A while back, I wrote about FOMO – Fear Of Missing Out, and how it drives food cravings. There’s another big fear that pops up all the time when I’m working with my clients and participants in The LEAN Program – fear of feeling pretty much anything at all, and especially so-called ‘negative feelings’ such as anger, sadness, worry, boredom, regret, dissatisfaction and shame.
Just recently I did a truly uplifting session with a client whom I’ll call Shauna. Shauna has a long history of battling with her weight – she had tried every diet plan known to humankind, starting from the tender age of 10! We’ve been working for some time on the emotional triggers of her overeating, reaching right back into childhood incidents which had shaped her behaviour patterns. The bottom line was that in Shauna’s family, no one really knew how to handle their own, or anyone else’s emotions. Whenever an emotional situation came along, both her parents reached for food. Shauna had learned this knee-jerk reaction too, and carried it right through her childhood, teen years and into adulthood.
Over the time we’ve been working together, Shauna has made amazing progress with her emotionally-driven eating. She’s lost a stack of weight; radically improved her body image so that she can now appreciate her own attractiveness instead of only seeing what she hates about her body; and changed her relationship with food so that she enjoys choosing healthy food that nourishes her body, rather than feeling driven into the arms of junk food that suppresses her emotions.
But when I saw her last time, she was in crisis – her beloved grandfather had died 2 weeks ago, and her grief was so intense that she had started to slide into overeating once again. We did some very intense EFT tapping on her sadness, how much she missed him, how everything she saw in her family’s house reminded her of him, and how she felt lost without his love.
As Shauna’s tears subsided, we reached the nub of the problem with her overeating: she believed she couldn’t handle her emotions. That was the message she’d picked up in her family – feelings were scary, out-of-control, damaging, and to be avoided at all costs! The realisation that hit Shauna was that her grandfather was one of the few people in her family who was comfortable with experiencing and expressing his emotions… and what was really interesting was that he was pretty much the only family member who was a natural eater – that is, he only ate when hungry, and stopped when he was full.
By the end of the session, Shauna’s experience of her grandfather’s death was completely transformed. Of course she is still sad that he died, and will continue to move through the many and varied emotions that comprise the human experience of grief. But she had a profound realisation – she honours the memory of her grandfather by facing the pain of her grief rather than trying to distract herself with food – and also a major shift in her beliefs: she knows she CAN face her feelings and handle them, just as she’s handled many other challenges in her life. Her emotions aren’t something she has to hide from by burying herself in food, just because everyone else in her family is so scared of them!
The beauty of EFT is that it empowers you to experience your emotions fully (rather than either suppressing them or wallowing in them) and then move through them and into a state of inner peace and calm where we recognise the truth of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s famous line, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”
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