*** This entry was originally posted to LiveJournal March 9, 2010 ***
I think it would be great if making an agreement with myself to do something difficult and important were always enough to ensure that I will do that thing. In fact, I think it will be a good measure of my growth in dealing with my "not good enough" piece when I can see that I'm better at keeping agreements with myself, when keeping my integrity with myself (doing what I tell myself I will do) is as important to me as is keeping my integrity with others (doing what I tell others I will do). This week is re-demonstrating to me that I'm not quite there yet.
I got particularly off track with my eating and my working out around the holidays. This is not uncommon, I suppose. I've been telling myself that I would get back on track, with such limited success that it doesn't really count as success at all. In fact, I've actually been gaining back previously-lost weight fairly consistently since December. This is March. That's a problem. I can really notice now that it just *feels* bad to have these re-gained pounds hanging on me.
So this week I drew my line in the sand. Yes, that one part of me that harbors deep self-loathing has kept me from doing the work of paying attention to my eating and of working out. Yes, my inner self-loathing has also kept me from honoring the agreements I've made with myself to get back into my patterns of healthy behavior. But this week I changed tactics.
I didn't make an agreement just with myself to eat well and to exercise. I made an agreement with a circle of men to do these things. Now it's about my integrity with eight or so other men, not just about my integrity with myself. Take that, "not good enough" piece!
This may only be the second day of the week (my weight-tracking week begins on Monday), but I can already see how much easier it is to eat properly and to work out when I know that I'm going to go back to that circle of men on Sunday and tell them whether or not I have done what I told them I would do.
Yes, I want to maintain my integrity with others for all the right reasons. But even that "not good enough" piece wants to maintain my integrity with others, too, because it's the piece that thinks it "needs" everyone to like me, and it's afraid that if I don't do what I tell them I will do then they won't like me. Mostly I do what I say I will do because it's who I choose to be and because it's good for me. But on the rare occasions when I can align my conscious goals with the goals of my subconscious, self-destructive pieces, the subconscious pieces give me a nice extra little boost to my motivation level.
There's work to be done, certainly, around digging out the wound that lies underneath that "not good enough," inner self-loathing piece so that I can heal it. In the meantime, I see a couple of lessons here:
First, the more I stay consciously aware of those currently-counterproductive pieces that like to slip back into my subconscious the moment they are left unattended, the more I can choose strategies that take the reality of those pieces into account. Right now, the reality is that self-accountability has lately been insufficient to motivate me to do what I know is good for me. So right now, a more effective strategy seems to be to open myself to letting others support me in my accountability.
Second, there are vast storehouses of energy in those subconscious, currently-counterproductive pieces. If finding even a small way to align their goals with my own produces a noticeable increase in my motivation, then how much more power could I have at my disposal once I do heal the underlying wounds and free up the energy that's currently protecting those wounds and giving them their subconscious, counterproductive expressions?
I learned some time ago that no matter how counterproductive an aspect of my personality may be, it does me no good to try to fight it or "conquer" it. It's part of me--to destroy it would be to destroy myself. Besides, all of these pieces are there because at one time or other they were effective survival strategies for me, to get me (probably as a very young child) through whatever created the wound. The problem isn't that these strategies exist; the problem is that they've overstayed their usefulness--strategies that served a young child well do not serve a grown man well.
The task, then, is to crack open the no-longer-helpful safe in which I long ago locked those wounds, heal them, and melt down and reforge the safe into something that will be useful to me as an adult. There are resources there to be reclaimed and put to use in new, productive ways. That's why I've been calling these pieces "currently counterproductive." Once I can reclaim and reuse them, these same pieces that now trip me up will become powerful and highly productive tools.
So in the short term, I can use the first lesson to craft effective workarounds for these pieces so that I don't bash my head on them quite so hard. In the long term, the second lesson shows me that releasing these pieces from their current task of protecting old wounds in what are now counterproductive ways will let me put them to good use in far more productive ways.
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