"Can I Love Myself Even with *This*?"

When you forgive, you lose both emotional and physical pounds.

The chapter below is the second in a trilogy excerpted from Tap, Taste, Heal: Use Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT) to Eat Joyfully and Love Your Body by yours truly, Marcella Friel, published by North Atlantic Books, copyright © 2019 by Marcella Friel. Reprinted by permission of North Atlantic Books.

“It’s only when we alter our eating habits out of love and respect for ourselves that lasting change has any real chance to take root in our lives.” —Katherine Woodward Thomas

“I’VE GAINED TEN pounds in the last two weeks. I’m so disappointed in myself. I should be over this by now.”

These were the words of my client Linda. They were nothing new. After listening to her bemoan her body condition, I asked, “Linda, I wonder if your true addiction is not to the food but to the disappointment? Might you be using your food behaviors to maintain your story of being disappointed in yourself?”

Linda fell silent but was open to my suggestion. I asked her to close her eyes, place a hand on her heart, take a few deep breaths, and tell me all the things she genuinely loved and appreciated about herself. She free-associated while I took notes.

I sent her my notes after our session, along with the suggestion that she audiorecord her proclamation of self-appreciation and listen to it every morning upon awakening. “This feels good,” she texted me the following day. “I really like it!”

There’s Nothing Wrong with You

If you are struggling to heal your relationship with food, it’s seductive to feel, deep down, that something is horribly wrong with you and to believe that, if you punish yourself enough by eating celery sticks instead of cookies, you’ll one day reach that ever-elusive promised land of a “perfect” diet and “perfect” body weight. When you inevitably fail to meet such tyrannical expectations, you turn the blame inward and double down on the celery sticks—at least until the next binge.

In this chapter, I want to take you beyond just losing the weight or quitting the sugar for good. Let me share with you my secret recipe for the most profound, enduring, and rewarding tool you can ever use for transforming your struggles into blessings at the deepest level of your being. Ready? Let’s begin.

What It Takes to Heal

When I was a natural-foods culinary instructor, one of my favorite classes to teach was Therapeutic Menu Planning—how to prepare health-supportive menu plans for those who suffer from cancer, diabetes, obesity, and other chronic health hindrances.

I always began the class by asking students, “What does it actually mean to heal something? Is healing a disease the same as curing it? Can someone be cured of a disease but not healed? Can someone be healed but not cured?” As we batted around our ideas, words such as wholeness and integration and alignment ended up on the whiteboard. I would then invite them to explore what’s at the root of attaining wholeness or integration or alignment. They would often look at me quizzically while pondering the possibilities.

In our take-a-pill-and-feel-better culture, curing—or symptom relief—is the apogee of recovery from illness. But while symptom relief is certainly desirable, it is not, in and of itself, the optimal outcome. What is it, then, that heals any disease or malaise at its root? Forgiveness.

For those of us who struggle with food, the quest for healing can be a maddening maze of diet plans and exercise regimens fueled by a multi-billion-dollar diet industry that wants to keep us buying the next meal-replacement products or fitness gadgetry. None of it will ever create lasting change. The key to choosing your food with self-love versus self-loathing and making lifelong friends with your body is forgiveness. Forgiveness appeases all those stress hormones we talked about a few chapters ago. It calms our state of mind, which, in turn, alleviates the triggers that cause the body to crave food and hold on to excess weight. So when you forgive, you lose both emotional and physical pounds.

A Different View of Forgiveness

Unless we have the fortitude of Mother Teresa, forgiveness for most of us is pretty tough. In one of his Sunday sermons, Pastor Rob Koke at Shoreline Christian Church in Austin, Texas, unpacked some common misbeliefs that can hamper our efforts to forgive:

“Forgiveness is not taking the blame ourselves. It’s not earned or deserved because somebody pacifies us. It is not getting even, it’s not feeling sympathy, it’s not trying to be nice. It is not becoming a weak doormat.

