If you wrote a New Year’s Day letter to yourself (remember Season’s Greetings: A Letter to You?) here’s a friendly reminder to open it.
Enjoy reading your letter – I hope it brings you comfort, insight and encouragement.
If you haven’t written your letter yet, it’s not too late. Why not take some time to write one now? If you’ve immediately dismissed this suggestion, maybe ask yourself why. What’s holding you back?
You’ll notice things are a little different on the blog this month. The usual features are being replaced with a series of festive-themed posts to help you through the holiday season.
And before the festivities really begin to ramp up, why not stop and take a breather?
Think about how the past 12 months have been for you and consider what you want next year.
It’s so easy to beat yourself up when you binge eat. Especially if you begin to suffer health complications as a result of increased weight.
“It’s my fault”, you say. “I’ve brought this on myself”.
Except you haven’t.
“One way to encourage clients to accept themselves is to remind them that it is human to err and make mistakes. This will enable them to see themselves as human and learn to replace self-judgement with humility and laughter, rather than being crippled by shame. When clients are able to laugh rather than become embarrassed by awkward situations, they are able to redefine their experience and maintain social bonds. In this way, good-natured humour and laughter has a positive effect in disrupting the cycle of shame (Scheff 1990). Moreover, shared laughter is quintessentially human and a powerful tool for connecting to others.”
Christiane Sanderson, “Counselling Skills for Working with Shame”
Continue reading “Expert Insight: Seeing the Funny Side of Our Mistakes”
I saw a quote the other day that stopped me in my tracks:
“When you keep criticising your kids, they don’t stop loving you, they stop loving themselves”.
Its stark simplicity hit me hard.
It’s absolutely true. If children are criticised relentlessly, they don’t start hating their parents, they start hating themselves.
Self-trust. Easy peasy lemon squeezy, right?
Actually, if you’ve experienced a lifetime of self-doubt, it’s more like difficult difficult lemon difficult.
It can be hard to connect to that quiet, assured, trustworthy voice within you.
But it’s there.
You may struggle to hear it, but it’s there.
Julie de Rohan 