Have Compassion for the Child You Were

Have compassion for the child you were, who knew no other way to cope than with food.

Have you had overeating issues most of your life, starting when you were a child?

It is vital to have compassion for the fact that you overate that young.

Every child who overeats or seems to be addicted to junk food, is doing so for a reason. It is never an anomaly or related to any kind of personality trait of the child.

If you overate as a child, it was because your life was bad enough that you couldn't cope with it.

Children who are well-loved, respected as individuals, encouraged in their passions and desires, and validated in their feelings, will not have compulsive eating.

Something must have been very off in your childhood for you to develop that compulsion, and it was not your fault.

It's not because you were a lazy child or an overindulgent child.

People who overate as children had a series of things going on:

1) There were dynamics in their childhood that were not healthy or loving, and which felt bad for them. The adults who were negatively affecting them must not have noticed or tried very hard to change the way they were affecting you.

2) When you had any emotion about these unloving dynamics, you were taught beliefs and treated in a way that resulted in you feeling you couldn't feel those emotions. So if the injustice and hurt in your childhood made you angry, you may have been told you were being awful. If you cried, maybe you were treated as pathetic.

This double trauma is a recipe for food addiction in children. There's the original events that are hurtful, and then there's the discouragement about feeling them.

Now as adults, we can feel and release these emotions, and we can heal lifelong overeating.

But we must have compassion for how it started. And we must rage for that child, and cry for that child.

Photo by Elena Kloppenburg via Unsplash