When Parents Teach Us Compulsive Eating

Did your parents suppress emotions with food but act like their eating was "normal"?

Some people grow up with one or both parents who actually modeled food addiction, but often there was no acknowledgement in the family that it was addiction at all.

You may have never noticed that nobody taught you to wait until you were hungry to eat. Perhaps nobody in the family seemed to consult their bodies in deciding when to eat, and so this was normal to you.

Perhaps your parents ate in excess, or were really attached to certain heavy and processed foods, and of course as a child, you just went along with this and ate the same things they ate.

In many of these cases, there is no hint or whisper in the family that there's anything wrong or that anyone is doing something compulsive. There certainly is no admitting that the reason they ate that way was to suppress and avoid their own emotions.

For you as an adult now trying to heal overeating, it is important to look back and reflect on what your primary caregivers' relationship with food was. Did they wait until they were hungry? Did they eat appropriate portions? Did they eat healthy food?

Many of your habits are likely ones you simply saw your parents doing and so you learned to do the same.

There are deeper truths to be discovered than this though.

The real question is, why were your parents eating that way? There are deeper things going on than it just being "the way it was".

What did your parents teach you about feeling or suppressing emotions by using food? What did they teach you about fear and food? About anger and food? About shame and food? About sadness and food?

Where are you responding to your emotions in the same way they responded to theirs?

Photo by Tim Mossholder via Unsplash