Self Sabotage, Resistance & Fleeing From Health
You try to do the healthy thing, you start to make some progress, and then BAM! You’re back to old self-sabotaging behaviors around food and body. You might even think something’s wrong with you since everyone else seems to have it figured out. How can you want to improve your health, and at the same time self-sabotage your best efforts?
Maybe you’re in a really good space and then you do something completely mindless and put yourself back to square one. One step forward, five steps back. In my line of work, we call this fleeing from health. We are literally running away from having goodness in our life that we so desire. Spoiler Alert: There’s nothing wrong with you, it’s just that there’s some deeper work that still needs some processing.
In today’s episode we’re going to talk about:
- The underlying (deeper) reason why you “flee from health” and sabotage health and weight loss goals (even though you want it so bad!)
- How the thing you’re resisting is likely exactly what you need! (So let me show you how to move through it…)
- The very first steps out of this hell so you can stop getting in your own way.
- How the totally free 5-day Food & Body Freedom Challenge can help with this!
- And soooo much more!
Resources and Links:
- Take the FREE Path to Food & Body Freedom Challenge!
- I’d love to hear your thoughts…Drop me a DM on Facebook or Insta!
TIMESTAMPS:
[00:02:05] Survival stress and trauma response.
[00:05:37] Trapped survival stress.
[00:08:12] Childhood trauma and survival mode.
[00:12:08] Working somatically with the body.
[00:14:05] Healing the disconnection with our bodies.
[00:17:07] Trauma.
Full Episode Transcript:
Hello. Hello, everybody. Welcome to another episode. I’m so excited to be here today. We are right in the middle of the five-day Path to Food and Body Freedom challenge. I do run it live sometimes, and we are right in the middle of live and live it’s just a lot going on, a lot of energy.
We have a lot of energy going on around the challenge anyway because it’s so powerful and people are finding it in all different ways and it’s life-changing whenever we can understand this information. So I’m not going to get into the challenge, so to speak, today but, you can go to the link that you see down below.
You can go to hellobodyfreedom.com. When you go there, you will see a link for the five-day Path to Food and Body Freedom challenge. It is very powerful. And I recommend everybody do it. Maybe it’s not for everybody, but for sure if you have struggled with gaining weight and then losing it and then gaining it back and just yo-yoing back and forth, if you’ve struggled with feeling like food is in control if you have struggled with just a real kind of shit relationship with food.
But also a relationship with just the whole body in general. So what we are doing today is a conversation that we had actually today with the entire group of challengers. And I thought it would be great to put on the pod, put it on the podcast so you guys can have it. And it’s really around our behaviors around self-sabotage, especially around procrastination and resistance that we feel and fleeing from health.
And so that’s the conversation I want to have today and how these three pieces can really be connected and stored as survival stress. So very specifically unresolved trap trauma and, going through the challenge, it’s just so alive for me right now because I’m redoing it. We always revamp it, make it a little bit better each time.
And I’m just talking a lot about the trauma response and the fight, flight, and freeze mechanisms and this survival stress mode that so many of us can get caught in. And when our nervous system is stuck in this energy, it’s because It never got processed in the first place whenever the actual shock trauma happened or these little t traumas happen over the course of time.
And so when our nervous system gets really stuck in the survival mode, it’s really can loop this fight, flight or freeze kind of energy. And it’s awful. Ultimately, if we’re stuck in that fight-and-flight freeze energy if we’re stuck in this part, it’s ultimately what we’re talking about is just having a dysregulated nervous system.
Okay. We’re always in survival straight state. So when our nervous system is dysregulated, we can have a lot of problems in our life. So very much. So we talk about this in the challenge on day two and day three of the challenge, but we talk about how we maybe learned that certain emotions were not okay.
Maybe we didn’t get our needs met when we were kids in some way or another. We didn’t get the love we needed at some point. We didn’t get the attention we needed. We didn’t get the safety that we needed. Something we didn’t get. And ultimately as kids, it’s very easy to find the coping mechanism of eating, right?
