Jessica Flanigan seemed to be the perfect parent living the perfect life with her family — then everything fell apart. As her life collapsed around her, after she felt intense despair and anger, she found something quite unexpected: love. With this discovery came a revelation about the power of love for overcoming not only emotional adversity, but also physical ailments. Flanigan, a clinical nutritionist and author of The Loving Diet, sat down with WellBe to discuss how facing adversity transformed her outlook, what living with a chronic illness shares with emotional hardship, the power and limitations of the autoimmune paleo diet, and why practicing self-love is the answer to almost everything.
*This is a short clip from our interview with Jessica Flanigan. Click here to watch the whole thing.*
You can also listen to an audio version of our interview with Jessica Flanigan on The WellBe Podcast.
Facing Adversity and Changing Her Life
Flanigan was a married mother, actively engaged in her community and living the picture-perfect life. She thought nothing could go wrong, and that if it did she would have the skills to handle it. But then, her husband cheated on her, eventually leaving her and marrying the other woman. They lost their home. She became a single parent. And she didn’t know how to handle it.
“Before my life fell apart, I had been meditating, I had been doing yoga. I was a class parent. I was a prominent member of my community. I volunteered. I checked off every single box that I thought was what I was supposed to do,” says Flanigan. “Then, when the rug really got ripped out from underneath me, I found out that I did not have the skills to move forward. I didn’t even know what the first step would be.”
This was particularly shocking to Flanigan because, like many of us, she was taught that the better her life looked, the better she would be able to cope when she was facing adversity. When this turned out not to be the case, she knew she needed to find a radically different approach.
After much soul-searching, she discovered that the only effective option was to fully accept and even embrace her circumstances, to investigate how her life was serving her rather than how it was hurting her. In other words, she needed to love everything that had happened and everything she was experiencing, no matter how impossible that seemed.
When she put that realization into action, everything became better, easier, and happier, and the seed was planted for her book, The Loving Diet. In the book, she explains that when you’re facing adversity, practicing self-love is often the most transformational and healing tool you have. This applies to emotional hardship, as she experienced, but also to physical hardship and diseases. “I wrote the book for anybody who is trying to figure out how they can use something for themselves instead of against themselves, even when it feels like their life is being torn apart,” says Flanigan.
Practicing Self-Love to Handle Life’s Challenges
Accepting and embracing — and loving — her circumstances may seem like it was a tall order given what Flanigan was going through. But eventually she was able to get there, and the way she found that love and acceptance was by starting with herself and practicing self-love.
In the months after her life began to fall apart, Flanigan was completely grief-stricken, and this pain was compounded by her own judgment of her sadness. One part of her brain would be thinking, “Poor me. Why did my husband have to cheat on me and leave me?” while the other would be thinking “Why can’t you get through this? Why can’t you just get through your grief?”
This all changed one day, on a normal trip to the grocery store to pick up some groceries. Suddenly, she made the choice to stop judging how she was handling the situation, but rather to simply be with herself as she experienced her sadness. “That was the key,” Flanigan says. “I had never allowed myself to be present in a nonjudgmental way with the parts of myself that were sad, the parts of myself that were grieving.”
She began practicing self-love by wholly embracing that sad part of herself. She did visualization exercises while meditating or while in bed, imagining herself holding the hand of the part of her that was in pain. She would talk to this part of herself, encouraging and comforting her. Up until that point, her mind and heart had been occupied with judgment and hatred for her husband, for the other woman, for her life, and for her own feelings. “I was doing all the human things,” Flanigan says. “So I just stopped judging my humanness. I stopped trying to be a superstar when, really, I was just on the ground moving inch by inch.”
In other words, she was practicing self-love by being with the parts that hurt instead of trying to fix them — and, through this, she was able to reach a place of peace, acceptance, and love with regard to her life and the people in it (yes, even her ex husband).
When working with clients, Flanigan presents a three-step process for coming to terms with difficult circumstances in their own lives, be it a challenging relationship, a chronic illness, or something else. The process, which is its own form of practicing self-love, goes like this:
-
Become curious. Become curious about whatever it is that you’re grappling with. Curiosity allows you to look at the issue without judgment, and to perhaps learn something useful about it.
-
What is your relationship to your circumstances? Understand and define how you relate to whatever it is your grappling with.
-
What did you decide? This is the step where you can look at the assumptions and judgments you may hold and identify if there is anything there that’s not true or not serving you.
COMMENTS