I know there are going to be some days where you absolutely don’t want to do what you know you “should” be doing.

I know what it’s like to wake up in the morning and not want to “do” life. To not want to engage or participate in anything at all, and just to disappear… to pull the covers over your head and to just say FUCK IT ALL.

I have to say that this intense depression is something that has plagued me for many years. The not wanting to do anything. No motivation. No drive to get anything done. To just sit in the place that I was in, because it felt like there was no escape.

Truth be told, sometimes I still feel like this. Sometimes I wake up in the mornings, and I truly do not have a desire to do anything. I don’t want to show up, I don’t want to take on the burdens of life and responsibilities that I know are waiting for me.

The thing is when you are conscious of these things, I think that it is actually more difficult to deal with them— because you aren’t actively numbing out. When I was using the eating disorder and mass amounts of drugs and alcohol, it was very easy to just numb out and not deal with anything.

But now? Now I don’t use any of those things. I deal with everything HEAD ON.

It is an entirely different way to approach life. I had to work for many years to get to a place where I can be experiencing the mass amounts of emotional turmoil and processing and STILL SHOW UP FOR LIFE.

In fact this has probably been one of my strongest qualities and something I’ve also judged as a weakness or liability but damn I’ve gotten over that and I want to show you how to do that as well. Let me explain…

Us women with eating disorders are INCREDIBLY sensitive beings. We feel emotions SO DEEPLY. SO DEEPLY in fact that it can actually hamper our ability to function in life. The feelings and emotions we experience can literally be debilitating and paralyzing. We feel SO MUCH.

It makes sense then that your dysfunctional patterns and addictions came in at a time in your life when you literally COULDN’T DEAL with everything that was happening to you. It was literally TOO MUCH for you to handle. Whether you consciously realize it or not, there was too much STRESS, too much EMOTIONAL INTENSITY, and you got overwhelmed with the magnitude of it all.

You might have been traumatized sexually or physically on one extreme, or you may just have been a super sensitive emotional child and didn’t deal with change or life well. Either way, there is nothing wrong with how or why you developed the eating disorder. Because underneath it all, we are all incredibly emotional beings. And society has told us and conditioned us to believe that there is something wrong with this and that we need to be medicated and fixed and we need to change ourselves in order to change how we feel.

But the truth is that there is nothing wrong with you. There is nothing wrong with being an emotional creature, and in fact this is something that I had to accept many years ago which in that ACCEPTANCE has come great FREEDOM.

You see, I actively understand that my emotions are important to me. I don’t ignore them, I don’t stuff them down, I don’t distract myself from feeling them.

I allow them to come up. I allow myself to feel them. I make friends with them, observe them and then let them go.

I don’t believe that emotions are a bad thing— and this is one thing that I see SO MANY women struggling with, especially recently in my coaching practice and in the Recovery Soul Tribe. Why is it that we think that having emotions is a bad thing or there is something we need to do to change them?

I honestly feel like this is such common knowledge to me that I sometimes think its too simple when I tell women that its okay to feel… but seriously this is something that so many women beat themselves up and criticize themselves for… isolating themselves and punishing themselves for just being who they are and feeling what they feel especially when it is super negative and uncomfortable.

I just know the way it works and feel confident in the system that I use for myself, and can’t really understand how other people don’t understand it too!! Which is probably why I need to write this to communicate to you the way in which I operate so that you too can utilize this mindset and apply it so that you can overcome this block in your life and go on to fully break free from the eating disorder and create a life you love. This is a part of the journey on how you get there.

And also just let me just address those of who you are aware that you need to do emotional work but who don’t feel connected to your emotions… Do you feel like instead of feeling everything so much that you spend most of your time in your head? Overanalyzing and scrutinizing every little fucking detail inside your head? Especially when it comes to calories, food, obsessing over every little bite of food that you put into your body, workouts that you do, every little comment that you hear people make you repeat, your obsess, you think about what everyone else is thinking about? I’m talking to you too, you know.

