Emotional Exploration as a Path to Healing Emotional Eating

Self-awareness as a path to healing emotional eating was fully explored in my last blog post. I hope it was helpful, self-awareness is always where we have to begin in order to welcome and enter into the process of change. If we don’t know what the problem is, it is difficult to create solutions that can lead towards the change process. Self-awareness is helpful, but knowing what the problem is alone unfortunately doesn’t lead to change.

Now that you have the awareness of the why behind the patterns of any emotional or stress eating, the next step is to begin to confront and heal the underlying emotional suppression and stressors driving the behavior. It is necessary to offer yourself space so that you can create a deeper understanding of the inner world of your emotions. When you create a willingness to get present in the here and the now, and to feel whatever there is to feel inside, you can begin to create this deeper knowledge that moves you along a path towards true inner knowing and ultimately change. This process of emotional awareness, connection, and expression is difficult—really it’s the hardest part— as it has been what the emotional and stress eating has been suppressing for most likely a really long time.

When you can acknowledge that emotional eating is not about the food, not about having a lack of willpower or ability to stick with a diet or wellness program, but about emotional suppression, this awareness leads to a continued journey inward. This journey inward brings you in contact with your emotions in a new way and you can learn to become, with time and practice, more and more comfortable with feeling your feelings. As you walk this new path and create these deeper awarenesses you begin to develop a new language, intelligence, acceptance, and understanding of your rich, inner world of feelings and emotions in a way that can be eye opening, powerful, and truly life changing.

If you are ready to continue along your journey towards healing from emotional and stress eating patterns, I recommend that you start by keeping a feelings journal. Having this one place to begin to explore your feelings in a nonjudgemental, curious, and open way creates a gentle and yet specific container for this inner work. Having a dedicated place to explore your feelings can feel scary and yet comforting and even hopeful at the same time.

Just the act of naming how you are feeling can begin to reduce the discomfort associated with some feeling states and emotions. Once you can offer a specific name to the feelings or emotions, you can explore them more and more deeply. Eventually, you will create a relationship with your emotional world that is healthy, open, and welcoming versus the suppression, avoidance, and numbing that has been the previous internal response to these feeling states and emotions.

As you begin to cozy up with your emotions more frequently, you may not initially notice much change in your relationship with food. That is normal and ok. That part will come with integration, practice, and beginning to offer new ways to explore, cope and soothe the emotions you have been numbing out for some time. As you begin this self-exploratory work, try to keep the focus on the emotional exploration, not the food, and see whatever it is that will unfold for you on your personal path to healing.

I recommend you go through the following journal prompts either in the moment when you are experiencing a specific feeling state or emotion, or even after the fact if you miss it in the moment. Use these prompts to grow your emotional awareness and expand your self-awareness through the journaling process:

First, if you don’t have a language for emotions, I recommend this feelings wheel as a great tool to study, get familiar with, and use every time you use your feelings journal.

Whether you are using this process to explore in the moment of experiencing a specific emotion, or in an effort to understand a recent feeling state more completely, look through your feelings wheel and consider, what emotion am I feeling right now (or did I feel at the time)? Name the emotion and write it down. See the name written on the paper and observe the name of this emotion.

Notice, where do I feel this emotion in my body? See if you can simply sit with the feelings you are experiencing in your physical body for a moment, and write it all down.

Ask yourself, have I been triggered or is this emotion congruent with my present experience? Again, write it all down.

If the feeling is not congruent with your current experience, can you journal about why it might be here and why you might feel triggered? For example, if you are feeling lonely but you are surrounded by people, journal about where the loneliness may be coming from, what you might be avoiding, or if you have been triggered and are experiencing old loneliness. Journal it all out.

Ask yourself, what is the message this emotion has for me, what does it want for me to know, what is its purpose right now? Write it all down, whether it is congruent with your current experience or not, it is important to begin to read the language of emotions, what do they represent, what are they here to express to and for you?

