"I don't belong" - Change this CORE BELIEF. Healing Self-Worth. Part 2

I take you through some practical steps to change a low self-worth mindset. Change the beliefs that you don't matter, you are unloveable, or you don't belong.

How you feel, and what you believe about yourself, is vital to comfort eating recovery. It’s how you feel about yourself that determines whether you treat yourself well, or give up on yourself. Overeating is often caused by feelings of frustration with yourself, and the belief that you are unloveable or unworthy. So, it helps to learn how to change these core beliefs.

Listen to this podcast next: How Do I Stop Self-Criticism?

Citations
Some ideas here were inspired by a Nicabm training on working with self-worth. You can buy your full training programme here

Transcript

Hi, this is Shelley Treacher from the Binge and Overeating Recovery Podcast. Today, I'm going to carry on talking about self worth and how you can start to change your mindset on how you feel about yourself. But first I want to start with an apology. MadSandwich75, what a fantastic name, I owe you a great big apology because I have only just seen your review sent on the 28th of February 2021 to Apple Podcasts.

Thank you for this. MadSandwich75. She says, enlightening. I'm really enjoying this series. It is full of insightful ideas presented in a compassionate way. I often find myself pausing the playback to reflect on what's been said, and have even made notes, something I never normally do. I found writing a proud list at the end of each day particularly powerful.

It gives me something to fight the negative thoughts with, and helps me to get to sleep. This leads so beautifully onto talking about self worth and what you can do to help yourself to feel better, but first I want to tell you my news. I am about to, with a friend, we're both going to decide to give up sugar for a month.

That is no small undertaking, so I'm not exactly sure when we're going to do it just yet. But we are going to give up sugar and my idea is that I will talk to you every day to tell you how I'm doing and this is really with the specific focus of the emotional side of eating and how I'm coping with that so that I can pass on to you how I deal with it.

And I'm telling you this in case you want to join me. It helps me to have someone to commiserate with. So if you want to join in, join my Facebook group, Comfort Eating Recovery Support Group, because I'll be going live every day just to tell you how I cope, what the coping skills are with the emotional side of what comes up.

But if it's going to cause you to get competitive or to get too far into a diet mentality, take it really carefully. It is just sugar, which does mean alcohol too, that I'll be stopping, and only for a month to see the effects of that. And this is not about restriction, because I don't believe that that really works very well, but it's more about me sharing my journey through coping with the emotional side.

So I'd be really happy if you joined me to watch what goes on for me. The link to the Facebook group will be in the podcast information. So let's turn to what you can do about low self worth. I realize that I have so much to offer you on this subject, and the information is so dense, that I'm going to split it into two parts again, and talk about more ways you can do this next week as well.

As usual, the ways I'm telling you about will get deeper towards the end of this three part series on self worth. It's such an important subject, because it's how we feel about ourselves, That determines whether we treat ourselves well or give up on ourselves. Overeating is often caused by feelings of frustration with the self.

So it can help tremendously to learn to challenge that and to change it. This week is all about pragmatic or rational approaches to changing your mindset about how you feel about yourself. So the first thing to do here is to fact check. Is the thing that you're thinking true? For instance, if you're telling yourself after each time that you hang out with other people that they might not like you, is that really true or have you made a generalization?

Another thing you can do is discover any influences that you might have on your self esteem. Next week, I'll be talking about your attachment history and the effect of your parents and your upbringing on how you feel about yourself, where all that came from. But society has an influence on you too. One way to explore this is to name the judgment, to make it really explicit how you're actually judging yourself in those moments when you feel low self worth.

And you usually are, so have a look out for that. It might help to create a core belief log. So to start writing down all the self worth beliefs that you actually have so that you can challenge them, but you're also accumulating evidence that you can challenge. You can look into this on a purely pragmatic level by recognizing when you have that judgment and replacing it, you may need to separate out the judgment that you tell yourself, like people don't like me, from the depression that comes with it.

One step at a time, construct and strengthen positive core belief. For example, I'd like to see myself as likeable, having friends, someone who people invite to things. Another thing to do is to normalize the thing that you feel criticized for. So, for example, maybe you talk to yourself. I know I certainly do.

I live alone for most of my time, so I do actually talk out loud to myself all the time. I have a funny story about this. At Christmas one year, I lived on a middle ground flat. a ground floor flat and there were people usually above me and people usually below me. One Christmas they all went away so I had the whole building to myself and I just got louder and louder and louder with everything that I was saying to myself and by the time the downstairs neighbours came back I hadn't actually clucked that they were home and I was shouting by this point.

I wasn't angry or anything I was just really exuberant with chatting to myself. You might think I'm crazy. I don't think I am. But the neighbours actually came running because they were concerned about me. Because usually I'm so quiet up there. So of course I became self conscious again and quietened down.

