Today we are focusing on learning how to get thoughts out of your head …

And more about our inner destructive voices, as well as learning how to shift are destructive voices in to being grounded and soothing, which is one of the reasons why you may not be able to stop thinking about food.

How To Get Thoughts Out Of Your Head Commentary:

Previously we just looked at our thoughts in terms of when we were body bashing ourselves and when we had negative thoughts.

Sometimes we use the word destructive voices as an alternative word to negative thinking. We use the word destructive voices because if you actually spoke out loud your negative thoughts, the voice would be very destructive.

For example, “you ate way too much at lunch and you’re already a fat pig so this means no food for you at dinner.“

So previously, we just were familiarizing ourselves with these negative voices. The voice that called you a fat pig.

We tried to catch and identify and become aware of when we were speaking harshly to ourselves.

We then would try to counterbalance our negative thoughts and voices with more 3 objective reframed statements.

So this is an extremely powerful skill – the ability to catch negative thoughts and to replace them.

But what about our emotions? Sometimes we can realize we are thinking negative and we can see how our negative thoughts are extreme and biased and we can practice being objective.

But what about feelings? Sometimes the emotions behind these thoughts end up spiraling out of control.

Sometimes even though we adjust are thinking to be more objective and reasonable, the emotions underneath these thoughts still continue onwards.

What do we do then?

So today we are going to introduce a couple of concepts.

1. Rebel angry reaction
2. Submissive guilty reaction
3. Tightening fear reaction
4. Tightening seemingly logical

Now there are probably more reactions we could go through, but the point of this list is not to overwhelm you or to give you so much information to memorize.

The point of this list is to highlight the fact that we have emotional reactions as well as thoughts, and that we can adjust our emotional reactions as well as our thoughts.

Here’s how the pattern goes (learning how this pattern repeats itself is key to learning how to get thoughts out of your head)

You have a negative thought or a destructive voice.

“You ate way too much last night, you know you should never eat pizza, now you probably gained weight!”

There are a few different types of reactions you can have to this thought. Please notice that these reactions are gut reactions, they are not under your conscious control. Rather, we can work on catching these emotional gut reactions and changing them.

So the rebellious reaction might look like, “oh yeah, well, I don’t care, I’m actually going to eat more food at my meal next time just because I can“

The submissive guilty reaction might look like, ” You’re right. I failed. Always fail at these things. I might as well just have some dessert to feel better “

And the tightening restrictive reaction might look like, “You screwed up again damn it, just skip the next meal and don’t do that again. “

And lastly there is a seemingly logical voice, and this is a more subtle reaction, but here’s what it sounds like, “Yes, pizza is high in calories and cheese is high in cholesterol so it sounds good to skip the next meal.“

This last voice in particular is very tricky because it actually isn’t very negative. It’s very factual.

However, the voice still is not telling you to connect to your body or anything like that.

So the thing about these emotional reactions, is that they feel right.

This is one of the hardest parts of the journey.

It’s been able to adjust these emotional reactions because these emotional reactions feel justified. These emotional reactions feel justified because for years you have acted this way and now we are undoing years of conditioning.

So how do we adjust our emotional reactions?

It’s a practice, but we symbolize this practice by simply putting your hand over your heart.

I find this gesture to be extremely useful because there is something primal and innate about this gesture. It’s symbolizes groundedness and soothing at the same time.

So when your rebel voice gets triggered and wants to eat more just because… You put your hand on your heart and you try to practice the skills we learned earlier, where are you refrain your thoughts to be more objective.

This time though we are adding in the power of the heart, which means that when you reframe you speak to yourself with love and also from a place of groundedness.

It means that you use soft voices. This is the language of your heart, one of many languages.

What remaining questions do you have let me know!