Tag Archive | Emotional Trauma

Finding the Right Therapist to Help You With Your Food Addiction

Nov23

Food addiction is usually tied to some deeply rooted emotional trauma. I say usually only to give the benefit of the doubt.  Personally, I’ve never seen a case that wasn’t.

In my own experience, I have found that a psychotherapist can be a great resource.  When you are ready to delve into that dark place and retrieve the faceless memory that is sabotaging your abundance, talking with a professional can be very helpful.

The new moniker is “talk therapist”  which I suppose does sound better then “psychotherapist”.  But don’t let the generic term fool you. There is nothing small about talking your feelings out.

I prefer a psychologist, a Ph.D. because of their educational background, but a licensed mental health counselor can do a good job too, and at a more economical rate. It can be a tough decision, but the key is finding someone with whom you feel comfortable.

Here are three things to consider:

1. Education and Background:  Where did they go to school? How long have they been practicing? What is their specialty? Do they have experience working with people with food addictions?

2. Location: Is the office close, comfortable and convenient? This is important because you will be spending time there unraveling and and reweaving parts of your life, which may be painful.

3. Do they instill a sense of trust? This is the most important consideration of all. If you are to discover or uncover the hidden feelings behind your food addiction, trust must be the basis of the relationship.

That said, go at your own pace. You’ll have to take some risks. You didn’t contract your food addiction overnight and it won’t go away overnight. And that’s okay.

Risks are a part of life. Just seeking a solution for a food addiction or an emotional problem that has led to a weight problem, is a big risk. Good on you for taking it.

Depression and Food Addiction

Nov19

Here we are closing in on the holidays which should be a happy time. Unfortunately, the holiday season can be one of the most depressing times of year, and is for many people.

Why? Loneliness. Isolation. Overindulgence in under-appreciation. Just plain sadness. I know there shouldn’t be periods after these words and phrases. They are not, after all, actual sentences.

And yet they feel like sentences, the kind a judge imposes on you for doing something wrong. Would there be depression without judgment?

For all our technological advances, we are more isolated than ever. And no matter what people say, virtual relationships are virtually impossible. People need to interact, not interface.

No wonder so many people turn to food when they need comforting. Food addicts are born every day out of isolation and neglect. Depression is so common today that many people accept it as a natural part of everyday life.

But depression is the result of long denied feelings, unaddressed emotions, and a chemical imbalance in the body that is often a result of deeply rooted emotional trauma. Once it moves in, depression is hard to evict.

Emotional eating when you are depressed is fuel on the fire. Eating and overeating can become an absent-minded activity. Before you know it, you’re 20, 30, or 40 pounds overweight.

Add panic to emotional eating and you are heading into the food addiction arena. You stuff down the feelings without evening thinking, because depression makes you numb.

What can you do to break the cycle? During the holidays, there are plenty of things to get you out of the house. First, think of someone other than yourself. Doing something for someone else gets your mind off you and your troubles.

As for activities, there’s ice skating, snowboarding, skiing, and football, hiking, visiting friends and family, football, going to Christmas and New Year’s parties, and football.

There are holiday celebrations, church services, Midnight Mass, caroling, winter festivals, and even the beach if you live here in Florida.

Don’t forget all the volunteering positions available, like feeding the homeless, or helping a community service organization deliver meals to people who otherwise would have a Thanksgiving or Christmas Dinner.

Don’t be absent from the joyful activities the holidays have to offer. Just worry about which ones you’re going to take advantage of, and make healthy eating part of the holiday.

Aging and Food Addictions

Nov3

When you think of a person with a food addiction, what do you see in your mind’s eye? Someone, perhaps a girl or young woman, who eats a lot of chips and other snacks, has a weight problem, and doesn’t fit in?

Do you see someone who is in their teens, twenties or thirties who is fat, friendless, and has emotional problems?

Do you always think of a person with a food addiction as female? An obese person? A young person?

If you  search on YouTube for videos about food addiction and emotional eating, you will see that the majority are young women sharing their stories. There are some men too, but mostly women. And most are under 40 years old.

But food addictions don’t magically disappear when a person reaches a certain age. In fact, as I’ve gotten older, it gets more challenging.

The older we get, the more information is stored in our brains, like a hard drive that is never erased. We can hide some of the data, or forget where it’s filed, but it is still there to slow down the machine and inhibit peak performance.

Not all food addicts are obese, although most are overweight. “Safe” weight keeps you from exposing yourself to the circumstances that led to the emotional trauma that resulted in a food addiction.

Maybe it was isolation, sexual or physical abuse, or emotional abuse. Whatever the case, victimization is lurking in the background, always threatening you with embarrassment, humiliation, and loss.

Who wants to go up against that day after day? It’s too depressing to think about. And as you get older, it doesn’t always get better. But it can get better if you’re willing to keep working on it.

Aging works it magic on the human body, and although it may seem to take much away, it gives something to. You get feistier, more courageous, and most of all, more honest.

And that’s the rescue remedy for today. Don’t sugarcoat it any more. Be honest with yourself. Then you can be honest with others.

You may not be able to lose the weight, or maybe you will. You can move. Dance, work in the garden, take a cruise, go for a walk, be a good neighbor, resolve to be happy.

If you’ve been fighting a food addiction most of your life, then you’ve been missing some really great fun. Make up for lost time.

Aging happens. Big deal. Trying to prove to people who don’t care about you that you can be someone you don’t want to be doing stuff you hate to do gets old when you do.

So start living.  Get honest and get real.  Have some fun. It’s your turn now.

Food Addiction and Wellness

Oct31

Those two terms don’t seem to fit together, but they can. Overcoming a food addiction takes work. When you’re ready to do the work, you can make it happen for yourself.

I’ve talked about stuffing down your emotions, feeling compelled to eat certain foods at certain times in response to specific emotions. I cannot say enough about the importance of keeping a daily journal.

What every food addict wants more than anything in the world when they feel out of control is to feel in control again.

Wellness, oddly enough, is rarely an issue when we feel like we are in control of our lives. What is easy to forget sometimes is that we can be in control only in the present moment. Once the moment is past, we have no control over it. We cannot change anything by reliving it.

We have choices in every moment until that moment is gone. Food addicts  tend to eat in response to deep-seated emotional trauma that can surface at any given time to remind us of our victimization. Yes, usually a food addict has been victimized in some way at some point in their life.

It could be a lost love, the death of someone important to the person, a terrible decision that changed your life forever. Now the experience or fragments of it remain locked inside awaiting release.

The pain of remembering “how it used to be” or “what happened back then” is more than the food addict can bear sometimes. And so we eat, until we are able to release the pain. And then we’re okay again, back in the moment.

Wellness is a great goal for anyone. Freedom may seem distant, recovery long, but there is always now. Now is where freedom lives. Now is where wellness rests. Now is the best time to be alive, to be anything.

Now will never come again, and it doesn’t need to. When you fully experience each moment, now seems to last forever.