Old-paradigm psychology can try to convince us that unwanted habits are caused by a need to feel loved or safe or cared for. It can feel like we’re using food, or other substances, to soothe or comfort ourselves. In this podcast episode we bust this myth and look toward the true origin of unwanted habits.

You can listen above, on your favorite podcast app, or watch on YouTube. Notes, links, resources and a full transcript are below.

Are you interested in connecting with others who are exploring this understanding? Would you like some coaching and ongoing support with an eye toward resolving an unwanted habit? Click the image below to learn about the Unbroken Community and join the waitlist.

Hello Explorers and welcome to episode 62 of Unbroken. I’m Alexandra Amor. I’m here today to talk about the really common myth that when we have an unwanted habit where we’re using that habit to replace love that we might feel that we are missing. 

Before I say that, I should say that I think it makes sense that we came to that conclusion. And I know for me, I spent years and years trying to love myself in a way that would cause my unwanted overeating habit to disappear. And none of what I tried worked. I tried things like journaling, affirmations, radical self-compassion. What else was in that arena of loving ourselves? Cognitive behavioral therapy. I took a course I’ve talked about this before. And it was all about creating a loving feeling within ourselves. In order that our overeating habit would drop away. And none of that worked. 

I’m going to talk about that today and about what I see now, when we have the thought that we’re using a substance like food to try to replace love within ourselves.

The address for that is AlexandraAmor.com/community. And there’s lots of information there on that page. 

The community will be launching later this year in 2024. And we will be having some live coaching in the community, we’ll have an online group, we’ll have a couple calls a month live with me. And as I say, all the details are there on that page, AlexandraAmor.com/community. 

Okay, so let’s get into this subject of whether or not food is love.

The reason I’m talking about this today is that I had another coaching session with Tania Elfersy recently, and you may have listened to the episode, number 53, where Tania coached me. And so we’ve gotten together another couple of times since then. 

Today, we had a conversation about this thought and feeling that I have when I’m putting food on my plate, specifically at supper time. And the thought that I have is, there’s not enough. We talked about that, and what that meant, what that thought means for me. It felt as I explained to Tania, it felt like it was saying to me that I wasn’t loved enough, that that feeling of there’s never enough I’m sort of transferring it to food, but the food represents love that might be absent in my life or had been in the past. 

We talked about where that thought might have originated. And I can see that there was a time in my life when that thought probably came into being and how we innocently can assume or conclude that because of the circumstances that we’ve experienced in the past, and that we now have an unwanted habit like overeating that we are substituting one thing for another. That’s where the myth comes in that we are using food as a substitute for love. 

I want to share the five things that Tania and I talked about, and explore this a little bit more and hopefully help you see what Tania has helped me to see. And what I’ve seen, during my exploration of the, the understanding that we’re exploring here are the three principles. 

What really matters in this exploration is that we see it as thought. So that’s what seems to really create change, at least, it has done in my experience. And what I mean by that is, in the old paradigm of psychology, the outside in paradigm, if I had been coaching with Tania today, in that old paradigm, what we would have done is gone back to potentially where that thought originated. And then we would have dived into the feelings around when that thought originated, and the circumstances and the places perhaps where I felt an absence of love. 

And we would have dug up a lot of the painful emotions around that, and all that kind of thing. And Sydney Banks often talked about how digging into the past to him didn’t make a lot of sense. And it was for that exact reason that digging into the past brings up all these feelings within us. 

Now having said that, what I’m not implying is that we need to just bypass our past experience at all. That’s not the intention here. But what I do want to encourage you to see or to try to see is that when we’re having a thought about overeating or about a certain food, I really want you to notice that it is a thought. It’s not something written in stone, it’s not a pronouncement that’s come from someone that you can trust and believe that it’s the absolute truth. 

I’ll talk about how you can tell that a thought like that isn’t true, that’s coming up in one of the points I want to make later.

Initially, I invite you to see when you have a feeling or a thought that’s similar to the one that I’ve described, the first step really would be to see it simply as a thought.

