5 Steps to Recovery

Source: ibreakstock/Shutterstock

Did you know that there is a hidden force that drives behaviors associated with food addiction, emotional eating, and binge eating?

Here’s one patient’s story to illustrate that:

Maryann just turned 60. She is married and has a successful career in nursing. Although she feels good about most things in her life, she continues to struggle with her weight. When she feels happy, she overeats. When she’s sad or angry, she overeats. When her husband has to work late and she’s home alone, she overeats. She describes food as “my best friend.” Her husband is health conscious and often makes disparaging comments about her weight. She really believes that if her life were just less stressful, she could stop overeating.

Maryann’s story demonstrates how people in her life, starting with her mother and now her husband, have focused on her size. The emotions she feels about this started in her childhood, and now, as an adult, these same emotions are triggered when her husband makes comments about her size or lack of fitness. Emotions like embarrassment, guilt, shame, anger, loneliness, and disappointment drive her overeating.

Studies have consistently shown that overeating and other unwanted behaviors are linked to an inability to regulate emotions. If you are like many people with food obsessions, binge eating, or emotional eating, you may be able to recognize that your emotions at times feel overwhelming, or you may be the type of person who has completely shut down any access to emotions and even has trouble identifying what they are feeling. These reactions to emotional pain are two sides of the same coin—attempts to escape from your emotions, or from the “emotional soup.”

When you are stuck in the emotional soup, you may feel that your emotions are in charge of you as opposed to the other way around. Emerging from the emotional soup requires emotional development— that is, being able to identify, express, understand, and very importantly, regulate your emotions. It is not your emotions themselves that cause problems in your life; rather, it is your attempt to suppress or avoid your emotions.

Emotions can be called the energy of self-expression. How we express ourselves emotionally becomes part of how others identify us and often how we think of ourselves. Learning to identify your emotions, to put a name to what you are feeling, is the first step to being able to express emotions in a healthy and safe way. Emotional expression is important because it allows you to be the individual you are, with your own perceptions, emotions, and viewpoints. Emotional expression also is a necessary part of what it means to be human.

The second step to uncoupling your emotions from your behaviors is learning to express your emotions, without using food. Even if you didn’t grow up in a dysfunctional home, the messages you learned about how to handle your emotions may have come from family rules. For example, "boys don't cry" or "be a good girl; don't get angry."

Patterns of emotional expression may also be similar to patterns in your relationship with food. For example, you may skip meals or restrict what you eat (similar to withholding emotions), which usually sets you up for the next binge (or emotional outburst).

The third step is understanding your emotions. One way to do that is by understanding your family rules around emotions. You may not remember specific rules being talked about, but the rules were the way you learned how to express your emotions—either directly or indirectly. Emotional rules can include ones that (1) allow a child to change his or her expression of certain emotions to protect another person’s feelings, and (2) mask emotions to protect himself or herself from harm or to avoid embarrassment. For example, your mother may not have told you not to get angry, but she may have left the room or given you a disapproving look whenever you expressed anger. Or your father may have yelled at you, “Don’t talk back to me!” when you got angry, suggesting that it was not okay for you to express your anger.

Emotions themselves are neither bad nor good, neither right nor wrong. You may have judgments about past experiences and the emotions associated with those experiences. These judgments and associated emotions are what keep you stuck in a story (experience) from your past, which can lead to overeating or binging. For example, staying angry at your ex-spouse because you were hurt by him or her keeps you stuck in the past. If you continue to stay angry about what happened during that time, you are stuck in a past that no longer exists in the present moment. When you understand that this judgment is causing you suffering which leads to binging or other unwanted behaviors, it’s possible to move past these negative emotions. This can help uncouple your emotions from unwanted behaviors such as binging or emotional eating.

The last step in uncoupling your emotions from your behaviors involves learning to regulate your emotions without using food. Maryann is a good example of an emotional overeater — someone who uses food to regulate her emotions. Emotional regulation begins in early infancy when babies learn to self-soothe or calm themselves. By age 4, children have usually learned to change how they express emotions to suit the expectations of others: They’ve learned the cultural and family rules about emotional expression. They may learn, for example, to express negative emotions more often to their mother than their father, for example.

Anger Essential Reads

The Buddha, Twain, and You: Wisdom for Taming Your Temper

The Best Ways to Manage Anger

A history of childhood trauma contributes to the problem of emotional dysregulation. The point is, using food to manage emotions may have been something you learned when you were a child and didn’t really have other skills, but now you do, and you will learn to tap into other skillsets for emotional regulation.

The goal is to be able to experience a normal range of emotions without feeling so uncomfortable with those emotions that you use food (or other substances or behaviors) to avoid dealing with them.

Whether you have a history of specific trauma, abuse, or neglect, or you are just “wired differently” in terms of how strongly you feel your emotions and your ability to regulate your emotions, it is important to understand that emotions are often the driving forces behind your behaviors. You can learn new skills for dealing with your emotions that will enable you to finally uncouple your emotions from your unwanted behaviors.

Below are some exercises you can use to help you uncouple your behaviors from your emotions and emerge from the emotional soup.

Write down three emotions you experience each day for a month. Use this format:

a. Example: FEAR

b. Describe situation:

c. Describe body sensations associated with fear

Make a list of emotions you have trouble expressing.

a. Example; ANGER

b. What is your judgment about people who get angry?

c. What do you do when you begin to feel angry (to avoid expressing your anger)?

Think of times when you’ve expressed your emotions in healthy ways and unhealthy ways, and ask yourself how each affects your eating.

What were your family rules about expressing emotion?
Examples could include:

a. Don’t show any emotions that hurt someone else.

b. Hide your anger.

c. Keep your emotions to yourself.

d. Use anger when you want to get attention.

e. Ignore your feelings.

f. Don’t trust your emotions; trusting your logical mind is more reliable.

g. Be happy even when you’re not.

Think of 3 skills you’ve used to deal with stress in other areas of your life that could be applied to your food and body image issues.
Examples could include:

a. Meditation or breath work

b. Taking a walk when upset

c. Calling a friend or reaching out for support

d. Journaling