Earlier this week, I talked about my a ha moments in my journey of choosing health. A number of people had very interesting comments, and a discussion about the pros and cons of “personal responsibility” led me to consider a different concept: one of personal power.

Here’s the difference I see:

personal responsibility: Accepting responsibility for one’s own decisions (from M. Scott Peck).

personal power: Living our lives in a way that makes us feel confident. Here’s a definition I found that I really like (emphasis mine):

Personal power is not how physically strong we feel, but the use of our knowledge, thoughts and feelings to act in a manner to get our own needs met in a positive way. A person’s self-esteem and self-concept are directly related to whether one gets their needs met in a positive way or negative way. – Stephen Bavolek, The Nurturing Family

I love this definition! It so fits with the Abe Lincoln “when I do good, I feel good” philosophy. For me, choosing healthy foods has led to a chain of events that has means I’m no longer getting my needs met (sorta) by stuffing down emotions with food and drink.

I’ve read before that one of the first things they do with anorexics when they get them into treatment is get food into them. The idea is that there is no point in doing the psychological work while the person is light-headed, weak, etc., due to lack of nutrition.

Well, maybe that works too for people who eat a lot of food that is lacking in essential nutrients. I spent decades thinking that I needed to fix what was wrong with me psychologically, but it seems that actually eating nutritious food has given me a much stronger base for dealing with emotional overeating than I ever thought possible.

I mean, a year ago or so, I couldn’t have imagined sitting down to a dinner of primarily vegetables. Now, I can’t get enough! (And no, I’m not a candidate for orthorexia nervosa. )

I recently picked up Mark Epstein’s Open to Desire. Epstein is a psychiatrist who is interested in applying Buddhist meditation for psychotherapeutic purposes. In this book, he argues against the common Buddhist view that “desire” is the root of all suffering. Instead, he argues that the real problem is “craving,” and contrasts the difference between holding a coin with the palm open and up (desire) and holding a coin in your tightly closed fist (craving).

Anyways, I only dabble in Buddhism, and a lot of this book was a bit more esoteric than I was ready for. However, there were some incredible passages in the book that I really thought were relevant to the idea of personal power and overeating. Or at least they really resonated with me.

Here’s one:

Just as the lotus grows out of the muck of the pond without having to send down roots into the earth, so does nirvana grow from the muck of the mind without our having to dig down to the roots of our neuroses. Enlightenment, like the lotus, blooms spontaneously if conditions are right.

I’ll have to save my thoughts on psychotherapy for another post. But I’m intrigued by this idea (which is also described in this book) that a paradigm change can occur sometimes if “the conditions are right” … without years and years of working on oneself.

And then there’s this interesting snippet:

Cut off from themselves because of the traumas that unfold in their early lives, they learn to put on a mask in order to cope with the demands of their worlds. They do this to survive, but lose touch with the vast, vulnerable potential that was their birthright. … [The patient] did not know that she was cut off from herself, she just knew that she did not feel good. She wanted to feel better and turned to whatever she could think of: food, relationships or therapy. … In order to feel better, she had to learn how to go within.

This concept of “going within” reminds me a lot of what I figured out last May, after I got back from my conference. Before that, I used the conference as an external motivation (must lose some weight so I can be mobile). Afterwards, I knew I couldn’t just replace this with another external object; I needed something really long lasting. And for me, figuring out that I had considerable control over how I felt was amazing. Thank you Abe Lincoln!

Here’s another interesting passage:

By voluntarily forsaking compulsive patterns of thought and behavior, where there are ongoing but futile attempts to get unmet needs satisfied, it is possible to open up other pathways that prove more fulfilling.

Boy, “ongoing by futile” describes pretty much my life since I gained all the weight back, which was shortly after my mother died in 1994. Yes, I started this off as natural grieving, but it morphed into a something I just couldn’t let go of: I was too mad at the world for depriving me of the mother’s love I desired, and by god, I was going to throw my little tantrum until the world set things right.

Who knew it would turn out to be like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz? I had the power all along. I just couldn’t see it.

But here’s one that I really liked re the concept of personal power (emphasis mine):

Freud’s perennial question, “What does woman want?” was not pharsed correctly … The question is not what do they want, but do they want, at all. Do they have their own desire? Or perhaps the question might be more correctly stated: Can women be their desire? The challenge for women … is to move from being just an object of desire to becoming a subject: she who desires.

For me, being an object of desire is equivalent to losing weight so that someone else thinks you’re okay. That’s not a secure place to be! Being a subject of desire is to be in control, to act in a way that increases your own personal power and gives you the confidence to, as the definition above says, get needs met in a positive way.

Here’s to personal power!