A friend asked me about the appropriateness of cutting someone out of their life. My response ended up being similar to how I approach working with clients to manage the power and impact food has on their lives. So it got me thinking, does the idea of “ghosting” need to be rethought as it relates to our own self-care? What has been your experience with how you manage complicated relationships with people?
I had someone reach out to me and ask for feedback on whether or not it's just appropriate to cut somebody out of their life. How we take care of ourselves is all about how we put things into ourselves, right into our world. Maybe we can rethink ghosting and put it more into like a self care box.
Hey Cadre. When I'm treating folks with eating disorder, sometimes rather than focusing on the joy of food or the nostalgia of food, food just needs to be a means to an end. A lot of these people, we're trying to get the control and the power off the food and just make it part of one of those regular daily life things. It's one of the few things we have to do every single day, is fuel our body. So it's energy in, in order for us to have energy at what we put in our bodies helps us put into the world whatever it is that we do.
But I recently translated this into sort of like a social type recommendation. I had someone reach out to me and ask for feedback on whether or not it's just appropriate to like cut somebody out of their life. And when I learned more, it wasn't that they were, you know, cutting somebody off like out of the blue. It was related to a chain of events where they just felt like they weren't being a very supportive person in their life. And I just, I felt like, you know, within my own scope that my, my approach with the food side of things kind of blended itself here for this person's overall like mental health and well being.
Where like the, the people that we surround ourselves with also have like an energy input to our wellness. And if you find that your output, right, your energy out to somebody else is draining you and you're not getting that reciprocal energy and right. They're not refilling your cup and they're not necessarily showing up and stepping up when you need them to, but you continue to put energy out. To me, that says that you're putting effort forward, you're trying and you're doing your part. But if that 5050 doesn't eb and flow in both directions when you need them versus when they need you, then I don't consider it cutting off.
But maybe we do cut the cord because a means to an end, it's part of that evolution of life. So how we take care of ourselves is all about how we put things into ourselves, right into our world. And therefore it feeds into how we exist and what we put out into the world. And I just really didn't think twice about it until after we were having this conversation. This was with a friend, not with a client, so it felt relatively worth sharing. And I'm curious if anybody else has ever thought about this concept of ghosting and had like the fear of doing it or if they've had it done to you, maybe we can rethink what that means and put it more into like a self care box for how we let people in versus sort of say sayonara to certain folks in our lives.
So let me know your thoughts on your experiences with being ghosted and how you manage relationships with complicated people.
