The Self-Critic & The INNER CHILD Behind Binge-Eating - Blame. Binge. Shame. Repeat

SPEAKER_00: Welcome to overreating recovery. We don't know what to do about it. In this podcast, I talk about the side of your eating. But nobody really talks about the emotional and psychological side. There are reasons why you can't stop eating. And that's what we explore here. Here, I'll support you on your journey to stopping binge eating altogether. This podcast is produced fortnightly, and I am your host, Shelly Treacher. Welcome. In my work with overeating, what I see the most is people who are really hard on themselves. This is one of the main reasons that people overeat. So today I'm going to talk about how self-criticism goes hand in hand with comfort eating and binge eating. I'll show you ways to understand this for yourself and to begin the journey of stopping giving yourself such a hard time, because that's really what's needed to stop overeating. But first, let's just talk about the habit a little bit. Most people who come to see me who are frustrated with the compulsion to overeat ask, isn't it just a habit? As I was saying last time, it is a habit. Overeating is usually something that was learned very early on, and for most of you, has been practiced, perhaps interspersed with periods of dieting, for most of your life. It is a well-entrenched and well-practised pattern or pathway in our brains, as are the beliefs attached to and surrounding it. So it is worth noticing the habits you have around eating, from what you are in the habit of doing to what habits of thinking that you have. So notice what kind of habits you associate or what associations you have with eating junk food. A really common one is associating celebrations with cake and lots of junk food. But you might also go to the petrol station and buy yourself a coffee or a chocolate bar? Do you always eat popcorn at the cinema? Do you eat sweets or go to the cupboard and binge on biscuits after dinner? Do you know what kind of associations you've got? And how long have you had these habits? It's believed that a large percentage of our behaviour is habitual. So that's your next task, to start thinking about what habits and associations you have. And I would love to hear. And so, secondly, we're going to talk about why do you want to stop overeating? To break a habit, whether it's the habit of eating something sweet after lunch or overeating altogether, you need a compelling reason. I know the first most obvious reasons are because you want to look better or you want to feel better about yourself. You want to fit into the clothes that you used to fit into, and you think maybe it would make your life much happier. I'm not going to dispute that. It probably would make you a little bit happier. However, I think you need something deeper than that to remind yourself of, to actually compel you to stop when that urge is so strong to stop reaching for the junk food when you need some kind of comfort from an emotion. So it's a good idea to really ask yourself why. Why do you want to stop? And here are some examples. I will lose weight, I will feel proud of myself, I won't feel shame later. I'm afraid of being ill. I don't want the urge for food to be in control of me. I don't want to feel tired, sick, hyper, drowsy, numb, or disengaged. It's not really gonna help. It's not what I actually need. I know how to feel and I feel okay with feeling. I can manage that. Probably staying with who I am is gonna improve my life in some way, that the food would not. But if you come up with any other reasons, and there are millions, I'm sure, please let me know. I'd love to hear, maybe include you in the podcast. So, thirdly, let's talk about the self-critic. One of the habits of comfort eating is self-criticism. Dieting is based around it, but the solution lies in not trying to be perfect, not approaching stopping overeating with diet mentality. It's the psychology of it that cannot be shortcut. And learning to address real needs rather than finding a fix outside of yourself is what we really need to discuss. Self-criticism is at the heart of the reason for most comfort eating. This can take so many different forms, but here's one you might relate to. One of the most common things that my clients have talked about recently is having family, friends, or doctors who point out their weight, particularly now, and they try and restrict their eating or encourage exercise. So they might say something like this: You're putting on a bit of weight, why don't you leave the food alone and go to Weight Watchers? Or let's give you a smaller portion. The person who does this might be well-meaning, but the result is often that the person they said it to feels absolutely awful about themselves and ends up overeating more. The person who overeats knows they need to eat less and move more, but they feel completely powerless to resist the binge urge. So they just end up feeling ashamed and thinking, why can't I stop eating? There must be something wrong with me. So you just want to eat more and more. That's your instinctive, natural, normal human response. How are you gonna manage how you feel? You feel rubbish about what they've just said. So of course you're gonna eat. Can you recognize that? Does this sound like you? This is the self-critic. So the first thing to understand is how you're criticizing yourself. What kind of self-critic have you got? In the last podcast, I asked you to think about when it was that you overeat, when it is, and what's happening just before you overeat? It also really helps to just ask yourself exactly what you're thinking just before you decide to abandon any good intentions and devour the whole cake. What are the exact words that you have in your head just before you give up? Are you putting yourself down in some way? Are you being really nasty to yourself? Do you have certain phrases that put you down that you repeat over and over and over again to yourself? Things that you would never say to somebody else, never mind to somebody that you love. Do you recognize any of these thoughts and behaviors? Comparing yourself to others, perceiving only negative things about yourself and feeling not good enough, feeling guilty, all or nothing thinking. Focus on the negative or punishing yourself. I had a client once, and we realized after the first 45 minutes that actually she was saying you silly cow to pretty much everything she did. So she had this voice in her head. If she'd make any move, she'd be like, Well, you didn't do that right, you silly cow. And it just repeated