Eating our emotional experiences.
Eating our emotional experiences.
It's all too easy to be hard on ourselves when grappling with disordered eating behaviours. Self-blame, shame, and guilt can become a relentless cycle, intensifying the struggle we face. Yet, by acknowledging the deeper purpose that might lie behind disordered eating behaviours, we open a door to a more compassionate self-exploration.
Today’s something to think about is…
How might your relationship with food be serving you?
Hmmm. I am proposing that, consciously or not, your eating behaviours may have served a purpose in your life.
The truth is, our eating patterns often function as coping mechanisms. Whether through restriction, overeating, binging, or purging, these behaviours likely became tools to navigate emotional and relational challenges when other strategies seemed out of reach.
It's possible they have been the means by which you have copied with tough situations, or found a fleeting sense of relief. Perhaps they've helped you by:
Providing a way to manage overwhelming emotions, helping reduce or regulate them.
Creating a temporary buffer from, or disconnection with, intense feelings by helping you distance from them.
Expressing emotional experiences that were otherwise difficult to communicate.
Recognising that these behaviours might have been attempts at managing life's complexities, we can potentially introduce more self-compassion while endeavouring to replace them with healthier, more supportive approaches.
One crucial step is strengthening our emotional resilience**. So, what does that entail?
Emotion Identification: Learning to recognise and name your emotions. We haven’t always been taught or had this modelled for us.
Permission to Feel: Granting yourself permission to experience emotions without judgment.
Emotion Tolerance: Practicing the art of enduring and understanding emotions when they show up in the body.
Challenging Beliefs: Identifying any beliefs that tie specific emotions to your self-worth. For example “I am a bad person if I feel anger.”
Skill Development: Equipping yourself with effective tools to manage and cope with emotions, such as healthy self-soothing techniques or enhancing assertiveness and communication skills.
Armed with emotional resilience, we can gradually transition toward healthier strategies to navigate life's intricacies, we can lean less on our relationship with food and unhook from unhealthy eating behaviours.
Food can become the means by which we fuel our life experiences, rather than the means by which we cope with them.
As always, I am rooting for you.
Rose x
**Note, before we do that we need a foundation of physiological stability. Nourishing our bodies with sufficient sustenance and maintaining balanced blood glucose levels, as these factors are pivotal to emotional regulation. When our blood sugar is erratic we experience increased cortisol levels which in turn leave us feeling anxious. Then back on the merry-go-round of eating behaviours we go!**
