When we experience compulsive behavior or obsessive or addictive activity, it’s usually not so pretty. However you want to call it, you know what I’m talking about–when you feel like you go into a trance of craving and consuming.
We feel swirling discomfort, intense emotions, swarming feelings.
Often the feelings stand out. Not the thoughts.
It’s like the thoughts become so distant, you can hardly remember what they were. They went by at the speed of lightening.
The primary thing we notice is FEELING.
When we’re full of feelings…especially conflicted ones…oh boy watch out.
We act pretty crazy.
I started eating as soon as I had the chance, and stuffed in food without caring what it felt like in my body. All I wanted was to eat, and eat. I had a panicked or angry feeling often, or a depressed feeling, and eating seemed to be the best way to express it.
It seemed like there was no thought at all. Almost like my mind was taken over by some kind of hungry ghost, or a zombie.
The thing is…when we slow down enough to wonder what we ARE thinking…it’s not completely vacant.
I began to find thoughts that were very stressful that happened first. Thoughts that scared, angered, frustrated and saddened me.
Many of us have heard of the idea of the “order of creation” in human behavior (I first heard about it used in Education Research looking at children’s learning abilities and behavior).
It looks like this: THINK – FEEL – ACT – HAVE
We usually see best the LAST point: What we have. Our results can’t be denied. We’re heavy, sick, unhealthy, hopeless, small, shrunken, unhappy.
We can also see how we act for the most part: eating, purging, over-exercising, under-exercising, stuffing, grazing, hunting for food, fixated on pleasure so that we’re out buying food.
We definitely can feel our suffering. We’re conflicted and confused. We sometimes have strong clear feelings about our life depending on the situation, but we often feel push-pull and love-hate towards many things including food and eating and our bodies, and full of both despair and hope. It’s all over the place!
And the thinking? Like I said, I wouldn’t even know consciously what was bugging me by the time I was eating. It was voided out by the compulsion.
The thing that helped most in my entire life to become more clear about this order of creation?
Admitting, identifying, clarifying what I was really thinking about situations in my life that caused troubled feelings.
Because then, I could question these thoughts.
When I questioned these thoughts, my feelings changed all on their own.
Here in my video today, I share about the way this process often went for me and how I replaced my original thoughts with thoughts about eating, and how much suffering that created (and I couldn’t seem to get out of it until I investigated more closely).
Much love,
Grace