It was the fear of judgment from someone else really that made me quiet. But also the fear of them coming running. So left to my own devices, it felt okay to me to talk. And you might know people who would judge this and think that it's not okay. Maybe you judge me for it. But it is pretty normal, especially in lockdown and alone.

So normalise how you're feeling, what your behaviour is. I can guarantee a million other people are doing it at the same time. It's also normal to wonder if people don't like you. In fact, some people won't like you. I know I don't like everyone all the time. But it's usually because I have something I'm going through that day or in my life.

Yesterday, for example, I didn't like my cat because she vomited seven times while I was doing something else that I needed to do. It was the stress of having to be in two places at once that made me not like my beautiful little cat for a second. But before you start to worry about my cat, she's got an enormous amount of fur.

This time of year, she needs to vomit it out because she swallows it. And so she's, she's fine. There's nothing wrong with my cat. But thank you for your concern. I know there are a lot of cat lovers out there. So if you feel that someone doesn't like you, or a whole group of people don't like you, or that nobody likes you, have a think about what they might not like you for.

And see if you can get into their perspective, just as I always try and encourage you, get really curious about how you are, what's going on for you, specifically in detail with this, rather than just assuming that everybody doesn't like you. And get curious about the other person. Was it their stress level that made them not like you?

That's usually why people don't like people. There's usually some kind of level of too much work, too much stress, too much to think about, too much to do, that makes us edgy. We don't like anybody when we feel like that. This could even be valuable information for choosing who you do and don't have something in common with on any level.

You might choose eventually, if this person is always like this with you, that they're actually not the kind of person that you get on with. Maybe you don't have the same interests. So, you can treat this as valuable information. Another thing to do is to find out what you feel not good enough for. Then develop an accurate sense of your strengths and weaknesses.

What are you good at? What are you interested in? What do you actually value? What's important to you? What do you not really care whether you're good at or not? I felt criticised recently for not being easy to feed. It's true, I have a couple of intolerances and allergies, I don't like eating animals who have been battery farmed, I've reduced my comfort foods and I'm menopausal, so I sometimes get migraines.

My diet is guided by all of these things, never mind my mood. So I could have felt like I was too sensitive and awkward, which of course is something that a lot of comfort eaters feel. A lot of people feel that you have been told that you're too sensitive and too difficult and too awkward, but really that's just being human.

So what I realized, what I recognized was that the person I felt criticized By felt inadequate themselves. They just didn't trust themselves to feed me. So we're getting frustrated. It's easy to help them out when I know that this is the case. At the core of it, I value my health and the wellbeing of animals on the planet.

So this is a strength in me, not a weakness. It's something that's so important right now. I actually love the food that I eat. I know you're going to grimace when I say this, but I actually get excited about my weekly delivery of different bean sprouts or unusual vegetables and fruits. They're so juicy and delicious.

It actually feels like a little gift that I've got every Monday morning. It's a chance to be more creative, though, and a bit more open minded, which I also really appreciate. So what I'm suggesting here is that once you've worked out what's behind the critical judgment, Then you can just agree or disagree with it, and you have the opportunity to turn it into a positive.

That's a hell of a powerful shift. You know, everything in life is a thing to learn. Like exercise, learning self belief is a muscle to be toned. You're not necessarily born with self worth. Maybe stick to comparing yourself to yourself. Not to others. What did you really do? What can you do to improve? Just like the person at the Mad Sandwich at the beginning.

God, I love that name. Suggests that we can write a list of all the things that we did that we were proud of in the day. That's the list that she's talking about. This is the kind of exercise that your brain needs, that your psyche needs, to get into believing that actually there's something quite good about you rather than bad about you.

So what do you really do? What can you improve? Discover how you actually shine and what you're good at. Replace the core belief of not being good enough with you are good enough. You are worthy. And practice saying it to yourself. And practice saying something like, I think you are good enough. Change the way you talk to yourself.

Recognising that you already do that. You already talk to yourself, whether it's out loud, shouting in your flat so that the neighbours hear you, or whether it's just in your head. Most of us talk all day long to ourselves in our heads. Change the script. Talk to yourself in second person. Shelley. Do this nice thing instead of scolding yourself for not being right.

Or, Shelley, do you really want this? Have the kind of positive conversation that you would have with a child or with your best friend. But have it with yourself. This way of talking to yourself feels more like support and guidance. Another slant on this is that you can explore what you actually want to offer the world.

rather than what you think others want from you, or achievements, values instead of achievements. So do this every day. Make a note of what you do well, even if it's very slight. Maybe at the end of the day, take inventory of what you did well, what you valued, what you believed in that day, and how you did something that actually you can be proud of or just happy with.

Another thing you can try, often people will tell you to try on feeling good enough. So to take on the body posture, the persona, the feelings of feeling like a worthy special person. To act as if you are. And this is a good thing to try when you're in the right place to try it. But you can also actually try the opposite.

