MEN and Binge-Eating - Recovery

Shelley: We are all pretty bad at naming our feelings. So, today I'm gonna start talking about how to cope with the feelings that might lie underneath your comfort eating. Because the frustration, or some of the frustration you feel with yourself, or irritation, is a sign that you need self-care. Attending to how we feel is an essential component of being able to do that. Hi, I'm Shelley Treacher from Underground Confidence. I help people to recover from the emotional side of comfort eating, which means I also help you to understand and to cope with many emotional or psychological difficulties. Today I'm talking about the problem of being in touch with our experience and our feelings, because I promised that I would do that the last time that I was here. And, because it's such a major part of recovery from any addiction, from comfort eating. But also, recovery of our self-esteem. As you've been exploring with me on my podcasts, comfort eating, or any addictive compulsion, is all about squashing our own experience. When people come to me for psychotherapy, or for comfort eating recovery, what they often tell me is that they feel or they have been told that they are'too sensitive'. I shared a meme on social media recently that says,"Hi, sorry I haven't texted you back", But then underneath it, it has crossed out:"I've been anxious and depressed. I haven't had time to catch my breath. You know how life gets. I'm so drained. I can't even collect the energy for the most basic tasks like texting you back or doing the dishes" and all of that is crossed out. And then it says again:"The weather has been beautiful, right?" And then crossed out it says:"Yesterday I fought off a panic attack while I was driving. I had to pull over because my vision was blurred. I just wanna sleep all of the time. But if I told you, you would want to uncover a reason behind all of this and there is no tangible reason that you would accept as valid." And then right at the end of the text, the real text that the person sends, they send,:"How are you? I hope you're well. Let's get together soon." Isn't this a fantastic representation of what goes on in our minds that we don't actually tell people? How many times have you thought about telling someone how you really feel or wanted to tell someone, but then stopped yourself or censored what you share, if you share it at all? One of the most common pieces of feedback that I receive as a therapist, is that it's just a relief to say all of the things that you normally carry around in your head, to say them out loud. It's just helpful to say it to someone who's impartial. Things are getting better, I think. But here in England, we still live in a British, stiff upper lip culture. Generation Z are being brought up in a world that has access to neuroscientific discoveries around how stress affects our minds and bodies, and they have more emphasis on wellbeing and mindful self-compassion than I ever did! But the further back we go into the generations, the worse it gets for us in terms of paying attention to how we really feel, nevermind actually meeting our emotional needs. And these are the parents that most of us were brought up with. I consider myself really lucky. I was brought up by a single mother who shared her emotions with me. Sometimes that was overwhelming! But if I really needed her, she always listened to how I felt. I could sense very deeply, in the core of me, that she cared. And it was that that I missed the most when she died. But then I also remember realizing that I was a bit different to most people. I had a boyfriend once,when I was really young, and I was like 19. He was beautiful. I fell in love immediately and we had a bit of a tempestuous relationship. And he had this wonderful brother who was extremely easygoing, younger than him. And I remember him just looking at me one day when I was in another argument with his brother and just saying, "Shelley, you are just really emotional, aren't you?" And I just didn't know what to say to that because up until that point, I had assumed that everybody was. So I realized that perhaps I'm more sensitive than a lot of people. I was lucky that I had my mother to let me know that being sensitive wasn't a terrible thing, because that could have really got to me. That could have made me feel criticized. This denial of someone's feelings, if you wanna call it that, sometimes now has a name. Sometimes my clients call it gaslighting. It's not my intention here to define what gaslighting actually is, but merely to point out that most of us still don't know what to do with our feelings. So much so that the denial of our feelings can be felt as abuse. And that, I think is one definition of what comfort eating does. It's often a self denial and a personal form of gaslighting or abuse, where we carry shame for having vulnerable feelings. I think men in particular have a lot of shaming around feelings, especially around fear. I read a great article recently, focusing on how men having good friendships is on the decline. The author talked about loneliness in the workplace, and quotes Max Dickens to say,"The sort of hyper-masculine traits that can block intimacy in friendships, aggressiveness, performative stoicism can become exaggerated in a competitive workplace." I know at least one dear listener who struggles with this, and I'm sure he is not alone. I also read a Facebook post about leadership recently. Here, the author suggests that masculine leadership does not mean being responsible for making all of the decisions. He says,"The world is not in need of more men that think they have it all figured out." I can hear all the women in the audience thinking,"Yep, Amen to that!" Have you noticed that when we feel pain society tries to offer us solutions, or to fix this unfixable pain? I had a problem recently. All I wanted to do was share how I was feeling,. So I started to tell my friends, And at least six of them, I kept in turn trying to find someone who would just listen), but six people gave me their opinion on what I should do. Lucky for me, my best friend was the seventh, and she was much more available. A man after my own heart. Soma, the chap who's writing about leadership, says that leadership relies on a feedback loop of paying