Food feels good. Food is good. Food tastes good. It gives us a dopamine hit and it does feel like it works, right? And when you don’t have any other coping strategies and you haven’t learned how to process, then what you have is a coping strategy that works likely from the first moment you did it. And now every time you feel this intensity in the body, instead of knowing how to process it, instead of working through it.
And I want to be really clear. No child knows how to do this on their own. This is what caretakers are for, right? Our caretakers are here to help us learn how to regulate. They have to be regulated themselves so they can help co-regulate the small little ones in life. But what happens is we have a bunch of grown-up people that don’t know how to regulate, don’t know how to fill their own feelings.
So it’s very difficult to co-regulate a little one, a child, when you are dysregulated yourself, right? So this kind of is the process that ends up getting repeated, this family kind of cycle that ends up going. And quite frankly, like I said, it’s not any kid’s job to know how to do this.
It’s their caretaker’s responsibility to help them and teach them this over the course of time. And when we don’t get that, for at least a lot of the humans that come into my life, they have learned that food or booze, they’re the coping strategies that don’t work, right? They don’t work because what it does over time is puts us into a situation where we don’t feel like we’re in control of food.
It feels like food is in control of us. And quite frankly, it starts to wreak havoc on our health. It starts to create a body that doesn’t feel like it’s our ideal size. This is where weight gain can also be a part of that as well. And it also creates self-sabotaging behaviors like overeating, over drinking, but also self-sabotaging emotions where we really get stuck, like we get stuck in anxiety, we get stuck in depression, right?
We get really stuck in loops of these emotions, but it’s also physical. This includes chronic illness. It includes autoimmune problems. That includes phantom pain, right? This is what happens when we have all of this unresolved stuff. Okay. And so I really want you to understand that, the self-sabotaging behaviors that you have of procrastination and ultimately fleeing from your health.
You’re like, gosh, darn it. I want to feel healthy. I want this. But I keep doing the thing that’s the opposite of what is going to make me feel good. I keep self-sabotaging over and over again. And this is a sign of trapped survival stress. This is a sign of having unresolved storm, stored trauma. Okay.
So what we have is. Now we’re grownups and we’re trying to do the thing we’re trying to live the healthy life. We might’ve had all this unresolved stuff from the past. We’re trying to, buy the healthier food. We’re trying to do the practices that we know might help us.
Maybe some breath work, maybe some yoga, maybe some meditation, things like that, eating healthier foods, choosing healthier recipes and all these things. And sometimes we can do it when we’re in a really good place. But what ends up happening is then it’s like we go completely blank, completely mindless, and we end up just basically putting ourselves back to square one, right?
One step forward, two steps back, one step forward, five steps back, right? The self-sabotaging patterns of behaviors that so many of us have. And this literally is so frustrating because, In your prefrontal cortex, a smart part of your brain that you want to be healthy. You want to be diabetes free.
You want to feel like you’re comfortable in your own skin and at an ideal size, but you keep hitting up against a brick wall of sabotaging yourself. And it just sucks. I’m just like, and I get it. And I, and it.
And if we can go back to understanding a little bit about the trauma response and I think that using childhood it’s just a great example because I really believe nobody escapes childhood without some level of overwhelmed nervous system, i. e. trauma response and then it doesn’t get resolved because most parents don’t know how to regulate and help resolve this kind of stuff.
And so if we can look back and we can just think about what it’s like to be, a small human who is in a family dynamic that sometimes doesn’t get our needs met. So there’s the big T traumas where we have like legitimate, like physical, emotional, psychological abuse. And those are big T traumas.
Those are huge shocks to the body and to the nervous system that sends us into survival mode. But then there’s also little T stuff, right? There’s things where you just didn’t get your needs met. Somebody wasn’t there in the moment that you needed them, right? You didn’t get the love, safety or belonging or something that you needed in that moment.
And so then what we do is we, since we Don’t know what to do with that, we didn’t get what we needed, but then now we’re in this family unit where some needs are getting met. I’m still going to school. , we still have presents under the Christmas tree, right? There’s some still getting taken to gymnastics practice or soccer practice or whatever.