Now, try to observe this emotion in a nonjudgemental way, meaning can you be with the feeling without labeling the feeling as a good feeling or a bad feeling, but just information in the form of a feeling? Let yourself sit with the feeling and consider the awareness that it may be uncomfortable right now, or maybe it’s pleasant right now, and that it is here for a reason. Write down your experience of practicing nonjudgement of this specific emotion.

Now, spend a moment just being present with this emotion. Let it be however it presents itself to you in this moment. How does it feel to not push it away? Practice being with it and letting it be without resistance. Write down your experience. Please know that this may not be a pleasant experience and that your mind and body may fight to numb out or avoid the feeling. Remind yourself that you contain within you inner strength, remind yourself that you can indeed handle experiencing discomfort. Remind yourself that all feelings pass. Let yourself know that what you experience as discomfort today will feel like strength tomorrow, this is how emotional resilience develops. Write down your experience.

Now, using your feelings wheel, or just ask yourself, what is the opposite feeling state of this feeling/emotion? For example, if you are bored, the opposite feeling state could be engaged, present, or interested. If you are lonely, the opposite feeling state could be connected, warm hearted or safe. Write down the opposite feeling state/emotion of the feeling you have been exploring.

Now, ask yourself, what might help me to feel this opposite feeling state? For example, if you are bored, maybe doing something creative, reading, writing, taking a walk, calling a friend, listening to music, or doing some cleaning will help to create this opposite feeling state. If you are feeling lonely, maybe you could reach out to a friend, search for a book club (or other social experience of interest to you with like-minded people) do something to improve your relationship with yourself, write a letter to someone you care about or take yourself out on a date.

Now, ask yourself, is it possible to do something right now to help myself cultivate this opposite feeling state in this moment? If yes, do it, and then come back and journal about your experience.

Ask yourself, what does this feeling/emotion need (besides food) to fully release it? Write it down.

As yourself, can I give the emotion what it needs, why or why not? Write it down.

Ask yourself, is there something I can do to cope with this feeling in a non-food way if more space and time is needed to release it? Write it all down.

This practice of emotional awareness and exploration can open up your internal world in a whole new way. Try to work through both comfortable and uncomfortable emotions, the only difference is acknowledging the opposite feeling states of more comfortable emotions without necessarily putting yourself into circumstances that would create those less comfortable feelings.

The most challenging aspect of this work tend to be letting yourself really identify the feeling as you may have gotten really, really good at emotional avoidance, shutting down and blocking out feelings. That is ok and part of the process. Try doing the journaling prompt on a feeling that you are not currently experiencing just to go through the exercise with a feeling you’ve experienced in the past, or one that you could imagine what your responses may be. The more time you spend considering emotions the more likely you will be to begin feeling into your true emotional world, no matter how scary it seems.

The second most challenging aspect of this work is letting yourself sit with the discomfort and feel into the emotion. To just be present with the emotion and how it makes your body feel, what it brings up for you, how it influences your thinking or your mood state or outlook on life. As best you can, let yourself notice your resistance and desire to avoid this feeling and see if you can just feel it anyway, even if just for 10 seconds, increasing the amount of time over time. When you practice getting comfortable with being uncomfortable you create more opportunities to feel close to yourself and others by being vulnerable, open and honest.

I hope you find this work to be helpful, eye opening and useful in your personal journey towards emotional awareness, acceptance and expression. If you find this to be too overwhelming or uncomfortable, it can be helpful to work with a therapist through this process, please know that you are not alone and that there are people and supports available to help you along the way.

Self-Awareness as a Path to Healing Emotional Eating

Many people struggle with emotional, and stress eating patterns and often feel frustrated, hopeless and helpless when it comes to changing these patterns.  Those who struggle with emotional eating often feel that a diet or wellness program is the only way out of the pattern. However, diets inflict control, restriction and force us into having to think about what to—or not to—eat constantly. Diets may have their place in the world, especially for someone who does not struggle with emotional eating patterns, however, the data is pretty compelling when it comes to the statistics related to the effectiveness of dieting.