And for me, this situation happens at the same time, this thought and feeling so the thought is there’s not enough food on my plate. And the feeling is one of a little bit of fear, a little bit of desperation, a little bit of panic, that kind of thing. Very light. It’s not huge, but it’s definitely there. 

The second thing I want to talk about is an experience from the past. And what I really was able to see today in my conversation with Tania. If you’ve read one of my books, the one called It’s Not About The Food, in that book, I talk about the soda habit that I had, that I’d had for like 30 years, and how when I began to explore this understanding, that habit fell away. And what I saw today was that in the past, before that habit fell away, I felt a very similar feeling about that soda that I would have every day at lunchtime.

That feeling was I need this thing, it’s a treat for me, I’m giving myself a lot of care and love by having this treat every day at lunchtime. And before I started exploring the principles, anytime I tried to let go of that habit, those feelings would rear their heads and become really tricky for me to navigate. And I was not able to do it until I came to this understanding. I quit that habit probably hundreds of times in those 30 years. But I always picked it up again, because those strong feelings of that need for love that I had projected onto the can of soda would overtake me, and I would fall back into the habit. 

In other words, the love that I feel in my life, from family, from friends from the universe, from myself, hasn’t changed at all. It hasn’t diminished at all, because I don’t have that soda habit any longer. And when I realized that as I was having the conversation with Tania, what I saw was that the nature of that thought was not true. Therefore it wasn’t telling me any bit of truth. 

Now, it felt true. In the moment, for those all those years that I had that habit, absolutely, it felt true. It felt like if I don’t have this thing, I won’t feel as nurtured, I won’t feel like I’m having a treat, I will feel bereft, I will feel a sense of loss. And I would feel deprived those kinds of feelings. And so like I say, what I saw today was that that wasn’t true, because that didn’t happen when the habit fell away. I feel just as loved now as I did when I was experiencing that habit. 

And it wasn’t a truth at all. It felt like a truth, but it wasn’t. So that was the second thing that I want to share. 

One other thing as well about that, that Tania pointed out was, what this also points to is the fluid nature of our thinking of thought, and our attachment to things and how fluid that can be as well. When we think of our thinking as being much more solid and real, and therefore dangerous in that way, of course it can be really hard to shift these habits that we have, these unwanted habits because the thinking that surrounds them feels so real. And what this example pointed out to both Tania and I, this soda habit example, was just how fluid thought really is. 

It was attached to this can of soda that I had every day. And then it was so fluid though that it was able to to shift and move and change and the connection that I had between those two things, between soda and love, which felt really, they felt really sticky and glued together. What I see now is that as the habit fell away that they weren’t stuck. They felt like they were stuck together in me. 

The truth is, they weren’t an equation, like one plus one equals two. Soda plus lunchtime equals love. That seemed like a real equation to me in the past. And now I see that it’s not that things are much more fluid than that. I’m not sure what other word to use. 

The third thing I want to talk about when we talk about the myth of unwanted habits and food being love is that – and I touched on this a little earlier – the feeling that happens when we have a thought about food, the feeling that comes up within us is what is going to point out to us that thought is a lie. 

Here’s what I mean by that. When I have the feeling and the thought, when I’m putting food on a plate, that there’s never enough, there’s not enough, that comes with, as I said earlier, feelings of fear, and panic. And it’s a real clench up feeling. 

The truth always feels peaceful. The truth is only ever going to feel like a good feeling, like a beautiful feeling. So when I’m having the thought of putting too much food on my plate, and how that’s necessary because there’s never enough, and I feel the feelings associated with that thought that information is so valuable about the fact that that thought is a lie. 

It’s not the truth, because it doesn’t feel peaceful, it doesn’t feel good, it doesn’t make my shoulders drop. It doesn’t make me feel relaxed. I feel like I said earlier, fearful, panicked, worried, a real clenchy concern about that. So that’s another thing to look out for, and observe. There’s nothing to be done when you feel that feeling. But noticing it is really important and noticing the difference between a feeling that brings you peace, and a good feeling, and a feeling and a thought that doesn’t bring those things, a thought that makes you clench up and feel fearful. 