You see, what I’ve found is that the women who tend to find themselves up in their heads and in their masculine energy much of the time with having to have things be logical, rational and make sense out of everything— you TOO are an emotional creature that has largely been cut off from this part of your being. You probably feel terrified to even go there, because of the magnitude of emotions that you haven’t allowed yourself to feel.

Believe me— they are there. They are there waiting to be expressed! And you too can benefit from connecting to these deeper parts of you and allowing yourself to feel what you haven’t felt in years or even DECADES. I’ve worked with so many women who don’t even realize they have underlying depression or emotional issues until they really start eliminating eating disorder behaviors— for example they start eating again regularly or stop binging and purging and quite frankly don’t like what they find. They find that there are some deep emotional wounds and traumas that they have been avoiding and denying that has caused them to become completely disconnected from their bodies and live entirely up inside their heads.

The good news is that it is only a negative experience in the beginning. That it DOES get better, but it does seem to get worse before it gets better, which is a truth that I think many women need to accept and just fucking forge on in recovery anyways, knowing that THIS TOO SHALL PASS.

Anyways, if you resonate with this, you are also a highly sensitive and emotional being, so much so that you’ve developed very advanced ways of being to completely cut yourself off from this essential part of your being, your soul! Which is most likely why you feel unfulfilled, unsatisfied and completely shut down to the heights of joy, love, expression, creativity and purpose in your life.

This is such an important point to hammer home to you!! That the only way we are to experience the joys of life, the satisfaction of healthy and loving relationships, getting high on life itself, and experiencing true joy, happiness and fulfillment, is by allowing ourselves to go through the depths of our sadness, our anger, our hurts, our guilt, shame, anxiety and depression.

There is no other way! We must allow ourselves to bring up everything that is blocking us from experiencing true joy and fulfilling our true potential in this life! And the only way to get there is THROUGH.

And of course there are shortcuts… for example I am certified and trained in a technique called Mental and Emotional Release technique which can certainly speed up this process. I take my private clients through a Breakthrough Session process that allows them to release the root cause of their emotional traumas and limiting beliefs very quickly, easily and permanently.

However, what I find that even with processes that help us to release our emotions, that an important factor to consider and something that can influence the efficacy of such techniques— is the RELATIONSHIP with EMOTIONS in general.

WE NEED TO UNDERSTAND that emotions are OKAY TO FEEL! There is nothing wrong with them!! Even where I’m at, and how far along I’ve come in this journey, with how many tens of thousands of dollars I’ve spent investing in my personal development and own release work, I STILL have stuff come up for me.

The difference is, that I have a wonderful relationship with my emotional body. I understand that negative emotions are temporary when they come up. They also are here to teach me something. All of our emotions contain lessons that we can ONLY receive once we’ve let them go. Sometimes we have to learn the lesson in order to release them. And sometimes there are also going to be times when we have NO IDEA WHY we are feeling the way we do. ALSO OKAY. You might find out later, or you might now. If you are to develop emotionally, you MUST BE OKAY with not knowing. You can’t always try to figure them out, or you’ll be trying to figure them out forever and you’ll never move forward!

The trick is to live in the question— to allow, to surrender, to accept and to BE with what is. Once you are able to do these things, then the emotions WILL inevitably release. They will pass and you will be wiser, stronger and more aware when they do. But you have to be willing to go through the shit storm to receive the rainbows and butterflies on the other side!!

The entire point of what I’m sharing with you today is to let you know that you will always have emotions and to NOT LET THEM STOP YOU. Especially once you are in recovery, you are going to feel EVEN MORE. You thought you were emotional before? Get ready…and honestly it’s a good thing, to become tuned into your emotional side is to develop a strong and loving best friend relationship with yourself. To know that NO MATTER WHAT you go through, that you commit to being there to SUPPORT yourself through it.