It is estimated that each year 45 million Americans go on a diet and that $33 billion is spent on weight loss products. According to the CDC, nearly half of all adults attempted to lose weight in 2018. Research through the National Institute of Health has shown that more than half of the lost weight was regained within two years. The same study showed that by five years post diet, more than 80% of lost weight was regained. Those are not so great numbers in favor of dieting! Yet, the dieting industry continues to prey on people’s weaknesses, exploiting weight as a problem, and offering restriction and control as the only solution. However, clearly their solution is temporary, problematic and potentially damaging to both our minds and our bodies.

Emotional eating really is an attempt to care for ourselves. Soothing emotional pain and life’s stressors with food provides us with a break, a numbing out, a moment where we can feel really good while eating the chosen or desired food. As human beings, we really don’t like to feel uncomfortable or to have to experience pain in any way. We avoid pain, including emotional pain, at all costs, and most of us are not given great coping strategies for dealing with painful emotions as children. While we often end up causing a host of other problems for ourselves through this avoidance of emotional discomfort with food, it is quick, easily available, and works every time.

When this pattern of emotional eating becomes the only way that we know how to handle our emotional suffering, it creates a vicious and dangerous cycle where food is the problem and food is the solution. Emotional eating can lead to undesired weight gain, which incites additional uncomfortable feelings of failure, pain, frustration, and often shame. You can see how this cycle continues to loop, grow roots, and create so much suffering, despite the intended desire and attempt to avoid pain. Patterns of emotional eating often leads to body image struggles, internalized shame, and creates a much deeper suffering, which often only thrusts us back into the yo-yo dieting cycle. Unfortunately, dieting often feels like the only possible solution, yet with the statistics related to dieting you can really foresee where that will lead without some other, more helpful intervention.

This is where mindful and intuitive eating practices can begin to offer some support, hope and challenge to the dieting mentality. Learning to be present with food, listen to our bodies, respect feeling hungry and connect with our bodies in a real way is tremendously powerful. However, difficult and painful emotions will inevitably arise again. Especially if someone has endured trauma or significant suffering (which is pretty much all of us) and a trigger occurs, the pull towards emotional eating can be very strong no matter how much mindful eating you’ve practiced or how in tune you are with your bodies hunger and full cues.

Emotional eating is impossible to heal through a diet or by simply being present with food, hunger, fullness or rejecting diets alone. To heal emotional eating, addressing the uncomfortable emotions, learning about emotional patterns of avoidance, as well as our stressors, and understanding our emotions and processing them is vital to this healing. Healing from the inside out is the only way because emotional eating really has nothing to do with the food at all, but how the food numbs our feelings and comforts our suffering.

There is a misconception that if you heal from emotional eating you won’t find pleasure with eating and be able to enjoy food in the same way. This is a fear that needs to be cleared up immediately, and often arises out of the wake of dieting where deprivation and restriction are necessary. When you can heal from emotional eating and integrate mindful and intuitive eating practices in a way that allows you to be the expert on not only in what your body wants and needs, but also in what brings you pleasure, you can create an immensely pleasurable relationship with food. There is a big difference in eating to experience pleasure versus eating to eliminate pain.

When you explore your patterns, emotions, the what, when, and why you jump towards avoidance with food (or any in any other way) rather than feeling your feelings, you can develop awareness into yourself very deeply. Self-awareness is always the first step; self-awareness is always where we must start on any journey. Without awareness there cannot be any change. To begin, it is helpful to give space to your feelings, to begin to learn and create a language related to feelings and to practice awareness, in the moment if possible, or as reflection if you find that you missed a moment of emotional suppression.

Journaling, mindfulness practices, meditation and reading about emotions are all ways to get closer to our inner world. When we offer ourselves time for reflection on our deeper internal experiences and to determine what really is going on inside ourselves we can discover what are we really feeling and why it is that we feel this way. Discovering what brings ourselves pleasure, comfort, ease, and joy in non-food ways can help create coping strategies that are more beneficial and useful. With time, practice and constantly growing in our self-awareness, food can become unentangled from the web of our emotions.

