Cru’s Letter

A few weeks ago, I had a call with a 1:1 client of mine who has struggled with a sugar addiction for many years (we’ll call her Alexa for the sake of the newsletter). By that point, we had spent weeks tinkering with her internal voice, self-relationship, and daily structure but something was off…

See, an addiction is a toxic relationship with something that makes you feel just bad enough to remain a victim to it and just good enough to still be in love with it. You might think of a toxic relationship as just being with another person but it can genuinely be with anything.

When you’re a victim to something for long enough, it becomes a part of your identity and that was absolutely the case with Alexa. Now, if there’s one thing people hate to break away from, it’s their identity (even when it’s a negative one). In the context of an addiction, there’s of course the physical or habitual tendency but at the foundation, there’s the addiction to the victim identity.

For Alexa, she was able to see how the mental trap of the sugar addiction was identical to the one in a past relationship of hers. That realization was very powerful for her but it didn’t make it easy to stop eating sugar because the absence of that relief is so overwhelming and a chocolate bar seems to fix that.

This is where it clicked…

For years, she has been trying to feel good. Chasing that feeling of resolve because reality felt too heavy.

Now, have you ever seen what happens when you chase something down?

IT RUNS AWAY.

So, by chasing down that “good” feeling it seemed to become more scarce and destructive because it set her right back in the place she’s trying to get away from.

Can you imagine what I told her?

“Your objective for the next week is to feel like shit and not try to fix it. Just feel as bad as possible and test your emotional endurance because if every hard moment is met with a quick fix, you’ll stay in the cycle forever. Sometimes the solution to feeling bad is feeling worse first and then in turn, you’ll feel better.”

Since I always keep it real, I often have to be the bearer of “bad” news but my bad news tends to have a damn good success rate in helping people change the way their mind works.

It’s not always fun telling someone to spend a little while feeling like shit but it’s incredibly fulfilling to see someone truly embody a version of themself that they weren’t sure was possible before.

If you’re stuck in life, I’m here to help.

Not in the bullshit guru way but in the way that will give you the tools to build a very fulfilling and uncommon life.

To learn more about how we can work together, check out my website.

-Cru