You can try on not being good enough. Partly to explore it, but really to jump out of this game of trying to prove yourself. To disengage from that and to try and connect perhaps instead and feel equal. To think about what's actually important to you? What do you really value? How do you bring that into your life?

How do you interact from that place and how do you communicate about it rather than chasing external validation? This is fleeting. This is something that was brought home to me when I learned a dance choreography once and was in a performance. So I learned this choreography for nine months and it really was hard.

actually broke down and cried halfway through because I found it so hard and felt like I wasn't doing very well. So there's my not good enough story. And then nine months later, I was performing in front of 300 people. And it was actually the night of my life. I was very stressed about it until I actually performed.

And then when I performed, it went so well. I had the best night I've ever had in my life. Everybody wanted to dance with me afterwards. Everybody was being nice to me. And I'd got that moment of attention and highlight and fame for 15 minutes. And it really did make me feel absolutely great. Next morning, I felt really depressed.

And so that taught me a really valuable lesson. The external validation, you know, I've been learning that for a long time. The external validation. It doesn't really last. It doesn't really make you feel good about yourself. And something that's much more sustainable than that is relationship and connection.

I am blessed with having been asked to be somebody's godmother over the lockdown isolation period. My bubble asked me to be their daughter's godmother, and I feel so lucky and privileged. I've never been more touched in my life that somebody would trust me with their daughter if God forbid something ever happened to them.

I would be the person to look after this lovely little girl, and she was the person who chose me too. So. This kind of validation of real connection with somebody who really appreciates who I really am and what I really value, this I find much more sustainable. So this is the thing that I chase now. I'm not really looking for someone to say how amazing I look or how amazing what I've achieved is.

I'm now looking for people who understand how amazing I am from the inside. And who can see that what I appreciate about myself, they also appreciate it. And I've got to say, this sustains me so much more. So that's kind of what I'm talking about with self worth. You sort of have to recognize what's important to you, how you really want to connect with the world, and what you want to bring to the world, and then how that can be reflected back to you and connected with.

Gives me so much more self worth. Obviously, this way of doing things is a bit more hard work in some ways, in totally different ways to doing a dance choreography. It's physically not as demanding, but emotionally, say it takes so much more respect and consideration, but it is so much more consistently rewarding.

Another thing that you can try is to do everything perfectly, see how that goes and what that tells you about yourself, or to do things Imperfectly, to do everything imperfectly. Then you're actually likely to start to realise that perfection is not the thing to measure yourself by. You also start to discover what it is that you actually want, rather than what you think you should want or should be.

This again is all about developing an internal reference. Another thing that you can do is you could also learn to see that the things that are facts are unfair. Sometimes your feelings do fit the facts. For example, prejudice. I was talking about society's influence on you last week and at the beginning of today.

Prejudice is something that's going to influence you wildly on your self worth, especially about being overweight. But this is unjust and simply not ethically right. It's. done through fear. There's some understanding of it. Last week, I talked about how you can understand that a little bit, but it's but it's not right.

It's not just it's not fair. It's not right. It's wrong. And so find people who have a different way of being and who can challenge their automatic traditional thoughts, people who can say nicer things. Just be around people who can reflect that inside you. According to research, perfectionists are less happy and less concerned with the meaning of life.

Good enough people are happier. Following on from last week, what I've done here is outline various ways that you can start to think about your self worth and change your mindset on the beliefs that you have about yourself. No one is great all the time. I can testify to that. My podcasts sometimes take me hours to produce because I say everything wrong and sometimes I'm done in 20 minutes.

Today it's been sort of an hour and a half, 10 minutes, so I can testify that some of these things go well and some of these things don't and that's just human nature. Sometimes we're on top form, everything comes out perfectly, beautifully, we're proud of it. Sometimes we're just not. That's the way it goes.

I know that some of my podcasts have been really interesting to me and to other people and some of them not so much. And that's just the way humanity is. I don't think we can expect to be any better than that. Normal is somewhere in the middle, and I think that's where mostly we are. Next time, I'm going to talk about changing core beliefs from the inside, and understanding your history a little bit more.

But if you want more help with how you feel about yourself, which might affect how you eat, I would really love to help you. I've got a support group coming out in August, and the next Understand Your Eating program is also coming out in August, so please come and be a part of either of those. But in the meantime, check me out on Facebook, join my group, get communicating with the other people who know what you're going through, and let's all support each other.

As ever, I would really love to hear from you and to hear your comments and to answer your questions. So please keep them coming in, I'm really enjoying all the ones that are coming in. There's more and more coming in, so please do keep that going. Everything that I share will be completely confidential, unless you've made yourself public as in Mad Sandwich.

God, I love that name. Thank you so much for listening, Mad Sandwich, and thank you for your comments. I'm only sorry that it took me so long to see them. And if you made it to the end here because you liked this podcast, can you think of someone else who might also like it? Please share, and thank you so much for listening.

I'll see you next Wednesday.