Giving space to finding pleasure in eating, delighting in foods that do bring us pleasure, comfort, ease and joy when we are not in a space of stress or emotional suffering also creates an opportunity to heal. When stuck in patterns of emotional eating, finding actual joy in eating can trigger feelings of shame or undeservingness, this is an important area to explore as well. When diets, restriction, hiding or withholding pleasure as punishment have been entangled with food, pleasure, body image, and eating, then choosing to eat decadent foods can feel like “cheating.” This is the process of letting go of old stories, patterns and ways of being with food and with ourselves. If eating something we desire causes increased discomfort, this the opposite of our original intent when it comes to healing our relationship with food. It’s helpful to get curious about how this fits into each of our own food stories.

This healing process from the inside out requires a willingness to let ourselves be a work in progress. So for now, start with self-awareness, what do you notice about your patterns? What does it mean about you when you find yourself emotional eating? Get curious. Journal. Spend time in deeper self-reflection. When we can become aware of our patterns, as well as the negative internalized beliefs more clearly we can begin to dive deeper and deeper into the exploration of emotions. This is the work required to truly heal from emotional eating. I hope you find some time to be present with your patterns, your self, and I’ll be back soon with more specific ways to help explore emotions fully and deeply as you continue along your healing journey.

Understanding Triggers

The word trigger has become increasingly commonplace in our day to day language, but really, what are triggers and how can we best handle them?

A trigger happens when a current experience of discomfort touches on an old inner wound. This current experience of discomfort then reignites the old uncomfortable feeling(s) or experience(s), the unprocessed wound(s), or trauma(s). Negative thought patterns then get stirred and this often comes with a strong physical, emotional, and mental response. This response overwhelms the nervous system and is not necessarily congruent with the current uncomfortable experience, or trigger.

A trigger is experienced in the present and can be something someone says, doesn’t say, a look, a smell, a physical sensation, a tone of voice, or anything else that then stimulates the memory networks connected to the unprocessed trauma(s) or old wound(s) and brings up subconscious negative internalized beliefs about ourselves, such as I am unsafe, I am inadequate, I am unworthy, I am in danger and so on. The nervous system responds as if we are in danger. There is a big difference between being upset and being triggered. 

When triggered, we temporarily regress back to that feeling state associated with unprocessed emotions or experiences and the nervous system takes over as form of self-protection. This response plummets us into fight, flight, freeze, or fawn mode. This usually happens without the ability to think it through, it is an automatic reactionary response to re-experiencing the old wounds of the past tied up into the present triggering experience. This is a survival instinct to avoid suffering and danger.

This nervous system response to a trigger is something that luckily, we can begin to manage more effectively with self-awareness and learning to regulate our nervous systems more effectively. It takes a whole lot of effort and consistent practice, but it is possible. If you have deeper trauma, it is helpful to do this with the support of a therapist who practices from an evidence-based, trauma informed approach. If you suffer from PTSD, while some of this information may be useful, I highly recommend working with a therapist who specializes in PTSD as the trigger responses are likely more extreme and automatic and may be challenging to process on your own.

Self-awareness is the key to understanding and learning to redirect our triggers. Without awareness, we cannot change. With awareness, we can begin to see our own patterns and begin to make small, incremental changes that lead towards more self-regulation of our nervous systems. With increased awareness and coping strategies, we can develop the ability to respond to the trigger versus being thrown into the automatic reactionary impulse of fight, flight, freeze, or fawn.

Gaining self-awareness takes a willingness to investigate our own reactionary behavior patterns when triggered. Journaling about triggers, keeping a “trigger log” and taking copious notes about all of the details related to what you experienced— what it was, who it was, why it was, and very importantly, what it brought up for you that is old and from your past. Having this information gives you a place to begin. Taking notes about your response to being triggered, what was happening in your body, your mind, your breath during and after the trigger, this is where your self-awareness begins to grow. Once you have some data, you can begin to consider where to intervene with these occurrences and experiences in a way that supports your growth.

