Compulsive Eating: When You Feel it’s Not Emotional

Often the first step in healing overeating is considering that you have suppressed emotions about people and situations that you previously thought you didn’t have any emotions about.

Maybe I do have emotions deep down that I don't realize I have?

It is normal, when we begin this healing process, to feel like, "I don't have many suppressed feelings. I don’t think my overeating is due to an emotional cause.”

We may believe that we don't have any suppressed emotions about specific relationships in our lives or specific situations.

For example, I might talk with a client who says, "I binge ate on Saturday, but it doesn't make sense as to why I did. Nothing really happened, and I wasn't emotional."

We might dig further into what happened on Saturday or in the days prior. It then comes out that the client had a conversation with their mother that they finally admit, "Yeah, I felt a little annoyed with that conversation."

The client often then insists that though they had some emotion, it was only little. They say that are over all of that now, they don't have big emotions about their interactions with their mother.

We dig in further and find out that in fact, they often feel irked by their conversations with their mother. I ask more and it turns out there is a long history where they've felt bothered by things that their mother says or does.

As we unpack it, it becomes clear: the binge on Saturday after the talk with their mother actually makes perfect sense.

Indeed, they were suppressing emotions. And those emotions that arose and got suppressed were big emotions, not little ones.

My recommendation to you is to start coming to terms, just intellectually at first, with the possibility that there may be emotions you have in you that you have 0% awareness of right now. But that they are indeed still in you and the avoidance of those emotions is driving your food compulsions.

When you start to intellectually consider that maybe you have suppressed emotions where you think you don't, then you will often start to see those emotions more clearly and you can get an inroad into really starting to heal your relationship with food.

Photo by Vladimir Kondratyev via Unsplash