attention to body language to tone of voice, pace of speech, the dilation of pupils and flicker of the eyes, the depth of the breath, the constriction and relaxation of the muscles. To the unspoken content that exists in the in between of the relational space. I have spoken with you before about the limbic system and the right to right brain connection. Where the right part deals with emotion, the unconscious and processing of social information. It's our right brain that speaks to the right brain of others. When we relate to each other, we're always listening at this deeper level as well as to the words. How we interpret speech is affected by both sides of the brain. We pick up what's not said, how we communicate underneath the words. We're looking for safety in this part. Living in the left brain, the rational, more logical side (which is what we are trying to do when we squash our feelings) more results in under regulation, or overinhibition, of the right brain functioning. We become blocked to our right body, to our emotion. According to research, this shows up much more in men. But isn't this something that we all need to pay attention to? Aren't we all quite emotionally unavailable? Soma suggests that,"Good leadership is in how you meet the moment with courage, consistency, and integrity that makes you a man worthy of following." Now, he is talking about men because he thinks that men need to hear this. But of course, it applies to any of us. My focus here today is on being able to apply all of this to yourself because courage, consistency, and integrity are also what it takes to guide yourself out of an addiction. But first, you need the attention described here too. You need a connection with your own right brain. As the author suggests, you cannot lead without first following, and this may take the most courage of all. Interestingly, as I thought about writing this podcast, the theme of the week in therapy was very much about validating feelings. I mean, to some extent it always is, but it seemed to just come up very specifically this week. Just being able to do this with me, being able to express exactly what people have been thinking was relief in itself. Sometimes just staying with a feeling or naming it calms the whole nervous system, and it helps it to shift. It is often the fear of the feeling rather than the actual feeling itself that causes a problem. I have a picture in my therapy room of an iceberg because that shows all of the feelings in our unconscious. What's underneath the water of the iceberg is so much more than you see on the top. What you experience really matters, despite the fact that most of us feel ashamed of how we feel. And so also in this week, of course, I had an experience of this for myself. I'm sad to tell you that my cat is still very ill. She has cancer and she took a turn for the worst a couple of weekends ago. I really thought that she was dying. She's fine. She has recovered. She's obviously on her last legs, I would say. She's gonna be on her way out at some point. She's not dying yet,. But I thought she was dying a couple of weekends ago. And so I talked to someone about how I felt acknowledging my pain was so healing. It just helped for someone to say to me,"That sounds really painful, Shelley.' It was, and I'll be honest with you, I did eat rubbish food immediately,. But as soon as I was more empowered, I didn't want it. I knew that I could cope without it. I didn't want the craving that the addiction gives me, and I was motivated by the fact that I really need my energy right now, so I need good food. I sometimes feel like I'm living in two worlds. I have one side of my life where my friends, often, lots of them are therapists or I've done some kind of training with them, and they're all really kind. They're all really considerate. They allow me to talk about how I feel and I delight in listening to how they feel. And then the other side of my life, where almost everyone else I come across has shame for feelings. This is just in the normal world. There's a culture of positive thinking in our society and an aversion to being'brought down' with lots of tips on how to be happy. Mine included probably! But these tips and this denial can reinforce the shame. I know it's natural for all of us to avoid pain and to seek pleasure. So I know this is part of what's going on here, but I also know that that shame for feeling is really powerful. I read another lovely story through Brené Brown. She quotes James Clear's book. He said that he wanted to read a book. He tells a story at this time when he just really was well into his book, and he wanted to carry on reading it, and he's on on his way to the bathroom when he noticed that his wife looked a bit sad. And he said, quite honestly, he wrote that his first instinct was to ignore her and to just keep going and to pretend that he never really saw her. How many times did we do something like that? But he said this was a pivotal moment where he had to make a choice, and he chose to help her brush her hair and to ask her what was going on for her. Clear writes,. 'There is the opportunity to build trust and there is the opportunity to betray.' As Brené Brown writes, he chose to connect when the opportunity was there. I'm sure he doesn't always, as you know, we can't do it all the time, but this was an important moment to connect and be relational with his wife. I think recovery from comfort eating is the same thing. Only the choice is about connecting with yourself first. To figuratively brush your own hair and ask how your day is going. With my clients that I talked about, who got relief from talking about their own experience, the way some of the sessions progressed; it was actually uncanny how they were all quite similar. They realised that they don't talk to their friends about how they feel and what's going on for them much.And so their next steps were to be brave and to say how they're really feeling to some people. On different levels of depth. So they start here by practicing with me. They start with themselves, and then they talk to their friends. And then they follow a path of investing in people who can make time for them,. Because the core wounding is often that they're too much, that they're not worthy, that they're too sensitive, that