Going backwards to move forwards.
“Make it go backwards first,” I told her. The tiny little red windup car we had, that fell out of the gigantic yellow plastic bin along with the Lego’s, had run out of juice. If we tried to give it a good start and push it forward, after about a foot it simply fell on its side and slid across the green and white linoleum. Not cool. Besides which, that classic high pitched “vroom” from the gears moving was missing, and that was what made it seem like a real car!
The cheap little toy was a pullback car. I guarantee you my father tried to explain how the mechanism worked, and I guaranteed you I tried my utmost to pay attention and understand. But it still seemed truly bizarre that to make something move forward, you had to make it go backwards first.
When I first heard about this concept as related to growth and development, it was with reference to business and marketing. It basically describes breaking through growth plateaus or resurrecting a failing venture by returning back to the drawing board, rethinking decisions, and analyzing what went wrong in order to fix problems or redirect focus.
But the backwards-to-go-forwards idea applies to many other areas of life as well.
After an injury, we have to start back at basics through rehab in order to return to sport. Therapists focus on the past (some might argue a bit too much) as a means to help someone understand, learn from, or heal from the past and move on with life. In pottery, if a sculpted piece of clay doesn’t take on the form desired, the potter often times has to start from scratch with a fresh piece of clay. And playing the piano, if you practice in a mistake, you must unlearn the mistake (take out the trill, do one hand at a time, slow it way down) before learning the proper technique to enhance your performance in the end.
We don’t like it, though, for many reasons:
Society is hyper-focused on performance and success, generally measured by positive, forward change.
We are easily discouraged and upset when our hard work doesn’t result in what we’d hoped for.
We are impatient. In a world obsessed with social media, access to the internet residing in our hands much of the day, orders arriving within 48 hours through Prime, and with a language reduced to text lingo and emojis, patience, appreciation, discipline, perseverance, and dedication are lost arts.
But this means, all too often, so is our wisdom lost.
When recovering from disordered eating, chronic dieting, over-exercising, and any kind of addiction, the way forward and through will often entail a lot of what feels like going backwards. But a house can’t be built on a weak foundation.
Clients often approach coaches and therapists for help, only to disclose that they only want specific help on this or that. The sincerity of their desire to change and get better is not at all lacking. But of short supply is a willingness to do so at all cost.
Amending programming is messy. Think about every time your computer does an update, or your website needs a “patch” added to perform correctly. Code is added to code over and over. Before long, what should have been a script of one line is now 16 lines of complicated symbols and commands. Eventually the computer gets slower and slower, your website takes forever to load, and no one is willing to look for problems hidden within the mess of 0’s and 1’s. In the end of the day, the quick, easy changes made along the way in lieu of correcting the true problems and doing it properly from the get-go, cause tremendous frustration and grief.
I wasn’t wise enough to understand all of this when I went through nutritional rehabilitation. I was going through recovery alone, and simply doing the best I knew to do. Each meal involved countless decisions. Without adequate understanding of how my body worked and metabolism, I tiptoed through necessary changes for what’s seemed like forever before my meals resembled anything close to balance. In hindsight, I realize that I had to struggle through thousands of redundant decisions, because I was holding on to some fundamental fear-driven concepts I didn’t want to let go of.
One example is dietary fat. Underlying my fear of fat was a lifetime of, well, fearing fat. As a child in the 80s, everyone was scared of fat and cholesterol in food. I wrote more about this in my How I Got Here story. I knew by the time I began recovery through copious amounts of recent research, coupled with a deep understanding of hormones, that 1) fat was essential and 2) fat in food doesn’t equal fat on body.
Rather than work to rectify the false fundamental premise that poorly guided my food choices, I approached each “fear food” independently. For each food high in fat, high in carbohydrates, or high in calories (all my red line forbidden foods) I had to erase my previous knowledge about them, and use a “feel shit, do it anyway” approach to force myself to eat them and, via exposure, lessen my fear response.
Did it work?
Well, yes. But it was a pretty long, forceful, headstrong, fear-based way to go about it- one food at a time. And, to be honest, it wasn’t until I really started to research nutrition and the human body, and allowed myself to explore camps outside of the eating disorder recovery collective, that I began to take charge of my food choices in a positive, secure way.
Had I understood the concept of addressing the deeper constructs and false beliefs underlying my nutritional constructs from the beginning, a fresh paradigm could have been established based on sound nutritional concepts much earlier on. This would have saved me thousands of fear-based exposure challenges.
The route of any journey is never a straight line. Going around the mountain, while it may look on a map to span a far longer distance, is actually far easier that climbing over it or tunneling through it! Don’t be afraid to turn around and have a look at decisions that have brought you to where you are either. Recognizing and amending any false premises underlying current beliefs and patterns is the only way to ensure a solid, positive future. Going backwards for a bit is, in many cases, actually moving forward on the journey as a whole.
Churchill once said: “The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you can see.”
In my post Are You Seeing Clearly I spoke about the lenses through which we see our surroundings and develop our belief system. Sometimes it’s enough for a client to realize they don’t have all the answers and seek wise counsel or new advice. But more often than not, if someone has struggled with dieting of any kind, they have some dietary frameworks that need dismantling before proper ones can be constructed in their places.
If you know something isn’t quite right with the way you nourish and respect your body, but you don’t know what to do instead, let’s have a look together and find the places where a little going backwards might be all you need to finally move forward.
