Hello love,
I wanted to talk about emotional eating and how it ties in to needing to reparent ourselves and the mother wound.
Something I share often is that Emotional Eating is a coping mechanism. It is something we develop in childhood. I see this time and time again with clients. When we are very young, we need our parents or caregivers to model how to move through our emotions, our discomfort, our stressors, to also hold that safe space for us to move through it.
We needed this. And when we don’t have this we cope.
This is where we develop coping mechanisms like emotional eating. We distract or numb out from that internal pain.
This happens when we’re very young. It doesn’t have to look like we’re sitting around eating 5 bags of potato chips, but the seed is planted at this younger age.
I always share with clients in The Emotional Eating Evolution Program that they are learning to reparent themselves in all of these levels. Because if we came from homes that had a healthy relationship to emotions, food and our body we wouldn’t be where we are today.
Patterns I notice
Through the healing of this coping mechanism, we come back to a healthy relationship to food, our body and our emotions.
=> So what I find with a lot of my clients that are emotional eaters, they don’t have a healthy relationship with food because food has always been the enemy. It’s been something to control, it’s been something keeping them away from the body they want or from feeling in control.
It’s been this addictive tendency where you don’t feel like you have sovereignty or autonomy around it.
=> Their body has been an enemy. So constantly in these shame spirals, they’re constantly trying to create a body that is acceptable. Not just because they might have emotionally eaten themselves into a certain place with their body, but because if they only had that specific body, then they’d be accepted and loved.
=>If we are not taught to move through our emotions, this creates this inner void and hole because we think something’s wrong with us. We’re living in this pain because we don’t know how to process and integrate these specific emotions. We don’t know how to learn from them, which is something that we should have been modelled to us developmentally.
Most of our society doesn’t have the tools to have a healthy relationship to these areas. 95% of families are on a spectrum of dysfunction. So when we have any coping mechanism, especially emotional eating, these are the three layers we need to focus on.
We need to start healing our relationship to food, our body and our emotions, but in a really specific way.
Why Nothing Works
I’ve had tons of clients try to control food through the conventional means of diets and pills and surgeries even. Some have tried to be more intuitive with their eating. Some that have tried to connect with their body but they’re still listening to the external noise about their body. Some have gone to therapy to work through their emotions or trauma work or they’ve tried psychedelics.
Still none of these things, ranging from the very surface solutions to the deeper solutions are giving them that resolution.
The reason is that we need a process that is multifaceted, that’s multilayered that gets into all of these layers. It’s like reparenting ourselves, giving ourselves all the things we didn’t have when we were younger to actually meet all of our needs. Not just our physical needs, but our mental and emotional needs. And knowing how to fill those buckets.
This is the process that clients go through in The Emotional Eating Evolution Program.
Think about when you were growing up, what was your relationship to your emotions like, what were your relationship to food like and your body?
So my clients will definitely talk about having gone through trauma. Trauma is an unresolved event and is on a spectrum from Big “T” to little “t” trauma.
How do we resolve this?
Food
So around food, food becomes this sort of crutch we lean on as a coping mechanism because food is very connected to our mother, to love, and we make that association at a very young age, but we never truly learn how to nourish ourselves. So food becomes this tool we use to hide and numb out our emotions.
We need to shift to a nurturing and nourishing relationship to food where we can discern when we’re using it to numb out and cope and whether we’re truly nourishing our body and our body will start speaking to us.
Body
As we clear the deeper roots of this pattern with our body, we need to start looking at where do we shame ourselves or think if we only looked a certain way, what’s that deeper belief around our body? 95% of people that go to the gym, it’s because they don’t like their bodies and they want to change it versus they want to create more health and well being in their body or maybe strengthen themselves. So you have to look at what do you think about our body do we think it should look a certain way? Do we have that deeper acceptance?
Can you cultivate that deeper acceptance and appreciation and understanding of your body and its rhythms and sink into what is truly our relationship to our body?
Emotions
On this deeper level and with our emotions, can we start seeing how we’ve been coping with food and what is the deeper layer? What is food numbing us from? What are we going to food towards in order to feel better or to distract?
How can we start going deeper into the emotions? Start accepting ourselves, accepting our emotions, processing and integrating at a deeper body level. Start learning from our emotions because that’s why we have them. They’re giving us information about our life and how do we take that information and make choices in our life? How do we use that information of processing so that we’re shifting our nervous system from fight or flight to calm.
Getting to the Root
These areas are what we work on inside of The Emotional Eating Evolution Program. We get to the root of your emotional eating pattern and shift it so that you can start feeling that ease and confidence around food and in your body in a sustainable way. This is not a band aid or a quick fix. This is getting into the root so you can make that deep change and start giving yourself what you needed, reparenting yourself, healing that mother wound and creating a healthy relationship to food and your body.
If what I’m saying to you here resonates I would love to invite you to find out more about The Emotional Eating Evolution Program HERE. This is a step by step methodology. It’s a 12 week program full of support, guidance, coaching, accountability, in depth tools like somatic meditations to get to the root of this pattern and shift it so that you can move forward powerfully having that relationship to food that you desire, to your body and to your life.
To wholeness,
Michelle
Certified Holistic Nutritionist Specializing in Emotional Eating