they can't be loved, that there isn't space for them. So then they learn to create space for themselves and in their relationships. One in particular came in saying he's personally really happy that he's got more in touch with himself. And so of course we explored that, what that means to him. And he talked of not having many friends and certainly not having any that he could talk to about what's going on for him. And so as we explored his experience, his feelings, his energy, his body, the images that he was seeing, and the memories that he was having, all of this traced back to something that really frightened him when he was a teenager. Something happened that scared him. But the thing that's had a lasting effect on him was being afraid of looking afraid in front of his classmates. We sat with his teenager and I asked him what would help. We started trying to have a conversation, but it didn't really seem to get very far. The teenager didn't want to listen. "So what would help?' I said. And after a few minutes, he helped his teenager to breathe. This was a great conversation because as we explored, he discovered that his panics that he's had for a really long time, since that teenage incident are caused by this fear suppression. So he gets on the bus and he feels frightened that he's gonna show his vulnerability, so he feels even worse and has a panic attack. We also discovered that his headaches are a sign of this old belief. That it's not right to get frightened, that it's shameful somehow. And I had another client this week who also gets frightened on trains actually, and this time normalizing her feelings and just being able to express that fear, lessened her state of fight or flight, and increased her sense of safety. So she felt more able to go on this train journey. Areas of our body and brain work together to decide how to respond to any situation. Most of this happens unconsciously. Especially when we're comfort eating. My experience is that what happens when people begin to explore their experience. Not just their feelings, but their whole experience; the body images, memories. My experience is that they start to liberate themselves from their unconscious beliefs, habits, and wounding, and they come more to embody the rational, more adult logic, much more easily. As I've said before, the two sides of the brain have trouble doing that. Being on either side of a tiny little brainstem, they have trouble communicating to each other. So through becoming more in touch with the two parts of the brain and helping them to communicate more freely and easily, you have choices. You have a choice to really feel safe now in the present instead of acting and reacting from an old memory of a lack of safety. This is really different to shutting off from our feelings and shutting down. Where the feelings will always be there in the background to bother us at some point. We often go into our brains by default, but we need our limbic system. We need to experience it without stopping it up or holding it back. Grief, fear, depression, anxiety, they're all visceral. We need to allow the experience because it's real, and this is the kindest thing that you can do about it. This is not necessarily with the intention of getting over it instantly or making it better, but because denying it isn't really what we want either. Sometimes it's not that you move through it. Often it is, but sometimes you learn to hold it. And to be kind enough to yourself that you can. Allowing it changes everything. It's a different World. Love, relationship, openness, unfolding all happen in this place. And really being known. And a lot of people do wanna be heard and seen. More so, I think, since the isolation of the pandemic. If you are anything like me, and I know a lot of you are, you are a good listener. So you know that people can talk, and talk, and talk to you, without once asking how you are. This can be exhausting if no one listens to how you are. So you have to start with yourself. You need to be seen and heard too. If only by you. Difficult emotion is an indication of resistance within yourself. And you need to follow your own path, rather than to please others. Which I know is also a thing for many comfort eaters. An ex of mine picked a ridiculous fight with me once. Have you ever had that? When you cannot say right for saying wrong and everything you do is perceived negatively? For a while, it drove me a little bit crazy trying to work out why he had suddenly stopped acting kindly towards me. He seemed irrational. But then I realized he must have picked a fight because he felt he couldn't have whatever he wanted in relationship with me, and he felt guilty. So he unconsciously had to make me wrong. At the time, before I realized this, I set to work acknowledging my experience and finding support. Coming back to myself was the key to my recovery, here. Through my own inner work, I journeyed through my people pleasing and a fear of being alone. To coming back to what I really value, which is deeper, better communication. I started with myself. And it worked out well for me. Like I said, I now have people around me who show interest in how I feel. Not necessarily those six people that I came across and told my problems to. You have to learn to be discerning about who you talk to. But I do now have people who look to themselves for the answers, and don't blame other people for how they feel. And somehow this goes hand in hand with them being able to accept my experience too. This whole dynamic was echoed by another one of my clients this week. We spent the first majority of the session actually, with her feeling very alone and very frightened of being alone. And complaining about how difficult the relationship was with her boyfriend. We did manage to explore what was going on for her. I won't go into detail about what actually happened. Needless to say, it goes back into the past with her history with her Father. But the point I'm making here is that she came out having switched. She switched from wanting to be looked after by someone outside of her. (A man), to wanting to spend time on her own and feeling better about that. Because she realized that she'd been acting from an anxiety to please. And so she turned that back on herself and she's now more interested