Forgiveness is erasing the offense, cutting off the debt. It’s to release an account that’s due; it’s to wipe the slate clean. Forgive as you have been forgiven.”1

Merriam-Webster has two simple definitions of forgive: “to cease to feel resentment,” and “to grant relief from payment.” If you contemplate these definitions in relation to each other, you might see what Pastor Rob is saying: our emotions are a form of currency.

When we hold on to a grievance, it’s like jacking up our credit cards. We’re paying the energy bill on our previous emotional expenditures in order to keep resentment, anger, and victimization alive. As that debt increases over time, we pay usurious late fees and interest rates in addictions and degenerative disease. Eventually, we default into spiritual bankruptcy as our soul calcifies into shame, bitterness, regret, and so forth.

Forgiveness, then, is bringing our emotional currency into present time. When we genuinely forgive, we release the expectation that we will feel better once we make people, places, and circumstances conform to our expectations of how they should have been or should be now. In doing so, we cash in the “you-owe-me” attitude of justice and invest in a wealthier vision of peace that acknowledges things as they are.

For forgiveness to be genuine, before we even think of forgiving another, we must first venture into our own dark side. We must find and befriend the parts of ourselves we have split off, denied, or neglected. We must call our spirit home from those we believe to be the cause of our suffering. We must unmask the monsters of our soul to discover the keys to liberation that they’ve been holding for us all along.

Ultimately, true forgiveness is tantamount to death. We must die to our old story of what happened, who hurt us, and how we are flawed. We are then reborn in the light of our true nature. This is why forgiveness is so hard. It’s not that we don’t want to forgive; it’s that we can’t bear the brilliance of who we become once we do.

Having a hard time forgiving yourself or others? Become a paid subscriber to access the print and audio EFT Tapping guides that correspond to this chapter.

Release the Banana

The Second Noble Truth of Buddhism states that we suffer because we hold on. Like the classic story of the monkey that would rather die than let go of the banana in the box-trap, we perversely find it easier to hold on to toxic resentments than to release and forgive.

This is not our fault. As medical intuitive Caroline Myss points out, we, as a culture, have become addicted to the eye-for-an-eye mentality. If someone harms us, we believe resolution will come when the perpetrators have paid the penalty for their actions. Justice, however, is only a partial solution. Justice alone does not give us peace and often leaves us still smoldering even after the price has been paid.

For women, forgiveness is especially problematic, as we are conditioned to be peacemakers and pressured to forgive quickly in the interest of being “nice.” We also bear the burden of social conditioning to be sweet, pretty, and helpful to others. We are told to never look bad, smell bad, raise our voices, get in the way, or—heaven forbid—upset anyone.

As a result, we have endured and internalized the neuroses of our ancestors and the degradation of our culture. We felt our mother’s projected shame when she put us on a diet at age eight and obsessed over every detail of our appearance. We absorbed Dad’s misogyny in the salacious remarks he made about female bodies, including our own. We cringed at the violence of skinny-girl images paraded before us, knowing that our big-boned frame could never shrink down to that impossible size. And we reveled in the desperate pleasure of chips, cookies, chocolate, ice cream—our best and only friends when all else failed.

Having few or no reference points outside that insanity, we drove the madness inward and made it about us. We confused our food struggle with our value as a human being. From that confusion, we forged a fragmented identity of ourselves as unworthy, flawed, and condemned.

Forgiveness, then, begins with detaching ourselves first from our own insanity and then from the madness of those around us. As we meet and embrace those un-sweet and un-pretty parts of ourselves and release the shame that lurks in our shadows, we realize that Mother’s shaming was more about her insecurity than our appearance. We get that Dad would have made those rude remarks about any young woman, and it had nothing to do with us. We recognize that our true beauty emanates naturally from the sparkle of our self-esteem and has nothing to do with our dress size.

What Does It Take to Forgive?

