Learn To Express Feelings for Permanent Weight Loss

In the first article in our weight loss series, we learned about “emotional eating habits”, those eating behaviors that are related to emotional longings rather than the body’s real need for nutrition. The first thing we explored was the infantile programming to overeat created by the common practice of bottle feeding when accompanied by parental neglect. We learned how to heal these traumas from infancy and thus permanently change these habits. In this article, I will address the use of food to suppress emotions, in other words, stuffing one’s feelings with food.

Many of us were raised in families where the expression of feelings was discouraged or even punished. Such phrases as “Shut up or I’ll give you something to cry about!” or “Children should be seen and not heard” represent extreme but regrettably common examples. More frequently however we find the parent who is simply too busy and stressed to listen to their children’s feelings and needs. Sometimes children discover on their own that eating some food can help them suppress their anger and tears. Sometimes they are programmed by their parents to eat in this dysfunctional way. A child cries with pain, or needing some attention, and even a well-meaning mother will shove a bottle into the child’s mouth or give her a cookie to silence her. It doesn’t take long for the child to learn this life-long eating habit.

The solution is to return the client in trance to the time he or she first learned to stuff their feelings with food. Then we can bring in the resource of the client’s adult self to encourage the child to express their feelings. As a therapist I will often need to encourage my client to express their feelings, anger, tears, etc. in a loud voice. “That’s good! You tell them! You deserve to be heard” are all expressions I frequently use. Then we use the empowered adult self along with, if necessary, the presence of a new inner parent to respond lovingly and approvingly to the child’s expression of feeling. Then we help the child experience the incomparable joy of their needs being met. The client is encouraged to feel in their bodies the fulfillment of these experiences. Finally, we bring this newly developed skill of expressing feelings into the client’s present life and present communications, sometimes through assertiveness training, sometimes through mental rehearsals. In effect, we are training the client’s subconscious mind to express feelings safely and confidently.

Here’s an example. Sarah (not her real name) is 50 lbs. overweight and reports that stuffing her feelings is a problem. Her subconscious mind takes us to a memory of her mother and her in the kitchen. She’s crying about a broken toy, and feeling neglected by Mom who’s on the phone. Mom hands her a cookie along with a look that clearly implies she is not to be disturbed. While this kind of daily neglect rarely gets the media attention of sexual or violent abuse incidents, it is these supposedly mundane events which repeated often enough produce the syndrome we’re describing in many of my clients. Our therapeutic intervention begins with bringing in the client’s adult self. The adult self tells mother that she is making a big mistake. I encourage her to loudly express her anger. Mom is immediately remorseful. Then we ask her child to express her tears again, which she does out loud. Then, we gently instruct Mom in how to listen to her child’s needs and respond to them (If Mother were less warmly responsive it might have been necessary to release her and replace her with a new mother in the client’s inner world. This would not significantly affect the adult Sarah’s relationship with her present time mother, but simply provide a symbolic new resource for the child of the past.) We then embed this new resource in the client’s body and memory, with words like “Now breathe in that wonderful feeling as Mommy holds you. And now she’s looking at your broken toy, and promises she’ll get you a new one soon. Now she’s going into your room and helping you find another toy to play with. Breathe in this wonderful feeling. Notice how wonderful it is to let Mom know how you are feeling. This is how she knows to take care of you.” These words are called “counter-programming suggestions” and are essential to re-enforce new core beliefs and behaviors.

Now we link this new resource to every time she feels an uncomfortable feeling in her present life. “Now every time you have an unpleasant feeling, the kind that made you want to eat, we remember how safe it is now to tell your husband or children how you feel.” I then walk Sarah through a quick rehearsal of expressing this feeling to her husband. I may even advise her on the best ways to express her feelings to him in a style that he finds it easy to respond to. We’ll also follow through in our rehearsal to see that her needs are being met afterwards in some way. I can give her more help in her skills of emotional expression. “Perhaps instead of blaming him we could just tell him how this behavior makes you feel?” I persist in this rehearsal until her communication is comfortable, and it works to get her needs met. While shouting and crying may be a useful part of the client’s therapy, opening up the channels of emotional expression, it isn’t so useful in our daily family lives. Instead the client needs to develop adult communication skills, which in many cases have never been properly developed.

We re-program half a dozen similar memories provided by Sarah’s subconscious mind in this way. This includes both repeated rescue missions for her child of the past and lots of mental rehearsals of her new communication skills in her adult life. After only four hours of therapy, and two weeks later, Sarah reports. Not only is she eating far less, she is finding her relationships are changing in dramatic and wonderful ways. Her experiences of victimization and powerlessness are disappearing, and love and intimacy are growing in her family. And she is losing weight. She tells me however, that the other changes in her life are much more important to her than the lost weight. She is already beginning a life that is no longer ruled by her weight issues. I find it typical of my work with weight issues that many other aspects of the client’s life change dramatically for the better as we work, because we are addressing core problems, of which weight per se is only one symptom.

In our next article, we will explore how compulsive eating is programmed to replace creativity in our lives. How we recognize when this is happening, and how we fix it.