I’ve always been my own best Guinea Pig. If something I tried worked for me, I incorporated into my life, made it a habit, and introduced it to as many others as would listen. Friends and clients alike, have benefitted from my own private little experiments on myself. This has essentially been the story of my life.
I believe my calling as a Healer in this lifetime grew exponentially when I halted myself from heading toward my kitchen decades ago to quell the inner demon that had always driven me to eat when I felt sad, empty, bored or whatever. Years later, I figured out that my Compulsive-Eating disorder began in my highchair.
My mother was not a demonstrative woman, but she managed to ‘nurture’ me in one of the few ways she was able. Alas, feeding me was the mortar that cemented our relational bond. My voracious appetite and eagerness to eat literally everything she placed in front of me, evoked her gleeful response. I sensed her sheer delight of course, and happily ingested all the ‘love’ she offered. Amazing as it might sound, we’d created our own special symbiosis.
When I landed on this acute insight one day after decades of struggling with fluctuating weight issues since my junior year in high school, it caused a profound shift inside me. I was all alone when this revelation presented itself, and it was life-altering. I’d finally unearthed the shame-producing root of my lifelong eating disorder.
Insight can provide a fascinating and richly rewarding aspect to our lives, but does it actually eliminate emotional pain from the body’s cellular memory? In my experience, it does not. In truth, most of us have mentally attached meaning and reasons to our emotional pain, since we gained enough vocabulary as toddlers, to question and talk to ourselves about it.
When we mentally analyze our pain, we dissociate from it. We learned this reflex very young, because it ultimately distracted us from the terrible discomfort we felt inside our body. If our parent didn’t notice signs of our emotional distress and provide physical and emotional care and soothing when we were in pain, we had to endure that discomfort all on our own. Add to this, if we were crying or felt sad and our parent saw no “logical reason” for it, we may have heard, “stop that, or I’ll give you something to really CRY about!”
So, we’re already down on the mat so to speak, and we’re being threatened with punishment and even more pain, by people we’re supposed to trust and believe love us! Does this make sense to you? Would you viciously beat your sick dog for vomiting on a rug??
Harsh judgement about various emotions we experience as adults, makes us wanna mentally search for “good reasons” why we struggle with our difficult feelings~ and boom! We’re up in our head for hours or even days, trying to justify why we feel so bad! When we received no comfort for feeling bad as infants or young children, we assumed these feelings were unacceptable and wrong.
Within the realm of genuine healing, there’s no such thing as a “bad” or “wrong” emotion! All feelings ~light or dark, intense or subtle, socially acceptable or not, are healthy and GOOD. These emotions are Us and we are Them. Each one is vitally important, and belongs in our emotional repertoire~ or we cannot attain wholeness and happiness.
If you ask me, far too many ‘half-people’ roam our planet today, because they learned to disconnect and dissociate from at least 50% of their emotions as toddlers, in order to survive their inner pain. Emotional dissociation spawns developmental arrest. If you’ve wondered why there’s such a high incidence of Borderline Personality Disorder in our world today (and all the insanity that appears to have infiltrated societies all over the globe), this is the root cause of it.
When I continued resisting the urge to feed my pain (and keep it alive) with food, my emotional development grew exponentially. My initial foray into feeling my feelings rather than shoving ‘em down and distracting from them with eating, forever altered my relationship with food. Surprisingly, it dramatically shifted long-standing, established patterns of how I entered into involvements with men, as well. This was something I could never have foreseen happening.
Deeply rooted in my substantial need for frequent sexual gratification, sat unmet primal needs from infancy and early childhood. Not too surprisingly perhaps, food and sex had become synonymous for me over the many years I overate to soothe my feelings. If I didn’t have access to sex (which was thankfully rare), I indulged and sublimated my primal needs for touch, affection, positive mirroring and attention, with food. My mother had unwittingly implanted this reflex in me. You might say, I went through most of my lifetime with two distinctly different and separate lovers, who gratified the very same needs.
Psychotherapy launches into searching expeditions, to identify the root of your psychic and emotional pain. Having thought psychoanalytically for as long as I can remember, I relished the fascinating and highly plausible insights about myself I routinely excavated~ but this never eliminated the pain and insecurities that were housed in my core, since I was a baby. Only feeling my pain, and learning how to accommodate, self-soothe and thereby shrink it, has accomplished this aim.
When we allow ourselves to sit in our emotional agony, take the judgement off it, learn it can’t kill us (though at times it feels so bad, we wish it would), and stay the fuck out of our heads about it, we begin to purge it from our body. Think of it this way: Our cellular pain wants to leave the body, because our Higher Self knows it doesn’t belong there. The only way it can accomplish this, is to surface so we’re made aware of it.
As we acknowledge, descend into and experience this pain or discomfort, we begin to dismantle our fear and dread of it. Learning deep breathing and self-soothing techniques with the help of someone whom in a sense, embraces us while we’re hurting, and helps us stay out of our head during this process, is priceless. We are in fact, finally receiving the comforting we’ve desperately needed, our entire lives.
We cannot resolve and heal emotional pain if we continue to bury it. It remains in the body’s cellular structure lifelong, and catalyzes Anxiety Disorder symptoms, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder symptoms, physical discomfort via ailments and illnesses, addictions (of all types) and consistently disappointing relationship experiences and outcomes.
The good news about all this? You can completely Heal, once you learn how to feel.
I’d love it, if you’d spread this one around. Maybe send it to a friend who is overweight, or someone you care about who’s still fighting the depression battle (and losing). It could be very useful for those you know who struggle with physical pain, as well. In short, think about being a conduit for another’s growth and healing. Ball’s in your court~ and may God bless you and keep you healthy and strong.