I hope you’re getting the picture that, more than a quick “I’m sorry” or “It’s okay,” true forgiveness is a journey of the soul. Every genuine spiritual tradition has powerful teachings for cultivating forgiveness. If you belong to such a tradition, I invite you to refresh your connection to those practices, if it’s gotten rusty. You can also borrow some ingredients from Chef Marcella’s forgiveness pantry and add them to your own mix:

1. Start where you are. Don’t try to be a forgiveness superhero right out of the gate. The best starting point is to touch and be lovingly patient with those shadow parts of yourself that have kept you stuck in your pain. Forgiveness comes in its own time and will most likely come sooner if you accept yourself where you are.

2. Don’t rush or figure out forgiveness. Forgiveness is a spiritual process that doesn’t answer to logic. When we make a genuine decision to forgive, our inner and outer worlds shape-shift around our intention. We must set our thinking aside to allow the path to unfold in its own perfect way.

3. Allow another to witness your pain. However wise we are spiritually, we cannot heal our pain without support from others. Even if we can identify the origins of our struggles with food, we can’t liberate ourselves using the brain that got us into our predicament to begin with. When you are ready, disclose your wounds to someone you can trust. Ideally, this person has overcome their own ordeals and can provide guidance, tools, and emotional support that will catapult your forgiveness forward.

4. Let it all out. Don’t be spiritually hygienic while unpacking your pain. The more rage, pettiness, ugliness, and nastiness you can disgorge, the faster the healing.

5. Know that forgiveness takes many forms. You might forgive someone and never want to talk to them again. You might need to set new terms for the relationship. It’s okay to set whatever boundaries you need for your healing. True forgiveness requires a heroic and willing heart. It doesn’t always look nice-nice.

Which Practices Support Forgiveness?

If you’re ready for some nuts-and-bolts tools to help you forgive, here are a few practices that I have collaged together from various spiritual traditions. You can do any one of these or all three in succession. You can do these alone or with a witness. (If you do them alone, I suggest you “bookend” them with someone: contact that person beforehand and describe what you intend to do; then contact them again afterward to recount the experience.)

The Resentment Buster

This is a powerful practice if rage, righteous anger, and other strong emotions hamper your ability to forgive. Write a letter to the person you’re trying to forgive, whether yourself or someone else, venting all your grievances and negativity. Don’t make sense, don’t be spiritual, and definitely don’t be nice. This letter is for your eyes only. (If your emotions are particularly raw, use the Tapping guide at the end of this chapter to process them more quickly.)

When you feel complete, imagine yourself as that person and write a letter from them back to you. Allow them to express all their raw emotions and judgments about you. Again, no nice-nice. This is an all-out smackdown.

Continue writing back and forth in this way until the negativity is exhausted on both sides. This could take hours, days, or weeks. Give yourself as much time as you need without procrastinating.

When the negativity feels like it’s been discharged on both sides, write a letter of appreciation from you to that person. Express whatever goodwill and kind regards that you can. Write a letter from that person back to you expressing those same feelings. Keep writing back and forth until the process feels complete. Read them aloud to yourself (or to someone else, if that feels okay); then burn or compost the letters.

The Decision Ritual

You’ll need a candle, a journal, and, if you have one, a photograph of the person you want to forgive. You’ll also need a private space, free from interruption. Plan to spend at least thirty minutes performing this ritual.

Light your candle. Begin by sitting in meditation with your eyes closed and your hands on your heart, connecting to your heartbeat. If your attention wanders, bring it back to that beating heart. Sit this way until you feel more settled in your awareness.

If you have a photo of the person, allow yourself to gaze at it, without thinking of anything in particular. Notice the details of the photo, especially the look on that person’s face and their body posture. When you’re ready, spend a few minutes journaling about why you want to forgive this person. If it feels hard to forgive, write about that.

When your writing is complete, say to the photo, “[Name], I now forgive you.”

Repeat this aloud until you feel complete. Spend a few moments being present to the thoughts and feelings that arise. If they’re particularly strong, use the Tapping guide at the end of this chapter to move the energy through.

