
I have another friend who is gluten intolerant, whenever she eats it she feels terrible; her body aches, she starts yawning and wanting to sleep and her nose runs so you think she would avoid it like the plague… but she doesn’t. Sure she can go days or even weeks without eating any, she will only buy gluten free options when she is doing the shopping and everything is fine. Then something will push her buttons and she will give in to temptation and have a cupcake or other non gluten free treat and then she will feel like crap and berate herself for her lack of willpower. The truth is it has nothing to do with willpower and everything to do with how she was feeling on an emotional level.
When any of us give in to our craving for something that we know we shouldn’t be eating or drinking, what we are trying to achieve is to quiet down the emotional storm that is raging inside us. It might be raging away deep, deep down, so deep that we are not even consciously aware of it, but it will be there.
Self-sabotage is misguided self-love

 I listened to a webinar recently and the person being interviewed made the statement that self-sabotage is misguided self-love. We are trying to keep ourselves safe and the means we do that (like eating gluten when you know it is not good for you, or  drinking alcohol when you are an alcoholic) might seem crazy to someone on the outside but at the time they make perfect sense to us,
The trouble is when we sedate our emotions we are numbing out part of ourselves and life starts to become a bland, beige kind of world. Our emotions are signposts to what is going on deep inside us and by tuning them out we miss the messages and the lessons that they have for us.
How do we know if we are sedating an emotion? How can we avoid it?

(1)   Overwhelming cravings: You may have been able to go weeks or even months without reaching for a piece of cake and suddenly all you can think of is cake ( or whatever your drug of choice is). You might argue with yourself or endeavor to side-track yourself from indulging but that nagging craving just won’t leave you alone

(2)   Scroll backwards: Do a mental run through of your day and see if you can pinpoint the moment that your craving started and then scroll back further to what happened just before that. Chances are that you had an argument or an encounter with someone that pushed some button and flooded you with emotions. Shortly after that came the craving

(3)   See the pattern: While we are unaware of the pattern we can’t take any steps to avoid it and complain about our lack of will power or our weakness. Everything shifts once you see the connection between the emotions and the craving. We can’t change anything until we are aware of what needs to be changed.

(4)   Choose differently: This is the hardest part. Acknowledging the pattern is the first real step in changing the pattern and the next step into wholeness is to make a different choice. Often the easiest way to do this is with the help and guidance of an experienced therapist as confronting deeply buried emotions and memories is not an easy task which is why we opt for the easy solution – like eating cake, right up until that doesn’t work for our highest interests any more.

This is one of the beauties of EFT ( tapping) as you don’t have to relive old memories in order to clear and release them.

So next time you are hit by an overwhelming urge to indulge in your drug of choice ask yourself: “What emotion am I trying to put to sleep?” The answer might surprise you.

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The folly of glorifying sportsmen

Let me start off by saying I am not remotely athletic. Never have been. I have always found sports to be too competitive and nothing has happened to dissuade me from this idea.

In fact in recent news quite the opposite has happened. You see we tend to glorify sports people but especially men, as if , merely because they can kick a ball further than other or run really fast or hit a small ball into a hole far, far away, or because they can catch really well. Now I understand that these are great accomplishments but not as great as climbing Everest or, inventing the computer or discovering a cure for a disease or raising a child to be a decent respectful human being. These are note worthy accomplishments but they all seem to be insignificant to the great and glorious SPORT.

But lets just pause and take a look at some of the dark side of  sport shall we?
 
Herein New Zealand we revere the All Blacks like they are God's chosen ones and it leads to them also thinking of themselves as demi-gods. The latest one to fall foul of the glory of being an All Black has been Zac Guilford. He has now finally admitted to being an alcoholic but its hardly surprising with the main sponsorship for the team coming from various alcohol companies. Quite often when the boys are on tour claims of girls being raped, disorderly behaviour or drunken brawling are the norm and are played down by all concerned. As for the girls who claim they have been raped it always seems to be blamed on her for going back to the boys rooms.

All of this pales into insignificance in light of the Steubenville High School event that happened last year. Again we see the culture of sports heroes, only this time they are only of high school age. They are given free license to behave as badly as they choose and it is all passed off as boys letting off steam and "boys being boys". It is also seen as part of the normal behviour of a jock.

Now I always thought the idea of sports was for the sport itself to be an outlet for excess testosterone, that the players would exhaust themselves running around after the ball or hitting the ball with a stick or throwing it through a hoop or whatever sport it is that they are playing. The reality is that it just seems to hype them up even more so that they need an after party of alcohol and general debauchery to wind down after the game and if this means that somebody gets punched or things get smashed or girls get raped , well then that is just par for the course. In fact it is not just limited to the players of the game.  Those at home or in the stands also get wound up about the game and fights regularly break out in the stands or on the trains on the way home. In fact soccer hooligans have become a staple of  every soccer match in England.
Men regularly go home drunk, after the game and punch their wives or beat each other up on the way home or rape some unsuspecting women.
Oscar Pistorious has just been accused of shooting his girlfriend in a roid rage ( yes we even have a term for it!) and he is an Olympic athlete ie the creme de la creme of all sportsmen.
These are the people that we are telling our kids to emulate, to look up to. We encourage our kids to take up sports to let off stream, to direct their emotions into a physical activity so that they don't vent them in unhealthy ways but the reality seems to be the exact opposite for some of our elite athletes. They drink too much, they take drugs ( Lance Armstrong springs to mind), they want to win at any cost and because we give them such huge respect for what they do they think they have license to do as they please and their managers and the clubs they belong to will protect them, and they do. Sure they might get a fine or stood down from playing a certain game for a short period but ultimately their large pay checks and their do as you please lifestyle continues.
Sport was supposed to be fun. It is JUST a game. It has become big business with millions of dollars at stake and up for prizes. Womens sport is never taken as seriously and violence against women by sportsmen seems part of the deal .
I am glad that in the case of the Steubenville High School the courts finally brought the boys to account for what they had done but unfortunately some newstation are still decrying the end of their brilliant sports careers without once mentioning the end of a young girls innocence and the devastating impact this rape and objectification will have on her life. Watch here
What do you think? Do we glorify sportsmen too much?