by Dana James
Tony Robbins, the renowned self-help and motivational speaker, says, “Motion changes emotion.” In other words, move the body when you don’t feel good. Jump up and down for three minutes like a two-year-old throwing a temper tantrum when your mind is in a tug-of-war telling you to eat (and not eat) that cookie. I promise you, the movement will make your desire dwindle and you will find it much easier to say no. Part of the reason that movement works is that it disperses the body’s stress hormones. If you have ever seen a dog that has just been in a fight, you may have noticed it shook its body vigorously afterward. The dog instinctively knows how to release its stress hormones. Humans need to do the same.
Taryn Toomey, creator of The Class by Taryn Toomey, has created a sixty-minute movement class that all the archetypes will find beneficial. It combines movement with an emotional release and is specifically designed to shed the emotional layers that hold you back from living your fullest life. You can do just ten minutes as a tool for emotional release or the entire class for a physical and mind-altering experience. You’ll find at instructions at danajames.com.
SOUND CURRENTS
Sound currents include music, mantras, chanting, singing, the beat of a drum, and even your own voice. Different beats, melodies, and tones can instantly change your emotional state. Think about how you feel when you listen to classical music versus R&B. They create a different mood. Similarly, the music you play to get ready for a night out isn’t likely to be the same music you play when you want Sunday chill-out vibes. One reason movement and meditation are so effective in changing your emotions is their use of sound. If you are not in a place where exercise or meditation is feasible, you can use sound to quickly change how you feel. You can put on music, chant, sing, or scream it out (just not at others). I can’t think of a client ever reporting that she binged while listening to music she enjoyed or after meditating and chanting for ten minutes.
I frequently recommend that my clients listen to calming music on the way home from work as a way to transition out of work mode and into mother or lover mode. If they bring the intensity of the hectic workday into the home, they can find themselves eating with the same frenzy they use to tackle their day. Calming music helps facilitate this transformation, which requires a different set of personality traits—patience and playfulness, not tenacity and temerity.
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Using these four tools—sleep, meditation, movement, and sound currents—together with your archetype meal plan, you will prime your brain to create new neural connections so new habits can easily be formed. The next step is to go deeper into the psychology behind your repetitive behaviors. These behaviors may be as mindless as constant overeating, but if this is out of alignment with who you want to be, it can distract you from living an enriched and fulfilled life. No woman should be robbed of that, particularly when it’s her mind that’s the thief.
CHAPTER 16
Recognize Your Core Memories
The second R—Recognize—is loosely inspired by cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), a psychotherapy model that seeks to identify the root cause of behaviors rather than simply attempting to alter those behaviors. The CBT model asserts that your thoughts drive your emotions, your body’s physical response, and your behavior. For example, if you had plans to have dinner with a friend and she canceled at the last minute, how would you feel? Here are three possible reactions:
You might think, “She does this to me all the time. She’s such a flake. Why am I still friends with her?” This train of thought may cause three things to happen:
Emotion—You feel angry.
Physical—Your adrenaline spikes.
Behavior—You shove cookies in your mouth to cope with the anger.
You might think, “Oh no, did I do something wrong? Does she not like me? Did I do something to upset her?” With these thoughts, three things might happen:
Emotion—You feel sad.
Physical—Your serotonin levels drop.
Behavior—You shove cookies in your mouth to cope with the sadness.
You might think, “Oh, I hope she’s okay, but I’m actually glad I don’t have to go out. I was feeling like I needed a night to myself. Now I can stay in, take a bath, and finish that novel.” With this thought, three things might happen:
Emotion—You feel elated.
Physical—Your dopamine levels spike.
Behavior—You do something kind for yourself.
As you can see, it’s not the situation that has caused the emotional, physical, and behavioral responses but the interpretation of the event. If you want to change your behavior, you’ll need to reinterpret the events that lead to those feelings and behaviors, which is exactly what we do in the third R—Reinterpret. But before you can do that, you must delve into your mind to recognize the memories that are shaping your behavior today.
The most influential memories are those that were formed before you turned eighteen, when your prefrontal cortex (which processes logic and reasoning) had not yet reached its full development. That means you viewed your childhood and teenage experiences through the lens of how they made you feel, not through rational thought. And because emotions enhance the encoding of a memory in the brain, you’ll remember these memories more vividly than those that have been interpreted logically. Unless you recognize these memories, you won’t be able to reinterpret them through the more rational perspective you’ve developed as an adult.