And then the fourth thing that I really want to point out in this exploration, and something that Tania I really specifically talked about this morning for quite a while, is that it’s not up to us to manage our thoughts. 

She brought this up, probably just via her experience and wisdom around working with people on these things. And as human beings, when we begin to see the nature of our thinking, probably the next that question out of my mouth or question that someone might have is okay, I see that this thought isn’t true, I see that the feelings that I have with it are pointing away from the truth. They’re pointing toward a lie. So what do I do about that thought? How do I manage that thought? How do I make that thought go away? How do I change that thought, which is something that as people with long term unwanted habits, we’re probably very familiar with that feeling, wanting to change what’s going on. 

Tania’s point was that there’s no need to do any of that. 

So the only thing we really need to do is be open to the observation of what’s going on. And that’s a tricky thing to do. And it’s a tricky thing to understand, because our human minds are designed to solve problems. 

The mind anticipates. It says, “Okay, I get it, this thought is pointing toward a lie. So now what can I do about that?” That’s natural and innocent. There’s nothing wrong if that happens. I just wanted to bring this up as an important point related to this subject. It can be a little bit challenging to get our heads around this, that we see this thing that maybe we would label as a problem and then you’re asking me not to do anything about it. That seems a little weird.

Where we’re really wanting to put our attention, rather than digging in, and getting concerned about that thought and its presence in our lives, and getting bogged down in that problem solving, what we’re wanting to do is look in a different direction. We’re looking toward the nature of thought itself; that it is fluid, that it will change on its own, there’s nothing we need to do to make that happen. 

Our thoughts are changeable, they are using that old metaphor, they are like the weather. They are flowing through the space that we hold for them. We are the sky. And the thoughts are the weather. Trying to control them and change them is like trying to control the sky trying to control the weather in the sky. That’s impossible. What creates change more easily than digging into trying to get rid of the thoughts we don’t like, push them away, manage them, control them, replace them with different kinds of thoughts. 

And that that is how they are. They are energy flowing. Thought is energy flowing through us. And we can no more control that than we can control the weather. So that’s point number four. 

And finally, point number five. Tania brought up the timeline and how…

I do experience that myself, especially because I’m here in public talking about these things. And there is part of me that wishes that some of these habits would fall away faster than they have. But going back to what I said in the previous point, worrying about the timeline of how these things shift is like trying to control the weather. It is like shouting at the sea, was the example that Tania gave, being angry at the ocean. 

Thought is a force of nature that we’re dealing with. And it’s big, it’s huge. And it’s really not on us to control it. It’s going back, as I say to the previous point, it would be like trying to control the weather. And putting energy and effort into doing that really is just a waste of effort. Honestly, it’s just a waste of energy. 

Imagine how frustrated you would be if you thought it was your responsibility to change the weather. If you had given that task to yourself, and it’s raining, let’s say, and you have decided that well, it’s my responsibility to change that rain to make it go away, to turn it into sunshine. Imagine how frustrated you would be. 

So this final point is about a little bit of allowing, a little bit of surrendering to what’s happening. And again, being the observer in what’s happening and noticing the fluid nature of thought, of your thinking, but not necessarily being tangled up in trying to change that. 

I’ve experienced that during these years that I’ve been exploring this understanding and so many of my unwanted habits have fallen In a way, almost I would say, almost all of them. I feel like I’m down to the last, I don’t know, 4 or 5%. And that happens, not because I put a lot of effort into controlling my thinking, replacing my thoughts with other thoughts, saying lots of affirmations or trying to use willpower to change my habits. 

The more we look in that direction, what I’ve seen is the more change can occur. So I hope that’s been helpful for you today. 

If you have any questions, please always let me know if there’s anything I haven’t explained clearly. I would love to hear about it so that I can take another run at it. You can do that at AlexandraAmor.com/questions. That’s it for today. I hope you are doing well and taking good care. And I will talk to you again next week. Bye.

Featured image photo by Jamez Picard on Unsplash

The post Exploding The Myth That We’re Using Food To Replace Love appeared first on Alexandra Amor Books.