And so it can be like this big mush of all these different things where there’s love, but then there’s also confusion and then there’s also stress and then there’s also a chaotic environment maybe. And all of this stuff, whenever you’re so young, it leads to this sense of kind of chaos where you’re trying to like, figure out how to like, keep it together, right?
Where you learned that love was there, but it was, love and connection was given as a condition, right? It felt very conditional as a child. And so just imagine what it’s like to have to live in this kind of level of unsure and maybe waiting for the other shoe to drop. And again, it creates a level of survival mode.
And to give some concrete examples like hypervigilance, where you feel like you have to be perfect for everything and everything has to be in a place. And I know for me, it was like, I was hyper, hyper-independent at a very young age. And that’s usually because of unresolved trauma and trauma response that happened to me.
Not because of me, whenever we’re kids. Another one is where you learn how to get your needs met by people pleasing. So you learn if you get good grades, now you now are getting the attention that you want. You learn that if you do the dishes, now all of a sudden you’re, now you’re the good girl.
Oh, good for you. You’re doing these things. And then you learn how to get your needs met by people pleasing, which makes the love that you’re getting conditional. All of this is unconscious, but this is part of the problem. And so now we have a situation here where you’re always seeking out, how can I survive in this environment?
And it’s really toxic. If you can imagine a fish in like a bowl of water, right? It doesn’t know what, like, all you know, is that you’re breathing the water and this is your world. You don’t know that toxicity is there. You’re just taking it in as though it’s a part of what life is.
And so then you get out of it, right? You get out of it and fast forward, you’re an adult, and now you’re living your life, you’re an adult, maybe you started a family, maybe you have a partner, maybe you don’t like you’re living a life in a way that works for you, right?
You’ve got some friends, you’re surrounding yourself with things that you like, you go out, you listen to music, you have plants, you have animals like just this way of just okay like I’m figuring out my life, right? Because you’re no longer a child. But when it comes to your own body, your own health, right?
Somehow you keep finding a way to screw it up. And this is where this connection between self-sabotage and your past keep coming in, right? You self-sabotage yourself by eating, by not moving, by feeling frozen, getting stuck. And, or you end up in super hypervigilance where you’re on one diet after the other, which is a whole other level of shit show that creates all sorts of metabolic chaos.
Obsession with food and it just exacerbates this hypervigilance obsession. And that’s like not a normal way to live. That’s very like survival energy. And all of this is affecting your health and the self-sabotaging behaviors of neglecting your health. It’s a real painful thing because you’re like, gosh, I know what to do, but why can’t I just do it and for us to understand that.
All of these things that we keep trying to do, right? We keep trying to improve ourselves, right? Okay, I’m going to journal more. I’m going to get to the gym, right? All of these are external things, which is great. Not saying that these part of the process, right? But at the end of the day. They’re just behavior changes.
But what we really need to do is we need to be able to work at the autonomic nervous system level at the survival state that is creating the space that’s creating either like this intense, like Fight or flight where it’s like hypervigilant and you’re waiting for the other shoe to drop and the anxiety is there and the stress is there.
And then you learned how to use food as a coping mechanism, right? Or the other side of that where it’s frozen and you’re just frozen all the time and it’s hard to get moving. It’s hard to even do the thing. Even though you know the healthy thing that you want to do. The point that I’m making here is the work that is waiting for you is at the nervous system level.
It is at the body level. It is working somatically with the body. And I think this is what makes Hello Body Freedom vastly different than anything else out there. It’s not just about mindset training. Just get your head on straight and just reframe. And I’m not saying that’s not a part of what we do in Hello Body Freedom because it is reframing and mindset training is actually important.
But if you are, you can reframe all you want. If you are trying to create an awesome, mindset on top of a frazzled nervous system, your body’s F you, I’m just going to keep doing the other thing. And this is the work, my friends, this is the work. All right. And so what I want to leave you with today is that you most certainly 100 percent can get to the other side.
The reason why the self-sabotaging behaviors are so hard to get past is because you’ve been one, doing them for a really long time. And so the longer and longer you have the coping strategy of just sitting on the couch instead of moving your body, the coping strategy of eating the food instead of feeling what you’re feeling.
