Food Addiction and Parental Gaslighting

Recently I've had some clients who remind me of me not all that long ago:

They overeat, they have extra weight, and they blame themselves for not being "disciplined" enough. They feel like their lifelong struggles with food and weight are a product of something deficient psychologically in themselves, bad behavior with no real cause.

Then I learn more about their families, and I start to discover that their families -- primarily their parents -- have a familiar pattern of blaming them as well. Their parents also agree that the weight and overeating is just an anomaly, and they should be able to just get it together.

I come to see that for these people, the toughest but most healing work is ahead of them: to recognize that most likely, they were treated far, far worse in their childhood, and now, than they ever allow themselves to consider. Their parents would never permit them to consider this either, and certainly not without copious guilt and blame.

But nobody -- NOBODY -- is born or hard-wired from conception to be a food addict. Food addict behaviors are learned coping mechanisms to help us deny and suppress emotion. They tend to be something we looked to in order to deny how badly we were being treated by others.

We need to have the bravery to look more closely, and honestly, at how our parents (and other caregivers in our adolescence) treated us.

For myself and many, it is important to learn about a form of psychological manipulation called gaslighting, which is often what parents of food addicts do all the time to their child, whether that child is now an adult or earlier on in their life.

I encourage everyone to do some searching online to understand what gaslighting is and what it can look like coming from parents. Here is a good article to start with: https://lonerwolf.com/gaslighting/

Image by Simon Berger via Unsplash.