When My Mom Padlocked Food From Me

My mom locked food away from me with a padlocked refrigerator when I was a teenager.

My binge eating had become quite severe by my late teens, and my mom's response to that was to get a second refrigerator, put it in the garage, and put thick metal chainlink around the door handles which she locked with a padlock. My brothers had the combination to it but I wasn't allowed to have it.

This fridge was where she put all the more enjoyable food; and in the inside fridge, she kept only raw ingredients for cooking, like sauces and eggs and milk. I wasn’t starved of food, but I wasn’t allowed to access certain types of food anymore when I was at the house. I had to ask her for certain things instead of freely accessing them myself.

There was no discussion about all of this whatsoever, I just came home and this was the new system. When I asked if I could get something from the garage fridge, my mom simply said sharply and coldly, "No".

For a long time, all I felt about this was shame and self-blame. I thought, "Well, it makes sense she did that; I was really out of control with my eating" and "If I didn't have such a severe problem, she wouldn't have had to do that in the first place, so it's really my fault."

What I realized later was that the entire thing was actually really f***ed up. Why?

Because I had come to understand that for me -- as it is for everyone -- my parents were the cause of why I had started turning to food addictively at a young age.

So my mom was at least half of the original reason why I'd developed the problem in the first place (with the other half being my dad).

However, my mom chose not to do any self-reflection on why I might have been such a longtime compulsive eater. She never considered what role she had in my developing this addiction. She didn't talk with me about it in a compassionate way. She just sought to control and, in my case, it was done in the spirit of punishment. What she did was an incredibly shaming thing to do to me as well, but shaming was indeed a part of her motive.

Many clients I work with had parents who controlled their food in some way, sent them to weight loss camp, or some other form of controlling behavior that shamed them.

It is not unlike being repeatedly punched in the shoulder and then blaming yourself when you struggle to lift things with that shoulder.

I believe when parents do these kinds of things, it is a form of emotional abuse.