over and over again, and she was astounded when she realized that this is how she's talking to herself. And that's not good, is it? That's pretty nasty, right? What I want to leave you with in this third part is to pay attention to how you're talking to yourself. Being aware that if you're being self-critical, you might want to overeat more. What's often missing in the mind of an emotional eater is a kind of self-concerned voice. You need to start asking yourself what you're really saying to yourself. Because calling yourself a stupid cow or an idiot, even in passing, is never going to make you want to stop comfort eating. And in fact, it will actually make you want to eat more. So that's what to do. Start to note all the ways you give yourself a difficult time. I'm willing to bet that it's a lot more than you realise. And if you want to comment, I'd be really interested to hear what criticisms you level against yourself. So let's go to the fourth part, the inner child. Emotional eating, comfort eating, or stress eating comes from somewhere, and it usually deserves human compassion. So you also need to understand the response you have to the critic, or the part of you that needs comfort. For the sake of having a label for this part, I'm calling it the inner child, but you may have other words that you want to call it. It's the irrational, instinctive, unconscious, or reactive response. This might come after the voice of the critic or appear in any stressful situation as a reaction. It's so important to get to know this part because it is actually the child or this part of you that's running the show with comfort eating. Because the child is saying, I want this, I want this, I want this. And you can hear the same version of that voice inside you, right? It's just a really instinctive response. The child is our emotional side, it's our inner child, and it really needs taking care of. No matter what age we are. It needs listening to, understanding, and tons and tons and tons of compassion. Because it's not junk food that it really needs. It needs something more sophisticated that you could possibly provide. So, see if you can locate that childish voice inside you. Now that you know how you're giving yourself a hard time, notice what your natural response is. Notice all the times when your child feels bad-tempered or throws a tantrum or gets upset or sad about something, or frightened. Notice the times when this part of you turns to the fridge because of these emotions. And just see if you can spot them. In the fifth part of this episode, I want to start talking about feelings. The main language of the inner child is feeling and emotion. This is something that comfort eaters aren't generally much in touch with. With overeating, you learn to dissociate from feeling. Eating junk food gives uncomfortable feelings a quick fix. Of course it wears off, but accumulatively this means that people who overeat much of the time are quite disengaged from feeling and being able to express feelings. Which means you might also not be able to recognise your needs, never mind meet them. You might feel a general dissatisfaction but not really know what it's for. So being able to widen your feeling vocabulary is a really good place to start. You might be surprised how many emotional words there are. There'll be a link to a feelings list in this podcast information, but just while I'm talking, or pause the recording for a minute, see if you can jot down any emotion words that you can think of. Any words for feelings like happy or sad, and then just see how many you've got after about a minute. So now picture an iceberg. This is a classic representation of the unconscious. Often what you see on the surface is much smaller than the size of the iceberg underneath the water. This is like our brains. A huge part of our experience is unconscious. Our feelings are often very much in our unconscious, particularly if we stuff food on top of them. Being able to name our feelings, just being able to name what's in the unconscious, what's going on for us, can actually help to liberate that feeling and to feel better. So how many feeling words did you get? On average, whenever I do this exercise, you people usually get about six or seven. I've sometimes had people with around ten, and then once I had somebody who had 17, but she was a psychotherapist. How many did you get? Let me know. Sometimes we need to allow ourselves to go deeper to find out how we're feeling and what we need. For instance, what if your inner child really needed a hug and someone to listen to how upset she felt? And that's commonly what we need, really. When your boss was critical of your work and said that it needed to be faster, maybe all you needed was to complain about it for a bit. Or what if you just needed to work out that your friends were actually really stressed out, or tired, or worried about things in their own lives, when you wondered if they were bored of your story. You miss out on your own inner wisdom and your joy when you stuff your feelings down or dissociate. What you need to start to learn instead of seeing your body as something to be ashamed of, is seeing your body as home. Gradually you need to learn that discomfort or difficult feelings are safe to feel and part of just being human. Often what happens, and we're on to the sixth part now, the past, what happens when you start exploring the reasons for overeating is that you find that the way you now treat yourself is a direct continuation of how you learnt to treat yourself very early on. It's also an interpretation of how you were treated as a child. So the self-critic you now have in your own head is a reflection of and a learned response to the criticism you perceived from a previous time in your life. In a nutshell, you internalized what you thought others thought of you. And this comes to the surface again when you feel people are thinking badly of you in the present. All of this needs unpacking with such compassion and understanding, and it takes time. It's in order to relearn how to be kinder to yourself and to uncover your natural resources and ways to feel better. Binge eating disorder is known to stem from a traumatic history, so binge eating disorder treatment may not be complete without healing from trauma. Here is where shame in the body may have begun. So, number seven, self-nurture. What you also need to be working on is creating a self-nurturing voice. Self-nurture is all about providing the thing that you really need instead of criticism and junk food. How could you replace that nasty