As a grown woman, Jan is living a stifled and deadened emotional existence. It feels normal to her: it’s all she has ever known. While those around her — her daughters, husband, siblings, staff, and patients — are experiencing the routine emotional ups and downs of life, she is stranded in an emotional desert, and her body is keeping the score.
It’s Never Too Late to Start Feeling
Near the end of our session, Jan told me that she had seen other therapists in the past for her weight challenges and bouts of depression, boredom, and emptiness. Previous therapists, she said, had tried to get her to feel and asked her to track and write about her feelings. She had dropped out of therapy a few times because she couldn’t seem to experience her feelings, and she felt like a failure. When she tried group therapy, she witnessed other members “feeling all over the place” but still felt blocked.
I reassured Jan that I wouldn’t try to get her to feel; rather, we would work on enhancing her right-brain awareness of bodily sensations, such as hunger and fullness signals and muscle tension and relaxation. If Jan could become more aware of her bodily sensations and able to stay with and tolerate them, they would offer her important messages about the state of her internal world. We would allow her body to tell us her story and lead us to the pain she had long ago learned to push away and stuff down.
I commended Jan for finding resourceful ways to handle an emotionally painful and difficult childhood. When I praised her for her strength and resiliency, she began to feel something behind her eyes that she said “could be sadness.” She had experienced so little praise in her life that this little tidbit had begun to open the floodgates. It was clear that I could help Jan access her inner world not only by offering her the attunement she so desperately needed and deserved, but also by highlighting her strengths.
The Way to Vitality
I explained to Jan that slowly and gently learning to pay mindful attention to her bodily sensations would help her reside more in her body. Over time, we would carefully draw out the sensory information that had been stored in her body and frozen by trauma. She could learn to connect these sensations to any associated emotions, as well as to current or past physical and psychological events. As we nurtured and strengthened an underdeveloped set of circuits in Jan’s brain, she would be better able to tolerate and regulate her emotions and soothe and calm her nervous system. This would give her more ease and comfort in handling other people’s emotions.
Feeling more connected to herself in this way could also help her feel more comfortable in her body. Jan’s earlier connection to her body through sports was a resource that she could draw on. Exercise that she enjoyed would be a way for her to reconnect to her body and perhaps to tolerate and enjoy the comforts of touch, including more intimacy with her husband.
Learning Mindfulness
If, like Jan, you were exposed to severe attunement failures or early traumatic experiences, an overall sense of threat has been stored in your nervous system and in every cell of your body. But it’s never too late to release this locked-up energy, increase your zest for life, and reduce your attraction to food for comfort.
In part 2, we’ll see how Jan learned to use mindfulness to become more aware of her bodily sensations, stay present to them, and allow them to inform her as they shifted and dissipated. As her tolerance for unpleasant feeling states increased, she began to release and free the energy that had been frozen inside her. As her vitality increased, she felt better equipped to transcend her painful history and transform her life.
To some degree everyone is a prisoner of the past.
— Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery
One thing most emotional eaters have in common is that their childhoods didn’t feel particularly nurturing. Even if their parents or caregivers were loving, supportive, and kind, often there just wasn’t enough quality attention, listening, good attunement, understanding, empathy, soothing, comfort, and consistent nurturance for optimal development of the brain’s self-regulation circuitry.
You may be thinking, “Hold on, this doesn’t fit my situation — my parents were very loving and caring, and I didn’t experience any traumatic events in my childhood. My problem is that I just love food and eating.” I understand. And I believe you. I also believe that if you’re having trouble managing your eating habits and maintaining your weight in an optimum range, there’s a good chance that your brain’s self-regulation circuits could use some strengthening, and your self-soothing and self-comforting skills could use some sharpening. There’s some reason you’re having difficulty consistently regulating your behaviors and meeting your needs without turning to your favorite foods.
Even well-meaning caregivers can unintentionally neglect their children’s emotional needs at critical points in terms of brain development. Sometimes caregivers are unskilled at handling their children’s routine emotional challenges, including disappointments and losses, and they offer food as a source of comfort. Perhaps your parents baked cookies for you or took you out for ice cream when you were upset. “I’m sorry those kids were so mean. Come on, let’s go get a chocolate shake.” Maybe they unintentionally dismissed or denied your feelings in an attempt to calm you: “The shot at the doctor’s office will only hurt for a second. Then we’ll have pizza for lunch.” Or “Don’t worry. I’m sure you’ll do fine on the spelling bee; you always do. When you get home, I’ll bake your favorite cupcakes.”
Perhaps they were skilled enough to inquire how you were feeling, but once you shared your feelings, they quickly attempted to distract you or to solve the problem. “I know you’re sad today about saying goodbye to Fluffy. Let’s go to the movies and take your mind off of it.” Or “I can understand your being upset that you weren’t picked for the team. Maybe there’s another sport you could try.” No doubt they loved and cared about you, but you were left with uncomfortable and confusing emotions, and without the skills for exploring and processing your inner world of feelings and worrisome thoughts, calming yourself down, and learning from these experiences.
If your caregivers missed out on the right kind of emotional nurturance in their own infancy and childhood, they may have failed to learn critical self-and-other care skills somewhere along the way. Or challenging situations may have taxed their coping abilities: even the most loving caregivers can be overwhelmed by a death in the family, a needy or difficult relative coming to stay, caring for a family member suffering from a mental or physical illness, or a devastating relationship breakup.
Emotional challenges and skill deficits resulting from unmet developmental needs often become more apparent after we address any physical imbalances that may contribute to overeating. Most overeaters have some body and brain imbalances, such as hormonal irregularities, food allergies, and brain-chemical deficiencies, that contribute to cravings and overeating. These imbalances may be caused by both genetic and lifestyle factors. The easy availability of nutrient-deficient, addictive processed foods, foods of animal origin, and caffeinated and alcoholic beverages also plays a role, for sure, in wayward cravings and imbalanced eating. Most of us are stressed out, sitting for too many hours and sleeping for too few. And our increased exposure to endocrine disruptors, including the toxic chemicals in plastics, perfumes, and pesticides that are ubiquitous in our environment, is wreaking havoc on our bodies and brains.
Teasing Out the Pieces of the Overeating Puzzle
Lenny, a thirty-four-year-old art director for a large advertising firm, approached me at the end of a seminar I was giving on emotional eating. Looking tense and exasperated, he said:
I sure hope you can help me. I’m really