Don’t Compare Yourself to People Who Seem “Together”

People who seem “together” in their lives due to denial and controlled emotional suppression are not superior to your messy realness.

Do you think to yourself, "Why do I have all these messy emotions that other people don't seem to have?"

This is a common thing my clients say to me when we start getting under the skin of their compulsive eating. We start discovering their previously suppressed emotions, and those emotions start coming out instead.

Often, they realize that indeed, they do have a lot of emotions. Maybe they realize they are at times quite reactive, or their emotions are quite big.

When the emotions under our overeating start coming out, it's always messy.

That being said, "messy" is a word we interestingly only use for adults when we describe emotions, whereas we wouldn't probably call a baby's emotions "messy", but the reality is, feeling emotions is an overwhelming, often intense experience.

In our society we often consider people who don't appear to have a lot of emotional reactions as very "together". We often then think that we are inferior to them, and wish we could only pull ourselves together like they seem to.

But here's the thing: pretty much all adults suppress their emotions, and have compulsions, addictions and other issues as a result.

There is no such thing as a person who is by nature not emotional or not very emotional. All of our souls are designed the same in terms of how emotions work.

The person you're putting on a pedestal for their "togetherness" and "emotional control" might not overeat, but they may secretly be struggling with drinking or be compulsive with pornography or gambling or shopping.

They might have what are considered more socially acceptable coping mechanisms that allow them to stay "together", like workaholism and constant busy-ing. They might be really leech-y with their children and other people to stay "together". Maybe they drink obscene amounts of caffeine every day but they don't overeat.

They might stay "together" by controlling other people, being arrogant, engaging in narcissistic compulsions, or any number of other issues that we often overlook.

In this process of healing from overeating, be careful of feeling bad about yourself compared to others when the reality is you're not less "together" than they are, you're just more real than they are.

Photo by Matthew Smith via Unsplash