12/11/2023
The body is wired to derive pleasure from food. Food stimulates pleasure via neurotransmitters like dopamine and endorphins. And food is one of the socially-acceptable ways of seeking pleasure.
Meanwhile, our work-oriented lives provide us with little time for other sources of pleasure. And in some cases, religious institutions, our families, and society indoctrinate us with shame around certain sources of pleasure, such as s*x.
Overall, most of us end up pleasure-deficient. Since food is the most immediate and socially acceptable source of pleasure, we use food to make up for the deficiency of pleasure from other sources in our lives.
Many of us are also love-deficient because we grew up in families where we didn't (and still don’t) experience enough direct expressions of love and affection. Children often experience food as an indirect expression of love and affection from parents who are not good at direct expressions of love and affection. So food can become a substitute for parental love and affection.
Food is also the center of most family gatherings, so we associate food with feelings of belonging, and we use food as a vehicle for connecting to others. It can even be difficult to feel fully connected to other people, and we can feel "left out", if we are eating different foods than the other people at a meal due to dietary restrictions that we are following (e.g. for health reasons).
Our relationship with food is further compounded by the fact that most of us feel imperfect and inadequate. So we lack self-love. Not having self-love and not knowing how to love ourselves, we subconsciously attempt to love ourselves with food, and we use food to "medicate" the empty, love-starved feeling caused by a shortage of self-love and parental love and affection.
Food also often serves to quell uncomfortable emotions triggered by events in our lives. In other words, we use food in an attempt to regulate our nervous system and emotions because we have not learned to self-regulate. Self-regulation is the ability to calm and soothe our nervous system and emotions when we get triggered into fear, anxiety, panic, anger, sadness, shame, etc. If we have not learned how to self-regulate, we often medicate with food instead of self-regulating.
With food being the dominant source of pleasure, love, and self-medication, health-related food restrictions can become a serious emotional challenge. If a health issue like insulin resistance, excess body fat, or food sensitivities requires us to restrict or avoid foods that provide pleasure, serve as substitutes for feelings of love and belonging, and medicate our uncomfortable emotions, we can feel quite deprived and even worry that we will not be able to handle life without the foods we depend on to cope and feel OK.
So we might rebel against food restrictions, even temporary ones. These feelings of deprivation and resistance to food restrictions are major issues for many people who must confront dietary restrictions that may be necessary to overcome health challenges.
This internal conflict between the need for pleasure, love, and belonging on the one hand, and the need to restrict certain foods for health-related reasons on the other hand, can result in cycles of indulgence, restriction, shame, and guilt.
The holiday season can intensify all of this because pleasure-providing. love-substituting, emotion-medicating foods are abundant, and because we typically spend more time with family during the holidays. It can be a difficult time to navigate wounds and struggles around food, pleasure, shame, love, family, and belonging.
If you experience issues like these, there is some good news. All of this can be resolved by healing the original traumas that may have left you feeling forever love-starved and pleasure-deficient, by learning how to self-regulate, by learning new ways of eating, and by developing a new relationship with food that is much more joyful and rewarding than one driven by the need to derive pleasure, love, and self-medication from food.
I have been through all of this myself and have overcome a long history of using food to medicate feelings of fear, anger, and grief, and using food to fill an empty void inside of me. Now I have a very healthy relationship with food. I derive pleasure from healthy foods, but I no longer use (or overeat) food as my main source of pleasure, or use food to medicate my feelings, or use food as a substitute for love or belonging, or need food to connect with other people.
So how did this transformation take place for me? I learned to self-regulate; I learned how to eat "instinctually"; and I healed past traumas and issues around parental love and affection.
The most challenging part of this is healing trauma. In 2016 I learned several very effective methods for releasing trauma and painful emotions. As soon as I learned the main method, I started using it with other people and seeing amazing results. I combine several methods in a process that takes about 90 minutes and generates major breakthroughs around trauma and emotional pain.
You might need more than one session per issue, but very often each issue is entirely resolved with one session.
I started working on my own healing process in my early 20s. I have tried many methods, such as holotropic breathwork, tapping, hypnosis, NLP, EMDR, etc. I believe that the main method I learned in 2016 is far more powerful for most people than these other methods. It seems to facilitate deeper, more complete healing much faster.
If you want to transform issues around food, pleasure, and love like those I described above, I believe that I am uniquely qualified to help. If you were to work with me on that, it would be a multi-step process, and the holidays present a great opportunity to address these issues while you are being most confronted by them.
But this is not just about healing your relationship with food. Emotional food issues are merely the tip of the iceberg of deep pain that you can resolve with these methods.
If you would like to take advantage of this holiday season to release deep sources of emotional pain and thereby shift your relationships with emotional pain, pleasure, love, belonging, food, yourself, your family, and your life, then I invite you to message me to see if you are somebody that I can help. I can show you some strong testimonials for this work, and we can schedule a conversation if it makes sense to do so.
