Healing the Emotional Eating that Started in Childhood

Do we continue on the path of blame, and shame and self-loathing for what we perceive as our own weakness and lack of discipline? Or do we stand tall as adults, empowered with new knowledge, new perspective, and deliver the compassion and understanding to the child within us who so richly deserves it?

I hope the answer is as obvious to you as it is to me.

Perhaps, then, we'll be able to change the opening line of this post to, "A funny thing happened on the way to maturity...we healed."

Taken from Dr. Gould email. Author of Shrink Yourself: The End of Emotional Eating.

I read the book. Didn't like it since it was trying to lead you into signing up for their paid program. But get emails from them every few weeks and find them quite interesting:



A funny thing happened on the way to adulthood...we got hurt.

As adults we are sometimes surprised to discover that a destructive habit of ours actually developed in childhood. A childhood that usually involved having to face something far bigger than we could handle at the time; something that found us alone and without the support of an adult to help us navigate through.

One such destructive habit is emotional eating. Take this case in point:

A wife and mother of two -- let's call her Jenny -- recently realized that she'd been an emotional eater her whole life. She traced her habit back to her childhood where every school day she'd come home to an empty house while both her parents worked. Upon entering the house, Jenny's first action was to grab two sandwiches, chips and soda and head directly for the TV.

And there Jenny sat, burying her true feelings of fear and loneliness, till her mother and father walked in the door some hours later.

Cut to today, some thirty-years later, and Jenny's daily binge has grown to a full bag of chips, a 2-liter bottle of soda and a half-gallon of ice cream. More difficult still is the fact that Jenny finds herself staring into the fridge, post-binge, contemplating what else she can devour.

Is Jenny still waiting for her parents to come home to warm the house? No. But the emotional eating habit that numbed her fear and loneliness -- her hurt -- so many years ago is as powerful today as it was then. Perhaps even more so as it's stood by her all these years, a silent companion keeping at bay everything unpleasant, everything scary, everything too big to emotionally handle.

Can we blame a child for trying to survive emotional turmoil? I think not. Just as I believe it would be harsh and inappropriate to blame Jenny today, as an adult, for the emotional eating habit she carries.

What is the key, then, to discarding this kind of emotional eating habit?

In a word: compassion. Being able to see yourself as a child who had no possible way of coping emotionally with trauma is the beginning of healing, and the beginning of a life free from emotional eating.

Just as Jenny deserved the protection and guidance of an adult -- so, too, did you. The fact that you did not receive it is not your fault. Not in any way.

And so we arrive today at the crossroads of yet another golden opportunity: Do we continue on the path of blame, and shame and self-loathing for what we perceive as our own weakness and lack of discipline? Or do we stand tall as adults, empowered with new knowledge, new perspective, and deliver the compassion and understanding to the child within us who so richly deserves it?

I hope the answer is as obvious to you as it is to me.

Perhaps, then, we'll be able to change the opening line of this post to, "A funny thing happened on the way to maturity...we healed."