in finding her own happiness, without the need for something outside of her. I believe that intellectualism is not what makes us happy. Read any article on happiness and the meaning of life, and it will tell you that happiness comes from relationship, friends, family, and serving others. All of this evolves from and with feeling. By the way, this is also not to be confused with people pleasing, which comes from panic about disapproval or rejection. Knowing the difference inside you, however, is another good reason to advocate inner sensing. To find out how to serve where your passions are, and without needing to prove your worth. Of course, there's an example of this in my life this week. As many of you know, I'm a salsa dancer, and I've recently gone back to assisting classes in dance, and there was one particular student. I had to leave early, and there was another student who wanted to leave early, but her car was in the garage and she couldn't get herself home. So she either had to take the next class or ask for a lift. And it took me a long time that I thought,"Can I afford to give her a lift?" Because I was looking after my cat and I needed to get home, right? So I was not sure whether I wanted to help this lady, much as I liked her. But then I thought, do you know what I'm, I'm going to, I like this woman. It's gonna make me for good, to give her a lift. So I offered her a lift. Turns out she lived five minutes away. So I really didn't lose out there at all. But just like the man reading his book, there was a part of me that's like, no, I wanna serve my own interest. And that was, it took me a while to talk myself out of that. But the lift, I've gotta say, I really enjoyed it. This lady is fabulous. We had the best conversation that I would never have had with her in the dance class, and now I consider her to be the start of a new friendship. So, I guess you cannot beat that service reaps rewards, hey! I think I'm a great advocate of it now. It makes sense that the function of feeling is to drive behavior. So knowing about feelings is also useful for recognizing when you are triggered. When your system has gone into fight, flight, freeze, fawn, or any other description of feeling insecure. Or that you lack safety and so you're looking for protection in some way. This is something I've talked a lot about, so I won't talk about it here today. You can check a lot of my other podcasts about the parasympathetic- sympathetic nervous system and the fight or flight response. But it's just to say that feelings are a response to and a way that we read our environment. Denial, one function of the sympathetic nervous system, assumption, and projection. They can all cost us dearly cuz we often get it wrong when we're in protection mode. But all of this can be reality checked if we allow ourselves to feel, to sense through an experience and to ascertain the truth. Bringing the focus back to what's actually going on inside you, taking a pause, can all help you to divert relational disaster. The point of becoming more embodied or aware of your experience as a comfort eater, is to notice how and when you cheat yourself from being engaged or kind. Getting to know your system from the inside will give you some conscious control over that. As I've said before, it's not a simple, quick fix process to overcome the habit of comfort eating. But the great thing is that when you work towards it, you get to practice feeling better about yourself and who you are every step of the way. This is the secret. This is the key. This is the thing that will help you choose a happier, healthier life. Today, first, I talked about how we all find it difficult to express how we really feel. I mentioned that much of this comes from our British or otherwise stiff upper lip culture. I talked about the shame that we carry for feeling, mentioning that men in particular may struggle with hyper-masculine attitudes, especially in the workplace. I then started to talk about ways that we can get more in touch with the experience of others. I posited that this is also what we can do for ourselves. Then I explained that right brain emotional and social processing is very different to left brain rationalizing. I explained that over rationalizing can shut us off to our emotions and to our bodies. Then I talked about how just naming feelings can be a great relief with some examples. This led to talking about the choice between connecting or shutting off, both with others and internally. Then I gave some examples of how staying with your experience goes in therapy. I explained how I see that this helps people to heal by integrating their left and right brain. No podcast on the experience of connection and emotion would be complete without talking about the meaning of life. So I briefly talked about this too. Then I spoke a little about the difference between people pleasing and serving from passion. I promoted that being in touch with your inner senses can help you know the difference. Then finally, I talked about how knowing what's going on inside you is helpful when your nervous system is triggered into defensive mode. The second to last piece of information that I want to give you today is that the apps balance and Headspace have incredibly good offers on at the moment. Headspace, I believe, is free for six months, and Balance, which is the app that I'm using, is free for a year, and I'm finding it really interesting. I think you might like it, so give it a go. And now I wanna finish on a meme that someone has just this minute sent to me. So it says,"Website says, are you a robot?"(You know the way that they do?) And the response says,"I don't know, maybe" If I can help you to feel less on automatic and more in your body, please check out my pages at undergroundconfidence.com and join my blog list. My app is in the process of being approved by Apple. So it is coming very, very soon. This is gonna be great for you if you are feeling alone in this habit, so please join that mailing list. Next week, I'm gonna give you some guided experiences to help you explore your experience more, and to help you stay with more difficult feelings. Thank you so much for listening to the end. It really is appreciated! This is Underground Confidence with Shelley Treacher. I'll see you next week.