To illustrate just how profound an effect your childhood memories have on your behavior today, I want to introduce you to my client Emily. Emily and I had been working together for several months, and she’d lost the first twenty pounds quickly by following the program outlined in this book. But the last ten pounds were proving more challenging. She was stuck in a familiar pattern of weekday weight loss and weekend weight gain. The behavior part was pretty obvious: she’d diet during the week, only to blow it on the weekend. On Friday night she’d drive to her home in upstate New York, where her friends had pizza and wine waiting for her. Emily obviously knew that routinely indulging in pizza and wine wasn’t going to help her lose weight, but she felt compelled to join in and eat and drink whatever was on offer. Starting her weekend off on that note quickly spiraled into “all-or-nothing” thinking; having already “blown” her diet, she’d eat and drink her way through the weekend with gusto, gaining back several pounds in the process.
While I’m all for a celebration with friends, Emily’s behavior wasn’t celebratory. It was compulsive and addictive. Once the food and alcohol were in front of her, she couldn’t resist them. During the week, however, she was completely in control. I nonchalantly said to Emily, “Why don’t you just let your friends know that you don’t want pizza and you’ll pick up dinner before you leave the city?” I reasoned that if she could change her Friday night meal, her weekend eating might improve. When I looked at her I saw tears in her eyes. With a quavering voice she confessed, “Dana, I just don’t know if I can do that.” Emily is a stoic Wonder Woman who rarely expresses emotion, so I knew we’d stumbled onto something big: something that was going to lead to Emily’s breakthrough. Tears mean truth.
I asked Emily what image had just flashed before her to cause the tears. Emily said she saw herself as a distressed eight-year-old who’d gone to school one day and discovered she had been ostracized by the other girls in her class. She felt rejected, sad, and humiliated, and this isolation went on for an entire year. Not wanting ever to feel this way again, Emily’s mind naturally prompted her to avoid any situation that might cause her to be excluded, including the simple act of saying no to food when she was with friends. Emily’s need to be part of the “gang,” whether it was the girl gang, the work gang, or the Friday-night-pizza gang, trumped her desire to stick to her diet.
Emi
ly wasn’t consciously thinking of her childhood exclusion memory when she was eating pizza with her friends, and that’s the issue. The mind doesn’t show you the memory behind your self-sabotaging behaviors. Only when I inquired about her tears was Emily able to connect the two. Her self-sabotaging food behavior was all an effort to protect herself from potential rejection.
Not being able to say no to pizza with her friends was not the only protective behavior Emily had adopted as a response to this memory. It spilled over into her career and marriage. At work, she embraced the Wonder Woman habit of perfection, attempting to circumvent criticism in an effort to protect herself from being fired. While losing one’s job is never pleasant, it would have been especially traumatic for Emily because she would have relived the pain she felt as a rejected eight-year-old child. In her marriage, she exhausted herself to become the “perfect” wife, believing that if she was the perfect wife, her husband could not possibly leave her. Emily, like most other Wonder Women, also wanted to look good, and carrying extra weight meant she was less than perfect. Lucky for Emily, her desire to lose weight gave her the opportunity to heal these emotional scars and transform her life into something richer and bolder, free from fear of rejection. While losing weight doesn’t create a new life, the process of unpacking the memories that inhibit the weight loss does.
Emily’s childhood memory is what I call a “core memory” because it was at the core of her subconscious behaviors. These core memories will lay down the foundation for your archetype and very often for your eating behavior as well, just as they had in Emily’s case. After the incident in elementary school, Emily needed to find a way to fit in. She engaged in the protective patterns of perfection and passivity (the amplification and withdrawal of her Wonder Woman archetype) so as not to open herself up to further rejection. She also made sure she did everything to ensure her inclusion in any group, which in the case of her weekend friends included dysfunctional eating behaviors.
RECOGNIZING YOUR CORE MEMORIES
Your core memories are usually tucked into the darkest depths of the unconscious, but until they are unearthed, you can’t change the meaning you’ve attached to them. You’ll find yourself repeating the same defective patterns over and over again. Sigmund Freud called this “repetition compulsion,” which is the attempt by the unconscious to repeat what is unresolved until we get it right. By bringing these core memories to your conscious mind—by recognizing them—you can reinterpret them so you can adjust your behaviors, your body’s physical response, and your emotional response. As Joe Dispenza, neuroscientist and author of Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself, says, “Memories without an emotional charge are wisdom.”
Core memories are accessed through a series of questions. These memories usually have some shame attached to them, which is why you hide them in the depths of your psyche. They may be relatively minor and you might wonder, “How can these be influencing me today?” Let me tell you, they are.
When you review the questions in the exercise here, your mind is likely to respond in pictures. Don’t analyze or judge your answers. Just write down as many memories as you can think of. Don’t judge the memories; they are all relevant. The logical mind may brush off a memory as insignificant, but if it came to you, it’s not. You have remembered it for a reason. All you are doing is taking thoughts from your subconscious and unconscious mind to your conscious mind. You’re bringing them out of hiding.
