rheanna

ced,

You're welcome!

After writing the post above, it started a chain of thought in me. I wondered why I felt compelled to respond to you. I consider myself not so much over-weight, but under-exercised. But your description of your family rang a lot of bells in my head.

In fact after I wrote I could even hear echos of my father telling me that unless I was going to do something perfectly, there was no point in wasting my time on it. I realize that I apply this to exercise, along with lots of other things in my life that I would love to dabble in. Basically, because of this instruction that took hold in my brain before I reached the age of reason, my brain keeps telling me the same thing even though I'm just shy of 59 years old now. So I avoid doing things that would be fun (get some exercise, paint, sew, knit, etc) because those things would go against the messages that are deep within me. I can't speak for others, but this is my "fear of success" that others have alluded to -- "success" means being an Olympic athlete, or a Rembrandt painter, or a famous designer of clothes for the wealthy, or a <insert world-class knitting icon here>. Dabbling for fun just isn't allowed.

On the other hand, there is something wonderfully freeing about seeing this in print. I have made a great amount of change in my life in counter-acting some of the other programming from my childhood. By spelling out this particular programming line, I have the opportunity to look at it and find some other programming message to put into its place. "Dabbling is also success".

In regards to exercise, which is more my problem than truly overeating, I start to think of getting up and going for a walk or putting one of my many (unused) exercise DVDs into the player, or even laying on the bed and doing a few crunches -- and then my brain races ahead and I think about how I should be jogging instead of walking but I'm too out of condition for that so what's the point -- and I think about how I get so tired from the exercise tapes and I don't want to over-exert myself so I'll just sit here at the computer and tense up my muscles instead of moving them -- and so because I can't be "perfect" at my exercise I don't do aything at all.

So, I am going to try to replace my programming line of having to do things "perfectly" with "movement of any sort is success!".

You are also working with programming that got into your brain before you reached the age of reason. This is really hard to re-train, because it becomes an integral part of who you are and is largely unconscious. But it can be done, once you become conscious of it. It just takes a lot of repetition.

Again, I'm proud of you. You may not know yet just how to make changes in your life. But you have done two things -- you have made some conscious connections with your childhood programming, and you have made the attempt to reach out for help -- which in my experience really means asking other people for another way of looking at things when I've become stuck in ways that aren't helping any more. Thank you for posting on this topic!

--Rheanna