You Were Emotionally Caged in Your Childhood

You were emotionally caged in your childhood and then attempted to make your cage feel more tolerable with food.

Being caged emotionally and energetically feels miserable for a child. Having some comfort food while in that cage helped us cope with the cage. Any person who struggles with overeating likely was caged emotionally in some way when they were a child.

Without realizing it, you may have turned to food as a way to comfort yourself from the terrible experience.

There are many ways you may have felt caged, depending on the person. Perhaps your parents were controlling and overbearing and critical. Maybe they had very set ideas of how your life should go in terms of career and marriage and kids.

You might not have felt free with your personality and nature, or your creativity. Maybe they demanded you give them lots of feelings, play a role, and be there for them.

Most of all, any person who struggles with overeating was most definitely caged in some way in terms of not feeling free to experience and express all of their emotions.

Being caged in any of these ways is traumatic, infuriating, heartbreaking and grief-inducing for any child. But most likely, you were forced to accept your cage and maybe to not even acknowledge you were in one at all.

It is so understandable that you would have turned to food in order to try to make your cage feel a little more comfy, to be more soothed amongst the lack of freedom.

Now, as adults, while we are not at the mercy of our parents and caregivers as we were, there is a good chance that your parents and maybe other family and friends continue to want to keep you caged in the same way. This is vital to face honestly if it is happening.

Alternatively, you may be continuing to cage yourself even if no one around you wants you to stay that way.

The only way out of this is to face the truth of how you were caged as a child and feel all the rage, pain and grief about that experience. When you do this, you won't feel compulsive with food now as an adult.

For 1-1 coaching in healing overeating, please contact me here on my website.

Photo by Deanna Lewis via Unsplash