Overeating and Emotional Overwhelm

To heal overeating, we must allow our emotions to become overwhelming.

The real breakthroughs with healing binge eating happen when we allow ourselves to be completely overwhelmed by our emotions.

While we seek to control our emotional experience or how intense it becomes, we will remain compulsive with foods and drinks.

We often insist that we should feel safe before we feel fear, know where our anger will take us before we feel it, or have an understanding of the size of our sadness before we go there.

But this will never work.

In fact, this is our problem: we have these food addictions because we insist on safety and security about emotion before feeling it.

Certainly, it is vitally helpful to know the truth about emotion: that we can survive it, that we are made to feel it, that it is healing.

But the element of overwhelm is in fact the key to healing. We have to allow our anger, fear, grief and pain to overwhelm us.

Often we feel like we shouldn't have to feel overwhelmed, like it is unreasonable to expect. There is certainly a societal acceptance that overwhelm is bad and it is prudent and understandable to avoid it.

This is wrong!

The moments where emotion overwhelms you are the moments those emotions come out of you and release and the moment your soul changes.

And when your soul changes, your inclinations with food and drinks will too.

Do not avoid overwhelm: embrace it.

Photo by Katie Sue Photography