Knocking from the Inside

When I first realized at age 28 that I could live without depriving and shaming myself around food, I felt as if someone had given me the keys to unfettered freedom. I was seriously ecstatic, if it’s possible to be serious about ecstasy. I was flabbergasted to realize that the choice to stop punishing myself, to stop judging myself had been mine all along and that I could have made it any time in the seventeen years I’d been eating enough for a pony then trying to diet or purge it away. I could not get over the fact that I could eat a chocolate chip cookie in broad daylight and not be punished by don’t-ask-me-who. (Okay, ask me. I’ll answer “my mother” but the real answer is: my own judgments. My own self-rejection.) As Rumi said, I’d been knocking on a door from the inside.

I wanted to shout my realization to the world. I wanted to say, HEY GIRLS! STOP EVERYTHING! STOP DIETING! STOP COUNTING CALORIES! STOP SHAMING YOURSELF! THE WHOLE WORLD IS YOURS FOR THE TAKING!

So, I wrote two books about it, Feeding the Hungry Heart and Breaking Free from Compulsive Eating, which was my version of shouting it to the world. Not many people believed me. Even on the television programs on which I was a guest, there was an undertow of cynicism and eye rolling and yeah, rights. Those were the days—the early eighties—before the words “intuitive eating” became part of everyday lexicon. Those were the Scarsdale Diet days, the Weight Watcher days, the Atkins Diet Days, and being told to listen to your body was like being told that you could grow wings and fly. On a book tour in Australia, the hosts of a television program brought out a wagon piled with chocolate chip cookies. They laughed as they said, “Go ahead, Geneen. Eat these and then tell us you can lose weight by eating chocolate chip cookies.”

The cultural consensus around food and weight dictated that if you were over your natural weight, it was because you were lazy and lacked willpower. It was a moral shortcoming. Losing weight involved suffering. Eating cottage cheese and melon, celery sticks and carrots, and when you felt like breaking out, a spoonful or two of dietetic ice cream. It was, of course, destined to fail because deprivation and shame do not lead to happy people. They lead to deprived and shamed people who might be thin for ten minutes or a year but that is not the same as happiness.

Fast forward forty years to when I met Coco, the mentor I write about in Love, Finally, who introduced me to a process to dissolve long-held conclusions about myself that I didn’t realize I’d been living through. I’d participated in decades of therapy and spiritual retreats and spent enough money on both to buy a small island. I was happy enough, though vaguely discontent (and ashamed because I was also immensely privileged and couldn’t explain why). I knew that with one wrong move, I was at risk of falling into an abyss of self-rejection, so I was guarded, cautious.

The process Coco teaches was originally called The Six Steps to Freedom, and it was created by Diederik Wolsak. And, because I have been working with these steps for years, I’ve adapted them further and added my understanding of the process and what it fails to address as well as the places I’ve stumbled, resisted, and, eventually, surrendered. If I had to describe the process now, I would say that they dissolve the lies we take to be truth about who we are. And what remains when all of that falls away (which is pretty spectacular).

First: Recognize that You are Triggered.

The first step is to acknowledge the upset, which means recognizing that something has happened and that your response is to be triggered or charged, which often manifests as a physical sensation. Your stomach might contract, your heart might pound, your back might ache, your throat might close. We often override this step by normalizing it with a shrug and saying, “Well, who wouldn’t be upset?” or “Of course I’m upset. That person left me/lied to me/excluded me.”

It took months—I’m a slow learner—for me to realize that my response/trigger comes from my personal history and is not about the event or situation.

Matt doesn’t get upset when he is not invited to a friend’s gathering. I do.

My brother doesn’t react when my mother talks to him in her stern voice. I do.

My friend Jane isn’t triggered by unanswered texts, emails and phone calls. I am.

This step may seem obvious—pounding heart, churning stomach, reddened face—but realizing you are triggered is subtler than it sounds because it seems obvious that the situation and person that catalyzed the trigger are to blame.

Then: “It’s About Me.”