The Fourteen-Day Prayer

In the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous, a recovering drunk shares pearls of wisdom on the power of this practice:

If you have a resentment you want to be free of, if you will pray for the person or the thing that you resent, you will be free. If you will ask in prayer for everything you want for yourself to be given to them, you will be free. Ask for their health, their prosperity, their happiness, and you will be free. Even when you don’t really want it for them, and your prayers are only words and you don’t mean it, go ahead and do it anyway. Do it every day for two weeks, and you will find you have come to mean it and to want it for them, and you will realize that where you used to feel bitterness and resentment and hatred, you now feel compassion and love.3

Every day, for fourteen days, pray—in whatever way prayer shows up for you—for the person you’d like to forgive. Begin by reflecting on what you seek to gain from forgiving that person (peace, joy, relief, freedom). Arouse those feelings in your heart. You might want to say aloud to yourself, “May I, [your name], be happy. May I be well. May I be joyful. May I be free.” Give those feelings to yourself as best you can. Then mentally give those feelings away to the other person, saying, “[name], may you be happy. May you be peaceful. May you be joyful. May you be free.” (If you like, you can extend it out to everyone: “May all beings be happy …” and so on.)

If the object of your forgiveness is still alive, don’t be surprised if something in the relationship profoundly shifts as a result of this practice. That person might write an actual letter to you, offer a heartfelt apology, or just start being a kinder person. If you hold the view that, on the quantum level, we are all truly one, you must likewise hold space for the potential impact your act of forgiveness can have on others.

The Most Abiding Forgiveness

My client Tammy was making terrific progress with her food but was still seized with anxiety whenever she had lunch with her girlfriends. While the ladies blithely ordered their fare, Tammy obsessed over the menu, pitting what she wanted against what she “should” have.

When we looked into the energetic roots of this struggle, Tammy saw herself as a teenage mom, watching her girlfriends having fun while she was swamped with a low-functioning husband and two young daughters. Tammy remembered glumly looking on at her high-school graduation while her classmates received awards and tossed their caps in the air.

I guided Tammy through a Tapping meditation in which she journeyed back in time to soothe and reassure her younger self, then reenvisioned the graduation experience so that she walked her inner teenager onto the stage and awarded her—to a standing ovation—a certificate of thanks for blessing the planet with two beautiful children. Self-forgiveness flooded through Tammy as she imagined this new scenario. Weeks later she excitedly reported, “I eat whatever I want now. And by the way, I’ve lost fifteen pounds! It’s slow, it’s nothing dramatic, and that’s just fine with me.”

While we might well have people and circumstances in our lives that have indeed harmed us, our first, last, and most abiding forgiveness is to ourselves. Freeing ourselves from our compulsive food behaviors, then, is not about white-knuckling our way through punitive abstinence, eating lettuce when we really want to face-plant in an ice-cream sundae. It’s about releasing everything we have made those behaviors mean about us. It’s not about going on the next Grapefruit Diet but rather about letting go of being someone who needs to diet to begin with. Forgiveness entails saying these truths to ourselves and having them said to us over and over, until they take root in our cell tissue:

❧“Your struggles with food are not your fault. They have been your best way of loving yourself in difficult circumstances.”

❧“You are not your traumas.”

❧“There is nothing wrong with you or bad about you. You are an amazing being, exactly as you are.”

These truths are the stepping stones by which the broken fragments of our soul come tiptoeing home to stay. We re-collect ourselves, re-member ourselves, and, in so doing, realize in our very core that, ultimately, nothing was ever out of place. We see with bird’s-eye-view clarity that there never was, fundamentally, a problem. There have just been things in the way that are moved out of the way as we choose to allow them to be.

As that realization washes away whatever vestiges of shame we had been harboring, our addiction, once our worst enemy, becomes the teacher that shows us the goodness of our heart that was never tarnished to begin with. The healing we have been seeking all these years flows through us like a mighty river that never runs dry.

Does this mean you miraculously live happily ever after? Well, no. It’s more that, when faced with your old patterns, you can ask yourself the question my late friend Ellen asked herself at each stage of her cancer journey:

“Can I love myself, even with this?”