It’s a false belief to think that you will get through recovery and everything will become easy. That you won’t feel sad, you won’t feel unmotivated or depressed or angry or hurt or guilty or ashamed. Fuck no, and if you believe that these things will go away for good you need a wake up call. The difference in recovery is that we ADDRESS these things with LOVE, and we DON’T LET THEM STOP US.

We look at them with curiosity, with detachment, and with observation. We don’t let them determine our life. We don’t feel at whim of our emotions anymore. We don’t let them isolate us. We don’t let them disconnect us from our relationships, rather the opposite. When you can learn to accept ALL of your emotions, you can take CHARGE of your life. You can allow them to help you GROW in your relationships, to DEEPEN your LOVE for yourself and for life.

Because the truth is that we are incredibly sensitive and in my coaching programs we work on developing a strong relationship with self so that you can better understand your connection (or repulsion) to feeling your feelings. We work on loving yourself through them and processing through them in a way that does NOT paralyze or affect your ability to function in your real life.

Personally I have always been fascinated with emotions, my inability to control them as a child, teen and early adult, and my inclination to using behaviors and substances to amplify or numb certain emotions. It has been incredibly sobering and truth-revealing to learn over the last 10 years how to just sit with myself and my emotions without those dysfunctional coping tools. Of course it’s not perfect, and I obviously have my stuff that I go through that affects me more profoundly at times, or when I react out of fear or anger, but most of the time I am VERY aware and conscious of how I am feeling and my relationship to it and can communicate it in a way that is helpful, loving and productive.

Emotions are simply energy— energy in MOTION— get it? E- MOTION. When we don’t allow ourselves to feel them, they get trapped inside our neurology, inside our bodies and become stored as BAGGAGE. This emotional baggage is what we carry with us as wounds and blocks and also has us repeating our same negative patterns over and over and over again.

For example, have you ever felt like you break up with one partner and then get into another relationship that is exactly the same, just with a different person? Or you’ve tried hundreds of diets or workout plans but always end up at the same spot? Or move all over the place but you always end up in a similar situation? This is because of the baggage you carry, and once you go through the release work and emotional processing of that baggage, then you are able to elevate and transcend your old patterns of being.

Emotional baggage is what holds us back and weighs us down, and feeling our emotions and allowing ourselves to go through them is crucial to not repeating the same patterns over and over again! Which is why we do this work in eating disorder recovery. Emotions — even the negative ones— are usually here to serve a purpose. We have to be able to see that there is benefit in going through them and letting them go, as this is the only way to move forward in life and develop a level of emotional intelligence.

So today beautiful soul, what is it that you are holding inside that you are ready to let go of? What is it that you are judging yourself or criticizing yourself for feeling?

Know that it is absolutely normal and OKAY for you to feel these things. Allow yourself to go into it, to feel it, to process through it in your own way. Journal on what is coming up, meditate on it, talk to support people or loved ones about it, or enlist the help of a coach like myself to help you move through the emotions easily and effortlessly. You are too important to NOT learn these skills.

Whatever you are feeling today is OKAY!

You are ENOUGH, even if you are feeling down.

You are ENOUGH, even if you are feeling sad, negative, overwhelmed or incredibly guilty today.

This is the process of recovery. By becoming aware of what we are feeling, welcoming it in, and by being with it in LOVE and curiosity. When you are aware and don’t let yourself be identified by your emotions, knowing that they do not DEFINE YOU, you will move through them faster than you even know.

And most importantly, do not let them stop you. One of the most important things in recovery is to know that the emotions will come up and to plan accordingly. This is why having daily commitments and non-negotiables is super important. So that NO MATTER HOW YOU FEEL, you still take action towards your dreams.

You CAN do this beautiful soul.

I believe in you.

You are SO worthy and deserving.

Full recovery is possible.

You DESERVE to break FREE and create a life you LOVE!!!

And I’m here to show you the way.

Keep up the amazing work on yourself beautiful soul!!!

And for the love of all things— PLEASE ALLOW YOURSELF TO FEEL TODAY and to BE OKAY WITH IT!!!

In light + love,

Lauren Love