Food Addiction and Emotions You’re Afraid Of
Your emotions that you’re afraid you won’t survive are the very ones that, if you feel them, will heal your overeating.
It's the feelings where you think "I can't go there" or "I can't handle those ones" which are the very ones you most need to go into to heal.
Significant, permanent change in overeating happens when we finally realize, "The very feelings I've been desperately trying to avoid my whole life are the ones that are going to change this. There is no way around this."
If we could have healed overeating by only dealing with some of the milder emotions that we didn't find so terrifying, we would have already healed overeating.
If it didn't require going through a dark night of the soul, going into the depths of our pain, we wouldn't have an issue.
But the truth is, we can survive our emotions. We can survive all of them, every single one, in the full intensity that they exist in us. People don't go crazy or die from feeling emotions, they go crazy and die from not feeling emotions.
I'm on this journey too. While I have more faith that I can survive painful emotions than I had three years ago, or ten years ago, there are still layers of my onion that I'm currently afraid to go to. I am also afraid I can't handle them, can't survive them, they are too much.
Luckily, I have enough past experience with emotions to know that my fears probably aren't the truth. I have had so many experiences where I went well beyond my emotional comfort zone, and on the other side of feeling that pain, I felt happier, more relaxed, and more grounded. That's also how I healed my binge eating.
In my experience, we have to go there anyway, even though we are afraid. You can acknowledge the fears, but don't live in them and let them prevent you from taking the leap.
What if your ticket to having a zero-drama relationship with food and never binge eating again, was to feel these emotions that you've always thought you can't survive? Would it be worth it? I say yes!
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