These are just examples, but there’s a million more, but these are pretty big ones in my world that I work with my clients and myself, what I went through. But what the other part of that is that all of these habits, because you’ve been doing them for so long and because we’re working and talking about the nervous system level is the one that’s in charge in that moment.
We’re literally working with subconscious and quite frankly, pure unconscious energy where it’s almost like we just finished eating. And then we wake up out of a daze and went, Oh my God, that I just really eat all of that. Or did I really just do that? And that becomes the hard work because we’re literally working at an unconscious subconscious level at a nervous system body level.
And I want to be really clear to work at that level. When you have likely spent a lifetime. Not trusting your body, hating your body, wishing your body was different, going on one diet after the other because there was, your body’s just unacceptable and this isn’t okay and I can’t stand this fat and I’ve got to get rid of this.
When we’ve spent a lifetime ultimately denying our body, disconnecting from our body, and I’m literally sitting here telling you, this is where the healing has to happen. That’s another roadblock, right? So number one, you have these habit loops that you’ve been doing for a long time. So untangling that takes work.
Number two is here we are with this body that we’ve been disconnected to for so long. So reconnecting to it feels foreign. And then number three, all of this is happening underneath consciousness, underneath this part of your brain. Okay. This is why I created Hello Body Freedom, by the way there’s a lot of, you can go online and you can find all sorts of different ways to be in a relationship with food.
You can learn all about stress reduction and nervous system work. But at the end of the day, because you individually are working at a subconscious and unconscious level at a body level that you have not done, that you have been likely disconnected to from for a long time. What I have discovered in the last, it’s been since 2017, 17, 8, 9, 21.
So like seven years of really working at this level, two and a half decade career, but really working at this tighter, higher level of healing, doing this work, thinking you can do it alone, thinking, Oh, I’ll just figure it out.
Oh, I’m just going to get it right. It’s real hard to do it alone, but when you have a team of trauma-informed coaches, when you have the support and accountability that is trauma-informed, that has been there, done that knows exactly what you’re going through, what that ultimately does is it helps this unconscious stuff that’s going on underneath.
It helps to be able to bring it up into consciousness. More meaningfully in a faster way than what I’ve been able to do on my own and what I’ve seen other people attempt to do to on their own. And that’s really what we do inside of Hello Body Freedom. We give you a sane relationship with food. We teach you how to get out of diet culture and what normal.
Eating is what it looks like, what it feels like. And then you start taking action in that direction, which is wonderful. You immediately start feeling better. You’re like, Oh my gosh, this is working for me. Holy shit. Here I go. But then those self-sabotaging habits that have been around. Maybe for a lifetime.
For me, it started when I was six years old. I started emotional eating around the age when my parents got divorced, which was like, I was like six years old, right? I did not get any of this figured out. I didn’t even start the journey of untangling 35. That’s three decades of using food as a fix, wondering why my body was going up and down and why I didn’t like it.
And why I was so disconnected, y’all. Trauma. So what I want to leave you with today, is you can get to the other side. Absolutely. If everything I’ve been talking about is interesting to you and you want to learn more about how to get unstuck, how to end that self-sabotage, how to, instead of flee from your health, actually embrace your health journey in a way that feels really good for you and heals your nervous system at the same time, then I just want to encourage you to join my five-day challenge.
Go to the path to food. Actually go to hello, body freedom. com. Hello, body freedom. com. It will be right at the top of the page. You cannot miss it. Just click on it. You can get in and you can start immediately. And guess what we do. We support you even inside of the free challenge. That’s how we roll.
Because we know if you’re going to get to the other side, it requires consciousness. And that’s what we’re here for. Okay. So I, that’s all I have for you today. I hope you have a beautiful rest of your day. Thank you for listening in. And as always bring your questions, drop me DMs in Facebook. I’m in Facebook DMs all the time.
Instagram messaging on any of that good stuff or reach out to me. I got you. And I hope you have an amazing day. Thank you so much for being here till next time. Bye everybody.
Important Links
