Hello love,
Today I want to share with you how the inner child plays a role in your emotional eating pattern. I wanted to talk about this because the inner child and different parts of us play a role in this emotional eating pattern.
Emotional eating is a coping mechanism. It is when we use food to soothe ourselves from any discomfort, any distress, any uncomfortable emotion. It is a way we temporarily not feel that unease.
But it’s not a resolution, it’s not a solution, it’s a coping strategy. That means that we don’t know how to actually move through the discomfort. We don’t know how to make changes to create the life that we want. So our inner child is part of this pattern. Whenever I share about the emotional eating pattern, I always say the pattern that I notice with clients is that this goes back to childhood.
It’s when we didn’t have our needs met, we didn’t have parents or caregivers that could create that space for us to help us regulate our nervous system, to move through any discomfort, to help us understand our emotions.
So what happens is that we are left with this discomfort and we look for ways to take the edge off. Food soothing us is one of those ways.
So what is the inner child?
There would have been moments that we had events happen to us that left us feeling unresolved. We then went to food to soothe. That was the seed of this pattern. This younger version of you is still holding on to that discomfort is still using food to soothe. It’s running the show.
What happens over time is this inner child and pattern becomes subconscious, it’s unconscious. It pops up whenever you’re triggered because that is how you take care of your distress. That’s why you feel out of control, because you’ve grown up. But that younger part hasn’t.
It’s stuck in the past.
How do we move forward?
We need to be able to go back and meet our true needs and resolve the pattern at the root in order to move forward. So there might be the inner child plus different protection mechanisms making us stay stuck in this. This pattern is subconscious and we tend to not remember where it came from.
Developmentally, we wouldn’t have known what was going on because we needed our parents and caregivers to guide us through this process. We needed them to model this to us. So without the guidance we feel this void, this numbness, this discomfort.
We want to take the edge off of the pain of the discomfort. We want to take the edge off of feeling unloved.
So we go towards food and we’re constantly trying to escape this feeling. Every time that feeling pops up we go back to the same coping strategy. We emotionally eat. Over time this becomes layered because we start going to the diets and the exercise and we’re told that’s how we get love.
Because we’re searching for love, we’re searching for acceptance, we’re searching for validation and we get new ideas put into our heads around diet and our body.
Who’s to blame?
The thing is, most of the time what I see in the emotional eating space is that we want to blame the diet industry, we want to blame the body image our society perpetuates. Yes, they’re part of the issue. But if we had our needs met at when we were younger, we would feel whole. We would be connected to who we are, we wouldn’t second guess ourselves.
It’d be a lot more difficult for us to jump into these diets and these quick fixes and trying to look a certain way, thinking that’s going to make us feel good. Because we would be whole. We would have that love and acceptance and that validation from our upbringing. That’s usually the deeper root.
Becoming what you needed
But in order to repair that inner child we have to be the best parent to ourselves. We have to know what a healthy relationship to food looks like. We have to know how to connect to our body and we have to understand the value of emotions because we’re still running on the limited beliefs that we grew up with.
And so inside of my program, The Emotional Eating Evolution Program, that’s what we do step by step. The program is giving you a structure so you can flow from after years of abusing your body and buying into this diet mentality and these restrictions and feeling like you have to do people please or you have to do this in order to be loved and accepted.
You don’t really know what it feels like to have those deeper needs met. This is a process and we need guidance. Through this process we’re relearning a new way. We’re moving through the resistance, we’re moving through what doesn’t work, we’re connecting back to who we are and this is how we resolve this pattern at this deeper level that is sustainable.
When you touch into these parts of you, you don’t have to scramble and distract yourself with a shower when you want to eat something. You don’t have to obsess about food, you don’t have to make sure you hit the gym for 2 hours.
You are going to be in tune with your body, in tune with what it needs and in tune with yourself and you’re going to be able to make those decisions moving forward. You’re going to be able to navigate the ups and downs of life and meet those stressors because you would have done the deeper work. You would have gone back to that earlier. You that didn’t have her needs met and start giving it to her.
This is a process.
It’s going to feel like more of a relief. It’s going to feel like a dropping in and an exhale. And that’s what you’re looking for. You want to be making progress, but it’s a softening, it’s an opening up.
Invitation
So if what I’m saying to you here is resonating with you, let me know. I also want to invite you to check out more about The Emotional Eating Evolution Program HERE. So this is my step by step process where you do connect with yourself. You connect with food, your body and your emotions so you can resolve this pattern. This is how we get to the root of this pattern, so that you can finally feel confident in your body and around food.
To being whole,
~Michelle
Certified Holistic Nutritionist specializing in Emotional Eating