One way you can begin to understand your own triggers more effectively is to know what reaction it causes within you when you feel triggered. These are the negative internalized beliefs, negative cognitions or negative thought patterns that can loop in our brains based on early childhood experiences. The messaging we took in about our self-worth in these experiences as well as what we witnessed in the behaviors of our caretakers. We’ve picked these beliefs up and respond to them as if they are true, this self-awareness work is about beginning to understand that it is old, and to begin to challenge the messaging and eventually re-writing with the language that is actually true, useful and empowering.

Some examples of negative cognitions/negative internalized beliefs are:

I am not good enough

I am not worthy

I am powerless

I am helpless

I am not in control

I am a bad person

There is something wrong with me

I am a disappointment

I am a failure

I am inadequate

I am different and don’t belong

I am unlovable

I can’t trust anyone

I am unsafe

I can’t trust myself

I have to be perfect to be loved

The list can go on and on, however these are some of the most common negative cognitions that are experienced by many people. When we are triggered, if there are experiences in the past that have made us feel this way about ourselves, we can get stuck in a pattern of negative self-talk, or have a trauma response that makes us feel that this negative cognition or feeling state is indeed true. If we don’t learn how to manage these negative cognitions it can lead to compensatory, self-sabotaging behaviors such as using food, substances, mindless activities or anything else to avoid the discomfort that is experienced in mind and body. Emotional soothing with food or any other emotional numbing is only a temporary release and leads to increased negative feelings about ourselves. When we become the observer of the trigger and understand where it came from, we can begin to take our nervous systems back and learn to create and offer more self-compassion.

Over time, with self-awareness and practice we can create a new internalized belief structure such as:

I am good enough

I am worthy

I am powerful, or I own my power, or I now have choices

I am strong

I am now in control

I am a good person, or I am learning and growing every day, or I forgive myself

I am ok just the way I am 

I accept myself as I am

I can succeed

I am enough

I am unique, or I am ok just as I am

I am lovable, or I deserve love

I can choose whom I trust

I am safe, or in this moment I am safe

I am learning to trust myself, or I trust myself

I am ok as I am

When we practice accessing and internalizing these positive cognitions we can create a more compassionate relationship with ourselves. With practice and continued self-awareness we can soften the triggers and begin to operate outside of these negative, faulty beliefs. The most effective way to begin to re-write our internal language is to practice. Have the statement that is more useful, true and positive available at all times. Write it down, send it to yourself as a reminder on your phone, practice saying it out loud. Once we build this deeper awareness, we can begin to practice regulating our nervous systems in a way that leads to better self-regulation. Some of the most effective time we can spend is practicing learning these very skills and tools.

Breathing practices, meditation, mindfulness, thought work, movement, somatic awareness and embodiment, journaling, regular self-care, self-compassion practices, and talking through challenges with someone you trust are all great places to start. There are many forms of therapy that help to address thoughts and faulty beliefs and nervous system regulation if you feel you could benefit from further support as you heal. If you are someone who suffers from feeling triggered frequently, I hope you will pick one area to begin your journey towards deeper self-awareness and see where it leads. Spend time reflecting on whatever practices you may choose and notice the impact.

As you grown in your self-awareness and empowerment, you will begin to change the language of how you communicate your triggers with others. You can begin to shift your language from victim mode, “you triggered me” to self-ownership mode, “I was triggered when___________.” When we take responsibility we feel more empowered to choose our responses and less helpless and hopeless that change is possible. If someone else is in control of our responses we can’t truly believe in our capacity for change. However, if we are the ones beginning to learn to take control of our reactions and responses we take our power back and gain confidence in our capability for change. This increases our inner strength over time. It will not be an easy process. It requires a great deal of time, self-awareness, practice and more practice. It also does not mean we won’t get triggered in a way that is uncomfortable or even unmanageable at times. When you learn self-regulation, self-soothing and nervous system awareness and stabilization skills that change how you relate to any triggers, it will be life changing. When you are in control of your reactions and have this level of self-awareness you are becoming truly self-empowered.