In a Cold Childhood, Food is a Friend

To a kid enduring an emotionally cold childhood, food can feel like a kind, warm friend.

When we grow up in homes that feel cold or lonely, food can be a way that a child attempts to have some kind of warmth and lovely company.

Food — especially heavy or junky food — can feel like a warm blanket or a kind friend.

A child has to remain ignorant about how they really feel in order to survive a family that operates from denial and emotional suppression.

So kids will turn to addictive behaviors in order to try to get the emotions that are lacking in their childhood.

If there was any element in your childhood where you were rarely hugged, or a parent never said they loved you, or never was encouraging, kind, warm, or empathetic, this will be the case for you.

If they were rejecting, abandoning, and certainly if they were emotionally, physically or sexually abusive, you grew up in an absolute desert of coldness and trauma.

So of course you'd have been drawn to food. Can you see why empathy for your overeating is so needed?

It is also important to know that emotional coldness in a family is not always as easy to spot as you might think.

Many families have heavy facades about the family being warm, kind, and empathetic, but in truth, there is actually little to none of that present.

When a family has a propensity towards pretense, facade, and denial, you can easily grow up being told that you're loved and supported and yet feel the exact opposite.

You could grow up in a family that reinforces to itself and everyone around that it is a warm family, and yet you feel you grew up in the cold.

You must trust these feelings -- they are there for a reason.

Now that we are adults, we can safely state the truth of and grieve the emotional coldness of our childhood. This grief is the way out of emotional eating.

Photo by Anna Goncharova via Unsplash