comment with something kind? What about trying to understand the reasons that you feel or act the way you do? This is very powerful. See if you can name some qualities about one of your best friends or someone that you really love, qualities that you really admire about people. I imagine that's quite easy. But then try and do this for yourself. What do you appreciate about yourself? What do you like about yourself? Was that more difficult? If you're a comfort eater, you're not used to picking yourself up. Just as being self-concerned is seen as selfish in our culture, talking about yourself in an appreciative, good, or positive light is also presumed to be bragging. But that's so outdated. It's also really not helpful for giving up comfort eating. This self-deprecating point of view, as we've seen, will only make you want to eat more. So you really need to change that story. So think about a quality that you've appreciated about yourself every day. Even if this is difficult, do it until it actually works. Go to bed thinking, what did I do well? What did I feel good about? What have I done that I really deserve admiration for? Or that I was really good at, or even slightly good at. Start in small doses if that's easier. Appreciation of any kind is often going to lead you to a more positive outlook. It sounds like a cliche, but it actually really does work. If you list all the things that you appreciate at the end of the day, sooner or later it's gonna rub off on you, and you're gonna start being a more appreciative kind of person. Maybe you already are. So turn it back on yourself. I'm willing to bet it's not appreciation about you that you're good at. Self-confidence, self-esteem, and self-respect are really self-acceptance. Everything that I've talked about today goes into that. So number eight, self-challenge. Self-confidence is the backbone of giving up overeating, so at some point you'll need to start challenging your old patterns of self-criticism and unhelpful behaviours and beliefs. One place to start is to replace every I can't with I won't. This way you start to understand how you've been brainwashing yourself and what your real motivations are. We've had lots of good examples of challenges in this podcast, but here's another. At a celebration, do you really need sugar to feel good? Isn't that a bit of a contradiction? Shouldn't you already be feeling good? Daddy, does it even make you feel good? If you do feel you need it, why is that? Is there something else that you could do instead of eating sugar to feel good? And what is it that you really need? In the ninth part of this podcast, I want to talk a little bit more about the binge urge and the fact that it actually comes from dieting. So when you learn to diet to restrict your eating, you learn to starve yourself and your body hates it. So your body kicks in and starts an urge for food, and that's where it all began. Isn't that sad? We didn't really know that when we started dieting, did we? But you might be able to recognise that feeling as starvation, a feeling of desperation for to get food in you, and there's a physiology in that. I also want to add at this point that it's okay to find pleasure in food. In fact, that's probably the opposite of what a bingita is doing. Intuitive eating and mindful eating rely on you actually stopping and slowing down to enjoy the food and pay attention and engage, and that's one of the techniques that you can try. Cake, really often, is just cake. And the last part of this podcast, I want to talk a little bit about self-soothing, because that's really what the comfort eater needs to learn, and this is a bit that will take time. There are several ways to soothe yourself. One would be to understand your feelings and to be able to address them, and the other way are things like mindfulness and self-soothing techniques. I'm not going to go into massive detail in them because you can actually just look them up. There's meditation and mindfulness and ways of visualizing that can help you to get into a different state of mind, which is often what's needed at the mania of wanting food and with the feelings behind the food, that's what's needed to soothe. What these techniques do is they get you into a certain part of your brain that is more rational and adult. So it's the part of you that can look after the inner child and stand up to the inner critic. And it's really so important to be learning that alongside all the other things. So that's number 10. We've reached the end of the 10 steps, and I know they're all enormous, and it's been a whirlwind ride, so believe me, you're not expected to be cured by now. I know that a lot of this will be really challenging for the overator, so it's important to acknowledge that this is not something you can do overnight. It takes time to learn how to trust your feelings, particularly if, as is often the case, some kind of trauma caused you to block them off in the first place. But with gentleness, this is the way forward, and it can be done. It's about gradually becoming more engaged in the moment, learning to stop punishing yourself, gradually, bit by bit, catching the self harm and replacing it with love. Naturally, this helps you to drop the obsession with food for an interest in your life. So here's a summary of The ten steps. These are questions to ask yourself and the information to gather until I get to speak to you again. Number one, what habits do you have around food? Number two, why do you want to stop overeating? Number three, notice your critic. How do you give yourself a hard time? Number four, notice your inner child. What reactions are you having? Number five, start to notice and name your feelings. Number six, start to notice how your inner critic might echo your past. Number seven, how can you create a nurturing voice to replace the critical voice? Number eight. What I won't reasons do you recognize? Number nine, what happens if you resist the urge? Number ten, which soothing technique can you use? And I suggest that you just pick one of these to focus on for now. Whichever one has meant more to you or moved you is probably the perfect place to start. All that remains for me to say is thank you so much for listening. I will be back in two weeks. But if you're ready to go further now, please be in touch. My programme details are at bristolcounselling.co.uk, or you can get in touch with me, Shelley underscore treacher at hotmail.com, and you can also join my support group, Facebook Comfort Eating Recovery Support Group. Thank you so much. I hope to see you next time.