For the first four years I worked with these steps, I balked and brayed about this step. I hated turning the upset around to me. I really, REALLY wanted it to be about her/him/them. I wanted to blame, to get the whole mess out of my mind by believing that I wouldn’t be feeling any of it if she/he/they hadn’t done the dirty deed. I’ve died a thousand deaths on the sword of this step. Most of the time, I finally accepted that change was only possible when I turned my outward-facing gaze to the cause of the wound—my own beliefs and conclusions. Which does not mean that I am happy about it, only that I know it’s the truth.

“It’s about me” is counter to every impulse, every principle we learned about communication in relationship, every bit of information we read in the news—all of which either directly states or implies that the other people are to blame and that the solution is on the level of the problem—by fixing what is apparently wrong. If we can just get our partners to agree with us, if we can just get our boss to stop criticizing us, if we can just eat or exercise enough to flatten our bellies or find the correct skin cream to erase the lines on our faces, we’d feel better, be better. This step is where righteous indignation falls apart like a tattered dress.

Then: Name the Feeling.

Most of us are practiced at thinking our feelings, at reacting to or from our feelings, because we have an idea that feeling our feelings means being consumed by them. But feelings are still there, whether we name them or not. And we’re reacting to them whether or not we name them. If we’re feeling angry or betrayed or lost or deficient and we don’t name the feeling, everything we do and say is colored by it. When you name the feeling, you are able to witness it with awareness rather than merging with it and getting swept away by it. You realize that you have a feeling instead of believing you are the feeling. It’s the difference—and I know this is a leap—between having a coffee cup and being a coffee cup.

Which Brings Us to: Remember the First Time You First Felt This.

This is another one of the steps I resist. Back to childhood? Again? Do I have to? No thank you. Not going there again…

But going back allows me to see myself as I was. The first time it happened, I was so busy reacting to it that I didn’t actually feel it. I pushed the confusion or rage or rejection away and developed adapted behaviors—being tough, being bossy, being obstinate—that allowed me to survive. This, and the next step, are the steps that allow me to melt the resistance I have to that chubby, crooked-banged girl. To feel what she felt. To be kind.

And: What You Concluded about Yourself Then.

When your mother left, when your father hit you, when you were bullied or put on a diet, what did you believe this meant about you? What kind of child deserves to be hit or left? What kind of child has the food taken out of her mouth by her mother? Is put on a diet by her mother at age ten?

These conclusions were unavoidable, but they were never true. And everyone has a basket of them that we don’t realize we still believe. Some examples are: I’m not enough. I don’t matter. I can never get it right.

When you name them, you become what notices them rather than melting into believing you are them. Big relief.

Finally Comes: Forgiveness.

I’ve never liked the word forgiveness because I thought it meant condoning reprehensible behavior. Also, I’d built an identity on holding grudges, on saying no.

When my parents wouldn’t admit that anything was wrong, when my father laughed when I told him my mother said they were getting a divorce, when my mother lied to me about her affairs with men, I stopped pointing to the proverbial elephant and became sullen, morose, negative. They wouldn’t admit to the elephant so I became one. I became the naysayer, the holder of grudges, the one who wouldn’t let anyone pretend that we were a happy family, the one who wouldn’t let anything go.

I hear the word forgiveness and think: I’m supposed to forgive my mother for being an abusive neglectful parent? Forget it. But, I am not forgiving her for hitting me, lying to me, criticizing my body. I am not condoning what she did. I am forgiving myself for believing that what she did meant I was reprehensible.

After a few rounds of working with these steps, I felt as I did when I realized I didn’t have to punish and shame myself around food but, this time, it wasn’t just about food. It was about life itself and letting go of conclusions I’d made before I was seven years old. And just like realizing that I could eat ice cream any ol’ time without being struck by lightning, I realized I’d imprisoned myself behind bars I’d created myself and I didn’t have to keep living as if they were true. Once again, I was staggered by the freedom of stepping out of a prison of my own making. Which, it turns out, is even better than eating pumpkin ice cream with rainbow sprinkles in front of God or anywhere at all.

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