(cue sound effects:  eee…ee..eee…ee… a squeaky wheel)

I Can’t Help It!!!  I Have To Do That.  I Did It Again!  I Can’t Live Without That.

1. Consciously admit what is bad for you or bad for your future: Monthly binge on chocolate chip cookies to point of illness.
2. Decide to take a different action for a better future: Stop binging on cookies.  Do something else with this time.
3. Binge on chocolate chip cookies. Feel like a failure for not maintaining decision to not binge on chocolate chip cookies.
4. Make a new plan with more specific aversion techniques so as to succeed next month: Binge on cookies; feel like a helpless failure and guilty for not following through with plan.
5. Give up on better future: Give into binging.  Live with feeling of failure. Binge on cookies.  Feeling powerless.  No guilt because I’ve decided: I can’t help it.

About 25 years ago, I realized I had a self-destructive habit of binging on chocolate chip cookies once a month.  I recognized it was self-destructive because I would bake cookies and eat more than a dozen until I was sick and in pain.  I followed the above plan month after month for more than a decade with continued frustration.  I call it a ‘gerbil wheel’ because I went around and around with my inner conflict and my outer display for this nagging monthly dependence on chocolate chip cookies.

My sister, Dr. Annette Cargioli, DC, helped me make the first step in breaking this awful cycle of dependence while she was pioneering EPTworks.  After one 45 minute session, I didn’t binge or have the need to binge for 10 months!  It was freeing and odd at the same time.  I was waiting for the powerless need to drive me to the binge cycle and it didn’t come.  Then after 10 months it did come back.  I called her, and told her the magic stopped and I had a binge.  She explained there are triggers and aspects of this cycle.  The great news was we had effectively stopped the cycle once so we could probably keep interrupting the behavior with continued work.  She was right.  It was a process of a few more years of work with paying attention to what set me off or triggered me into the binge behavior.  I can say that I’m binge-free now, and much happier too. 

I say Annette saved my life because the mental and physical toll of the behavior was making my future good health and peace unattainable.

 

by Guest Blogger: Sherry Hamilton