100 days of no dessert Part 1

There are all sorts of reasons I find enormous value and joy in being a therapist. One of those reasons is the personal enrichment I gain from watching courageous people take risks in talking about areas of their life most people don’t even let themselves think about.

I get a front row seat to courageous conversations, new ideas, excitement about moving forward, and I watch people come back session after session, taking risks to fill out an application, begin talking to themselves more compassionately, start exercising, or change the way they have conversations with a family member.

I witness, over and over that being brave and showing up is worth it.

But there is a painful, challenging, inspiring, difficult, but ultimately “worth it” downside to all of that. (That probably looks like it doesn’t make sense, but hang in with me.)

It’s an integrity thing. I’m not perfect, and never will be…not sure I wanna be, and it’s certainly not realistic to expect that of myself.  But the work with clients holds me accountable to grow…and growing is scary, and painful, and uncomfortable, and frustrating, and bewildering, and lotsa work…but ultimately, so very worth it. It’s not pleasant nor nice, but it is deeply, profoundly good.

But as I help people improve the connections in their lives, I am inspired to improve the connections in my life. It’s hard for any therapist to be with clients while they do their work if s/he is sitting on a pile of his/her own stuff, not doing his/her own work.  If I’m working with a client on an area of their life where I have considerably unfinished work in my own life, I’m simply not able to work from my sweet spot with a client.

So, when I see a client struggling with something in an honest way, y’know, fighting the good fight so to speak, and it’s a battle I’ve been avoiding, it gets uncomfortable for me, and I’m outta that sweet spot…that place where good work feels like it flows.

I still work with the client on their stuff, for sure, but there is a part of me that realizes I’m being a hypocrite when I’m ignoring my stuff.

Last fall, I was working with a number of folks on numbing behaviours. Folks that were engaging in behaviours and habits as a way of avoiding the stresses of life completely, or to pull away and get a break from the challenges of the day for a time.

Numbing behaviours can be gambling, drinking, eating mindlessly, shopping to excess, working day and night, video games, marijauna or other drugs…or any other number of ways that people escape the discomfort and pain of the world.

And at the end of a full day of clients, and preparation and delivery of presentations, and enjoying a busy family life, and trying to squeeze in grocery shopping and car maintenance and proofreading homework and so on, I would collapse on the couch and decide I deserved a “treat”.

I like chocolate, dessert, sweets, candy and all things sugar, and so it’s logical for me to go to these foods for my treat. Only I wouldn’t just have a little treat. 

I was eating sugary food more often that I wanted to, in greater amounts than were good for me, even after I told myself I wouldn’t do that.  I wasn’t eating as healthy as my values would have me eat.  And I was eating sweets to numb myself from the stresses and busy-ness of life, rather than because there were yummy.

 

• There were days I would tell myself that “today, I resolve  to not eat anything chocolate or dessert-ish” One day, surely, would be no big deal to hold off on sugar, and I could do it. And…(no drum roll, please)…I would cave, and have some cookies that I had made for lunches for my Junior Tribe Members. I wasn’t following through on my good intentions.
• I would take a small piece of cake and go sit.  And then I would come back for another small piece.  And repeat.  And then sometimes I would think, “Well, there’s not much of that cake left, and I’m gonna keep thinking about it and wanting it until it’s not there anymore. Why don’t I just eat the rest of it now rather than prolong the agony?”
• I would go out with friends and enjoy a nice meal, and decline dessert (dessert doesn’t make sense after the size of most meals in restaurants)…and then go home and feel like eating…have a big bowl of ice cream.  If I was honest with myself (tho sometimes, y’know how it is, we aren’t exactly dishonest, we just don’t make a point of being mindful and fully present with ourselves) I was deceiving my friends, and hiding my dessert eating.
• I would seek to be compassionate with myself by not purchasing sweets and having them in my house. That helped…but then sometimes I’d just creative and start eating chocolate chips from the container, or I’d make brownies with the justification that the Junior Tribe Members needed some baking for their snacks and lunches (and then I’d have a piece just to make sure they turned out OK)

 

In short, I was eating chocolate/desserts/sweets more often than I intended (frequency), with less control than I liked (some bingeing), with some secrecy at times, to numb out the uncomfortable feelings that everyday life has for all of us.

If it looks like an addiction, moves like an addiction, and quacks like an addiction, it’s an addiction.

I’ve spent years telling myself that this was controllable and it was manageable, and therefore, was an acceptable vice, y’know, the whole rationalization thing:

 

• I might put on a pound or two, but I could (and would) pull back for a week or two when the scale suggested it was impacting my weight.
• In the summer, I would go for a bike ride or a walk around the block in the evening instead of eating, and that felt good so I know gets worse in the winter with the cold and darkness. I’m an active person, and I sought to balance activity with calories.
• I wouldn’t nearly always make bad choices, and there were lots of times where sharing a bowl of popcorn was quite enough.
• Although there are some long term implications with diabetes and cardiovascular health, eating sugar to cope with life doesn’t have the same sort of chemical dependence as alcohol, doesn’t have the same sort of criminal factor and dangers of impurity as street drugs, isn’t obviously carcinogenic as smoking, and doesn’t set a person up for life long debt like gambling addictions.

 

So…on the scale of numbing behaviours, I could know that I was dealing with addictions light version, and I justified it as acceptable…and decided, really, that I could probably quit at any time if I really wanted to, I was just choosing not to. (That last part is actually one of the hallmark classic lines of addiction, which made this rationale a little ridiculous, even for me).

And I suspect that there are readers that are, at this point, kinda squirming, cuz it is not only me that has this struggle.  I talk to a lot of people…and I know this.  Many of you want to pull away and disengage from this uncomfortable conversation you and I are having right now.

There came a day when working with folks who were engaging in the real and candid and brave conversations with clients had me realize that I was a two faced hypocrite if I didn’t examine my own behaviour and attitudes and numbing strategies more carefully. (Actually, I’d been examining them for years, and making excuses for  years, and trying this and that for years…but just not really seriously doing anything about it.) The time had come for me to take myself more seriously, and really feel the discomfort I was feeling about my habits and do something.

I realized I couldn’t continue these conversations with clients without getting real about myself.

So…on November 26th, 2013, I decided I would become abstinent from all sweets/chocolates/desserts that day.  Not one last ceremonial chocolate bar or piece of shmoo cake before I started. No more.  Nada. Zip. Zilch from then on. Cold turkey.

This week I passed 100 days of abstinence for sweets/chocolate/dessert.

 

• Not one chocolate over Christmas
• No sampling off the dessert buffet while on vacation or a dessert at a Christmas gathering
• No sneaking a few chocolate chips on a particularly rough day.
• Not even one cookie on a stressful day.

I’m no hero.  I don’t have super human self control. But I took this on as an experiment.