Once you’ve collected these memories, there will be one or two that feel highly emotional. These are your core memories, the mother memories of which future memories will bear the imprint. For instance, if you have a specific memory of feeling neglected, you will interpret later experiences through this feeling and carry those interpretations with you as you move through life. You might feel neglected in your intimate relationships and in friendships, and feel unheard at work. These later memories reinforce the feelings triggered by the core memory. However, once you crack the core memory, it’s like changing your DNA—the later memories carry much less of an emotional sting.
Start with questions related to your archetype, and if you want extra credit (Wonder Woman, you probably will), see if any of the other archetypes’ questions resonate with you. Because of society’s focus on female looks, I suspect many of you will have experiences that apply to the Femme Fatale. Write those memories down, too.
One important proviso: If you have suffered a severe trauma in your life like abuse, abandonment, addiction, or mental illness, you should consult with a licensed therapist to help you work through these experiences. Trauma alters our brain so profoundly that it can be difficult to work through the mental exercises on your own. Don’t be afraid to ask for help.
EXERCISE
THE MEMORIES
Use a journal or your smartphone to record these answers. Don’t filter them. Let it be a stream of consciousness. No one will see these—you can shred the pages afterward if you want, although I suggest keeping them so you can look back in three months to see how far you’ve progressed! While you can reexamine all of the memories that you write down, I’ve never found this to be necessary. Once the core memories are reinterpreted and released, the other memories lose their relevance and emotional charge. Write down every memory you have in response to the following question for your archetype:
Nurturer—When have you felt emotionally neglected?
Wonder Woman—When have you felt excluded or not fully accepted?
Femme Fatale—When have you felt less than because of the way you looked?
Ethereal—When have you felt alone in this world?
The responses I hear most frequently include feeling neglected by family members struggling with illness, addiction, or alcoholism; not fitting in at school because of your clothes; having less money than your school friends; being teased about a physical feature; a parent obsessed with their own looks; humiliation in front of the class; and a parent not supporting their child’s passion.
If none of the questions above provokes any emotions, could being in denial be a way to make yourself feel more acceptable? Push yourself to look a little deeper.
THE EMOTION
What emotion do these memories evoke? (It’s most often shame, sadness, or disappointment.)
Which two memories are the most emotionally upsetting for you? Circle these. These are your core memories.
THE JUDGMENT
What judgment are you attaching to these memories?
The core memories have a judgment attached to them. There’s an assumption that says, “It’s not okay to——— (insert word)” (e.g., be overweight, be poor, get things wrong, be alone, be emotional, wear the wrong clothes).
THE PROTECTIVE PATTERNS
Now take the time to reflect on how these judgments are affecting your behavior. Answer each of these questions in turn, regardless of your archetype.
What behaviors have you put in place to shield yourself from that unpleasant emotion?
What do you do (or not do) in an effort to get people to like, accept, and value you?
Do these patterns show up in your relationship with food?
Take your time to work through these questions, and don’t move on to the next one until you have answered the previous one. Your core memories will evoke powerful feelings within you that may surprise you at first, especially if you haven’t thought about these memories in a long time. Don’t let this upset you. Once you recognize the influence of the past, you can consciously start to dismantle your behavioral patterns.
Visit http://bit.ly/2K5Ei9o for a printable version of this worksheet.
CHAPTER 17
Reinterpret Your Past
Now that you have Recognized your core memory, it’s time to Reinterpret it so you can let go of the misguided assumptions and beliefs that have stealthily influenced your behaviors. When these memories were formed, you were
too young to process them correctly. But now that you have the benefit of hindsight and a better understanding of the forces that shaped your sense of self-worth, you can learn to look at these memories more rationally. This will free you from the emotions attached to those memories and help you discard the adaptive but ultimately self-sabotaging behaviors.
One of my core memories occurred when I was sixteen. I was having lunch at a café with my mother; younger sister, Carly; and best friend, Shae. Shae was a swimwear model who looked like a cross between Angelina Jolie and Elle Macpherson. My sister looked like a cooler, less curvaceous version of Barbie. They each weighed about 110 pounds, as did my mother, and none of them had ever dieted. I, on the other hand, had been on a diet since I was twelve.
When the owner of the restaurant came over to say hello to my mother, she proudly said she was with her two daughters. The owner said, “These two,” pointing to Carly and Shae. My mother corrected him and everyone at the table laughed at his mistake—except me. In my mind I had been ostracized, deemed not attractive (or skinny) enough to be my own mother’s daughter. This man’s innocent mistake would leave a wound so jagged that it scarred me for years to come.