I have had black and white thinking (all or nothing) my entire life and I come from a long history of black and white thinkers (alcoholics most). But in the thirty years I have been in recovery from alcoholism /drug addiction I have also worked hard to straighten out my thinking.
Because the drinking is just a symptom of how messed up my thinking can get! I tend to react strongly to what normal people would think are small issues. I tend to think I am unique (hence NO.1). I also tend to find someone /something I love, be it an author, a movie, a dessert and go whole hog crazy over it! I have been known to find a sudden fancy for a food (like quesadillas) and want to have it every night for weeks. (Well, maybe not EVERY night but at least every Friday night!) Then I get tired of it and go on to something else. Thank God my husband is a patient man who loves me dearly.
When I do this with people, I am so thrilled by what they have to say, or write or create that I begin to think in a very deluded way that they are super human, perfect, have it all together. And I don’t even realize I am doing it!
Because I know TRULY that no human being is perfect. But sometimes if someone writes a book I really relate to strongly, I want to think they have all the answers.
I recently had this experience with an author I have liked for years. Geneen Roth has written many books about compulsive eating (all of which I own) and how to heal yourself and be able to eat normally. She currently has a new book out and I was reading her blog. Now I have to say, Geneen has always been incredibly real, open and honest about herself and her humanness. It was ME who put her on some kind of pedestal. When she admitted in an article for Salon and the Huffington Post that she lost her life savings to Bernie Madoff, I felt sorry for her. Then she said she had never paid off her house because in
her own words: “Why didn’t I pay my mortgage off? And if I don’t engage in blame, I see the answer clearly: because I believed in something else more. I believed in accumulating. And when you believe in accumulating, you see what you don’t have, not what you do. You lose touch with what you value more than money.”
I have to admit, I felt disappointed. I felt disappointed in someone I have never met because I had told myself that Geneen knew it all. And she doesn’t. She is human. I am human. We all are. In fact, she was extremely honest and humble, writing about the fact that she hadn’t paid off her mortgage.
Yes, we can learn from mistakes and figure out what’s really important in life but most of the time it takes our entire life to do it. Sometimes I know more and have more life experience than the person whose book I am reading! I may not know everything. But I do know a lot and I don’t always give myself credit for that. I am not saying this to put Geneen or any other author down. I am saying I don’t appreciate my own knowledge and life experiences enough.
And I am sure that is true of many of us. Because otherwise there wouldn’t be so many GURUS running around! Food, diet, exercise, life coach gurus etc who tell all of us so much stuff we already know!!! If we would just trust our guts and listen to our intuition! But we have been taught in our society not to trust our intuition. Maybe Geneen even had a little voice in her gut telling her to pay off her house!
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