“My Parents Did Their Best” Will Prevent Healing

Telling yourself that your parents did the best they could have will prevent you from healing compulsive eating.

The true causes of our relationship with food originate in our childhood experience.

They're based on what we were taught about feeling emotions, whether our feelings were allowed, how our parents modeled responding to painful emotions. They're also based on the events and dynamics that happened that didn't feel good for us as children.

There is no such thing as a food addiction without childhood origins.

Often, when we are faced with the notion that the causes of our overeating is not poor willpower or even exposure to "temptation", but rather are far deeper and older than that, we have an inner protest. The protest often takes form in,

"But my parents did the best they could have."

"Well, my parents had rough childhoods themselves, so they were just acting from that place."

Here are some points to consider with regards to those protests. First, your parents had access to resources. Even decades ago, personal growth books existed. Support groups existed. Therapy existed.

Did your parents choose to engage resources in order to become better people and parents?

Are they engaging them now, especially with the addition of the internet, podcasts, audiobooks, online therapy etc.?

Also, you as a child didn't have the ability to say, "I'm 5 years old, I think that I'll not internalize this dynamic in my family because after all, Mom had a hard childhood." Child psychology doesn't work like that. The brain doesn't work like that. Emotions don't work like that. The human soul doesn't work like that.

I understand the guilt and fear associated with considering that your childhood caregivers could have done better, they just chose not to. It's terrifying. But it's also what's required to make true strides in healing overeating.

Photo by Anton Darius via Unsplash