How I Unfroze Emotionally and Healed Binge Eating

Here’s what it's looked like for me to open up emotionally in order to heal binge eating.

When I began researching compulsive eating and first discovered the idea that the way to heal is to feel suppressed emotions, I was very shut down.

I hadn't cried for years, I had never physically expressed anger even once in my life.

I had no clue what it meant to allow the feelings of fear or shame or hopelessness or really any emotion.

It seems to me that it is typically an opening-up process. An un-freezing process.

You can't just snap your fingers and make yourself cry for an hour when you've not cried for years. You can't just "decide" to be connected to repressed anger and fully express it.

You do have to make the decision to start, to try it, to take the risks.

At first, you might just open up enough that a few tears roll down your cheeks, and this may not have happened for years, so this is progress!

Perhaps you've never used your voice and body to feel your anger, so when you have your first solo anger shout in the car, this is progress!

This is how it looked for me as well. Unfreezing was a process over time. It involved me also exploring what my blocks were to emotions. The many judgements, false beliefs, and fears I had about emotions.

And even now, I am still working on opening up emotionally. I am so much more connected than I was 15 years ago, but I am still working through the layers of the onion.

The more emotions I allowed on a regular basis, the more my overeating healed.

I often tell my clients that if I were to make a line graph over time of how often I feel emotions, it would increase over time.

But if I placed another line in that graph of my compulsive eating, it has decreased over time. These trends are directly related.

While we are here, let me say that every time I thought I would never stop crying if I started, or if I felt rage it would consume me, or I would not survive fear... these worries have never turned out to be true.

Photo by Katie Sue Photography