Q&A 41 – Why is it good news when we backslide?

What should we do when an unwanted habit that has been getting better suddenly rears its head again? Contrary to what we might believe, when this occurs it’s good news. It means there’s more for us to see about our innate well-being. It’s also a very natural part of the learning and growing process.You can listen above, on your favorite podcast app, or watch on YouTube. Notes, links, resources and a full transcript are below. Show Notes* How there’s always forward momentum with our growth and healing, even when it doesn’t feel like it * How the ‘back of the spiral’ is where change and learning occur * What to do when we’re at the back of the spiral * How resisting what we’re feeling can backfire * What we’re looking for when we’re in the back of the spiral * How our unwanted habits like overeating always alert us to busy insecure thinkingResources mentioned in this episode* Freedom From Overeating online courseTranscript of episodeHello, explorers, and welcome to Q&A episode 41 of Unbroken. I’m your host, Alexandra Amor.I’m here today with the question, why is it good news when we backslide?By backslide I mean when we feel like we were making progress, and maybe our unwanted habit was a little bit less pressing than it used to be, or where, in the case of overeating, we’re eating a little bit better than we were and we feel like we’ve been making a little bit of progress. And then what happens when things start to feel like we’re slipping backwards, we’re not where we were a few days or a few weeks ago. Things seem to be getting worse instead of better, or worse than they were anyway, when we had improved. So that’s what I mean by backslide.Today’s episode might be a little bit longer than these episodes typically are because I want to delve into two separate things in order to explore this. And then it’s also going to be a little more personal than the episodes usually are, because this is something that I’m encountering right at this moment. So let’s get into it.The first thing I want to talk about is the way that change happens, and the way that we evolve and grow.When we have a situation like the one I just described, where we feel like we were maybe doing better, a habit was beginning to resolve itself and then it isn’t anymore, it isn’t getting better, it feels like it’s getting worse, or we’ve slid back a little bit – we have that expression, two steps forward one step back – it can feel like that. It can feel like we’re going backwards. Or maybe we’re going in a circle, we’ve circled back around to a place that we were before.And it can feel like the progress that we made, that maybe we’ve negated that somehow, or that it’s slipped out of our grasp, that it’s gone away. And we can get down on ourselves about that, of course. So the first thing I want to explain is how it seems to me that growth and healing – and this has definitely been my experience – are more like a corkscrew shape.For those of you on YouTube, I’m holding up a corkscrew. So a corkscrew, of course has this spiraling motion, as you can see, and this is a really great metaphor for learning and growth and change. And resolving something like an overeating habit. Because no matter what’s going on, even if we feel like we made some progress and now we’ve fallen back, we’re still moving forward. And that’s why the corkscrew shape is such a helpful metaphor, because if you lay it on its side, and it’s making that motion,