Understanding Your Emotions Isn’t Necessary to Heal Overeating

It is not necessary to understand your emotions before you feel them.

Insisting on understanding our emotions before we feel and experience them slows the healing of overeating.

To heal our compulsive behavior with food, we have to allow ourselves to feel our emotions about life instead of eating to minimize and deny them.

We have to feel our emotions about what comes up in our day-to-day life, how our lives are now, how our lives were in the past, and what our childhoods were like.

We often insist that we need to understand our feelings before we just go ahead and feel them.

But understanding why you have a certain feeling, or where it comes from, is actually not needed in order to feel those emotions.

You will have plenty of times, as I have, where you'll just feel, "I feel annoyed and I have no idea why."

Or you might feel, "I just feel sad today but I can't figure out an explanation for it; nothing bad is happening in my life."

And so when we don't believe our emotions are valid or we find them puzzling, we tend to restrict the permission to feel those emotions.

This is not kind and self-loving, and it will mean that your progress to heal overeating is much slower than it has to be.

Often you'll only understand why you have a certain emotion and where it comes from after you've felt it.

So you will have times you need to cry, have a scream in the car, or shake with some fear and you won't know why you're feeling that way until after.

Some of our feelings won't even have associated memories because they link back to things that happened in the womb, or upon birth, or when we were babies or small children before we have conscious memories. These feelings still need to be felt.

Trust that your feelings are always there for a reason. The only way to get them out is to experience them, and you don't need to understand them to experience them.

Photo by Brendan ODonnell via Unsplash