Chocolate does not equal taking care

Hi!

Wanting to say thank you to you all who have supported me in that dark period last week. I have learned a lot:

• What other people say and do belongs to them. I do not have to take it in. I can listen and then decide wether or not to do something with it.
• My boss is manipulative, mean and destructive. That is what she is. I need to take that seriously and not ‘hope’ that it may be different. Next to that she is also very nice, when it suits her. I do not have to change her. I do not have to take care of others. I only have to take care of myself.
• Asking for help when in trouble is a good thing.
• I need to remember my tools when I’m in a shitty situation. That is when I feel I don’t have a right to take care of me.
• I have a pattern of beating myself up when I do something not to my liking. Beating myself up is not useful. I NEED to learn to also ask WWAWWLHD when in trouble.
• There is a difference between pampering and taking care of myself. Chocolate does not equal care.
• I have, in the last months, I guess ever since I quit seeing the bookstore man, stopped with ‘being aware’. I have been eating chocolate and dates, Facebooking, WordPressing and Netflixing. All to be ‘not aware’ of what I feel, of what is going on. I fear that being aware will kill me. But like alcohol, I realise now it is the not being aware that will get to me in the end. I obviously do not lack a sense of drama so to me thinking about changing this attitude feels as big as quitting alcohol. But my goal with quitting beer was to become clear. That includes quitting the other addictive behaviours.

Sometimes it feels like I am so close and other times I drown myself in stupidity. Today I was SO fed up with the dirty state of my house that I cleaned. Wow, that took a long, long time and I am not totally done yet. Every time I wanted to quit and eat chocolate I asked myself WWAWWLHD? And she would clean because she felt bad about an unclean house. 🙂 The whole ‘WWAWWLHD’ is such an eye opener! And ooh yeah, off topic: Teal Swan, the woman who introduced me to the question and who used it for herself for a year, is getting married today. 🙂

I think it has to do with allowing myself to choose for myself. Allowing myself to close off the rest of the world and take care of me. Allowing myself to take care of me. Period. Because I used to think that I was not worth taking care of. I still do, sometimes. But I am starting to realise that taking care of me is the ‘only way out’. 🙂 (Once an addict, always an addict, always wanting ‘out’.) But I guess this is the good way out, because it goes in.

I need to remember: pampering and selfsedating with chocolate and Netflix does not equal caring. I find it hard to step out of (old) patterns. It seems to me that only setting the egg-timer to check up on me works and hanging these ’tiles’ – post-its with questions on my screen and in the toilet helps. How do you do that?

I am HAPPY that I quit in a tired way but realising I would probably not be alive if I had kept drinking. So I guess that is good because I was/am not ready to die yet. 🙂

WWAWWLHD? She would go to bed. Again, no spell check. And yes that might mean that there are strange sentences too, but if I go reading back I will spend another half an hour explaining, thinking, writing. Don’t want that.

Thank you all for reading 🙂 Love to hear how you deal with changing (old) patterns.

xx, Feeling