Dear Wildflowers,
I’m back to sending out this newsletter to a wider audience, so if it’s been a while since you’ve heard from me, hello. I hope you are well. At the end of each letter, there will be a section that is solely for clients who are currently working with me to set their schedules for the week and other helpful tools. But now each week, I will share each newsletter that I write to everyone on my substack. Thank you for being here and for reading.
I want to talk about beliefs, specifically the ones we have about ourselves. Beliefs are an interesting topic simply because most of the narratives that we grew up around would have us think that what we believe is a fixed entity. Not to make it about religion, but I will use it as an example for just a moment in that I was raised Catholic and have some family members who thought that simply because I was born into a Catholic family, that is part of who I am regardless of what I think or feel about the religion. It was taught to me that my free will and thought was no match for the strength of our “faith”. I can remember going to a teen night at our church and having one of the advisors talk about this and how once you are baptized, that’s it, you are Catholic for life. I remember raising my hand and asking about an Aunt I have who decided to convert to Judaism when she met and fell in love with my uncle. His response was something along the lines of “well she may have thought that was a good idea at the time, but she is still Catholic in her heart and I would bet that one day, she’ll be back”….she isn’t nor has any plans to “come back” to being Catholic so far as I know.
The world is filled with this. Diet culture and healthism is especially riddled with beliefs that we are just supposed to accept as true, regardless of our lived experience. But what about the beliefs that we carry around about ourselves? How do we go about challenging those? Do we challenge them? What actually makes a belief possible within our own minds? These are some really important questions that we must ask, especially when we are in recovery because so often, our ED is fueled by unchosen and fixed beliefs about ourselves. For me it was always the narrative and belief that “I am not enough”. I had to work really, really hard to discern A. whose voice was it that was actually fueling that belief? I knew that at an early age, I didn’t always believe that about myself. Over time, I had come to accept that belief, mostly because of the beliefs of others that were floating around me at the time, both personal and cultural.
One of the biggest pivotal moments for me was about a year after my daughter was born and realizing that if I didn’t actually change that belief I was carrying about myself, I was only going to continue to pass it on to her, regardless of whether I wanted to or not, which of course I didn’t. It took a lot of effort, mostly of noticing whenever it came up through certain actions, thoughts and feelings, and saying “oh yep, there you are again” and then “nope, we aren’t going to choose that belief anymore. I’m no longer going to let that be mine.” It’s not an easy task, believe me, and there were plenty of times when I was successful at challenging it. But the more I did it over time, the more adept I became at recognizing it and then replacing it with the belief that I am enough, no matter what room I step into because it is inherent and worthiness is not something I need to prove or earn.
So my questions for everyone this week is, what are your beliefs about yourself? Are they chosen by you? Are they working for you? If not, what would you choose to believe instead? I encourage you to do a little Sunday journaling about this, it may be helpful as you move into the week so that perhaps you can begin to challenge what you no longer wish to carry around with you.
And if you are booking sessions with me this week, here are your links as well as some other little goodies: