Hi! Welcome! Thanks for visiting. This blog is dedicated to those that have fought a lifetime battle for weight loss while managing the challenges of mental health issues and overcoming family trauma.
The journey towards inner peace is 100% not linear, don’t believe media, that is not how any of this works!
As I write this post it has been nearly 5 years since leaving NJ and heading south to GA to the place I would attempt to make my “forever” home. Upon departing, I left the northeast with the fervent hope in my heart to continue to work on finding inner peace in my life and make the most of the next 40 years living life on my own terms. Building a life that was happy and contained ample personal fulfillment based on my own ideas, likes and interest seemed impossible for me in NJ. I was raised with the poison drink of conformity that spilled into every area of my existence from the amounts and types of foods I should like and would consume, to the types of hobbies I would “enjoy” to what I would do as my career. Failing to comply with any vision my caregivers had for me would surely result in loss of love and acceptance. The loss of love and acceptance is something intolerable for a young child, for we lack the understanding of life outside our caregivers because we are wholly reliant on them. This drink of conformity helped to make the world an extremely small and scary place, which helps to rob children of hope and trust far too soon in life. On the other hand, despite the level of fear I felt about failing to conform to gain my families love, trust and respect I knew that I was a square peg and would never ever fit in the round hole. As you guessed I would be my family’s black sheep. Bah!!!
Therefore, at the age of 36 when I realized that I lived every aspect of my life conforming someone else’s ideas to gain love from my caregivers and family it was as if someone tossed a hand grenade into my belief system. I will provide you with a very simple example of conformity at the expense of my own self. Ice cream is a simple, wonderful sweet treat that most people enjoy. As a child I enjoyed vanilla ice cream; however, because one of my care givers liked chocolate better I would order chocolate in an effort to gain love and acceptance by them because my emotional need for love was not met. It is that simple how conformity starts and you lose a small part of who you are bit by bit. Now, take a moment and think about a small area of your life you might be able to say “I like ___, and that is part of me!” Needless to say this caused a major paradigm shift for me #mindblown. In my mind I felt as comfortable as someone locked out in shorts and a tee shirt in an Alaskan winter.
Thoroughly, understanding that a child’s sense of the world begins around caregivers both immediate and extended it does not mean that a child cannot sense a full range of emotion whether they can express them or not. For children, negative feelings are sensed, then based on external ques from caregivers they will either learn to express those emotions in a guided and healthy way or learn to hide their emotions if they feel that it is unsafe. Personally, I knew from a single digit age that I was living in an emotional place where the words and actions of caregivers were not in alignment with actions towards me. I was hugged and told I was loved; despite these heartwarming sentiments my caregivers spouted they did not come with actions that made me believe or feel that I was loved. For example, as a child I loved to sing, loud, proud and plenty off-key on the steps in my grandmother’s finished basement. When I would sing with childlike innocence my family would laugh at me throw shoes at me. The singing would continue until I conformed by not singing. All the while, not realizing at that time my family’s action bred sentiments within me that I was abandoned, unworthy and was only conditionally loved. Now of course, the previous articulation of my feelings surrounding my childhood were not able to be expressed due to my young age, all I knew was that something was not right. At that particularly young age with no knowledge of how the world worked, nor any advanced tools to fix these feelings, like any human I began to adapt. Little did I know at that time I was building my mental house on a tar pit. Dictionary.com defines tar pit as shown below:
The end result of building the foundation of my mental health on a tarpit would result in my lifetime commitment to working on and monitoring my mental health much like anyone with a lifelong or chronic disease. For as a vulnerable child I had been lulled into a trap that left me in part sunken and preserved in this cycle of self-deprecation while my other half was exposed to all the worlds elements with little or no relief at times just flailing and scraping to dislodge myself from this terrible inky black ooze sucking my life force. Therefore, continual work on cleaning all the tar off of me is the only way out towards a more hospitable growing environment.
To be clear for many of us including myself, the path to this intrinsic feeling of tranquility and relighting of your light in the world is not a straightaway from pain, heartache and emotional struggle to a place that fortifies your life with hope, joy and dreams come true. For family trauma causes us to come from a place which our emotional landscape is riddled with weeds and overgrown trees watered with caustic rain with strong feelings of abandonment and lacking for the moral support we have never or may never receive. To the point the only way out of this lifeless land and out of the tar pit is through broken asphalt, steep hills, bad directions and few rest stops across thousands of miles to find roads that allow us to feel that we may be headed in the right direction. Note!- Hungrily searching for this serenity will invariably push many people to place themselves into situations which force them to experience at minimum mild discomfort to places that bring them to the brink of their own prophetic level of hell.
The path for me to begin to break free mentally began though research and lots of it, books, mental health websites, YouTube videos from licensed mental health vloggers, accredited journal articles and my own therapist. Identifying and understanding how to process the trauma I had experienced allowed me to physically take steps in my life that were in my own best interest in many cases for the very first time. One of the instrumental tools in my extraction from the tar pit was understanding my stress/ trauma response style. Below is an infographic on the 4 F’s fight, flight, freeze and fawn by Pete Walker, M. A, MFT, related to the trauma response that we develop as very young children and that will define our response style in adulthood when stressful situations are presented.
After review of 4 F’s response metrics can you recognize your response style(s)? Individualistically, speaking for myself I can say as a child I fell into the fawn and freeze trauma response. Then as I reached my teen years and into adulthood I responded with freeze and flight. I am sure that you can see that continually responding to stress in any of the above four ways can be problematic and lead to maladaptation to the outside world thus having an immense effect on our life and our ability to orientate ourselves and work toward goals that make us fulfilled. At their core these response modes help to plant seeds of anger and resentment within us because we are unable to authentically express our emotions providing us with a voice in the world in a way that is heard and understood. The cumulative effect internally is a proverbial screaming silence we have inside making us feel as though we are lost out in the wilderness with no tools navigate home with.
There is hope though. Beginning to review our behavior and reaction responses during or post stressful situations is the start to gaining inner alignment between our head and our heart. I can guarantee with a high level of certainty that this will be challenging and on some days feel like mass confusion in your brain as it fights, at times violently against the path towards the true person you are meant to be. The purpose of this feeling inventory is a tool to teach the brain that it is ok to have feelings, even the not so pleasant ones. Of course please reach out to a trusted member of your tribe to 911 or a crisis center rises to the point of feeling suicidal, the world needs your exclusive voice and perspective!
As a tool to help you sort out and recognize the emotions you are experiencing the below emotions wheel will help identify those feelings as you get on your path towards your brain retraining.
As a simple exercise to help all of our voices be heard, share in the comments how you are feeling and why you feel that way. I look forward to your comments!