The effect of your UPBRINGING on your mental health - How to heal

Today’s podcast is about undoing the lack of confidence learned from your early relationships.

The first thing to wrap your head around is understanding that the discomfort you feel in the present (that makes you want to comfort eat or act out) may relate to something relational from your past. This may be why your discomfort is so intolerable, or so difficult to manage. Here, I’ll show you how you can start to heal.

Another podcast you might love: How Do I Stop Self-Criticism?

Citations
Some ideas here were inspired by a Nicabm training on working with relational history. You can buy your full training programme here

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:07

Hi, this is Shelly Treacher from the Binge and Overeating Recovery Podcast. Today's podcast is all about undoing relational conditioning. The first thing to wrap your head around is understanding that the discomfort you feel in the present that makes you want to comfort eat may relate to something relational from your past. This may be why your discomfort is so intolerable or difficult to manage. Here I'm gonna talk about how you can start to heal. But first I have a question and a comment. The question is how do you undo early childhood conditioning? Then she goes on to say, in my family, upsetting feelings were always medicated with food. Mum and dad had a blazing row on Christmas Eve like they do every year. Mum gives me hot mince pies and cream. Grandma's unwell and in hospital. Unlimited chocolate cake, chocolate bars, and fries are given to me, which mum would eat as well. And so on and so on. The compulsion to eat when upset is hard to break for me. It has to be food. A warm bath, a rheumatherapy candle, a hug doesn't even come close. I'm sure all of this is relatable to so many people listening in, and I hope that today's podcast will start to answer that question for you. Pretty much all of my podcasts are about understanding the habits you're in and finding ways to tolerate emotion differently. On the back of your comments here about familial conflict and comfort eating, today's podcast and the theme of the next few weeks is about undoing relational conditioning. Though you may also want to check back on the habits podcast that I did a few weeks ago. So like I said, the first thing to get your head around is understanding how how you feel in the present might relate to something that happened a long time ago to you. From last week's podcast, start by identifying which attachment style you relate to the most, what kind of caregiving you got as a child, and what kinds of relationships you have now. Did your caregivers attend to all of your needs? Or were they sometimes there and sometimes not? Or were they seemingly uninterested in your well being at all? And is this reflected in the kinds of people you hang out with now? Whatever the original wound is or was for you, this is likely something that still resurfaces. This is normal for all of us. So for example, if your parents were sometimes attentive and sometimes not, as mentioned last week, you might struggle to believe that someone could be fully there for you, and you may have developed anxiety around that. How did you cope with how your parents treated you growing up? I know I coped as a teenager by listening to music in my bedroom and writing poetry for hours, as well as watching a lot of television and eating pepperami. This was the eighties. How did that develop in later life for you? For me, I spent a large chunk of my relational life with men who weren't available emotionally. Quite honestly, it's only in recent years that I've found people who I feel really appreciated by. It's a two-way street. I had to learn to appreciate myself before I could even spot the people who did or didn't have the capacity to appreciate me. Then I could allow others who appreciated me into my life. One thing that you can do is lay out a map for yourself of how this all happened for you and to get to know what triggers you. I know that I can be triggered by what I perceive as rudeness, criticism, or disengagement. This is common for the anxiously attached. The anxious brain can quickly make up a story of feeling uncared for. The key to overcoming this patterning and triggering that may lead to comfort eating is in giving yourself time and attention. Partly in being able to recognize what's going on for you. Then, as I said last week, you have to learn to tolerate your affect or your feeling. For me, I've been learning to tolerate that feeling of being treated badly or disconnected with, recognizing that it comes from my past and may not be the truth about the present situation. I know that I see the world through this lens when I'm triggered. All of this helps you to see that you have a choice, so that you can choose to jump out of the unconscious system of reactions that you have. This develops so that it becomes quicker over time. When I realize I'm triggered, I first set about trying to calm my nervous system down. Lots of my previous podcasts are about this, so you may want to check back on some of them. Because what happens when you're triggered is your system goes into fight, flight, or freeze. So it needs to find equilibrium first. Then I can often see the situation from a different angle, recognizing that it's my primal wound that got triggered. I can see that the current situation may be very different to how I imagine. For example, the person I feel treated badly by may be feeling stress of their own, and so reacting from fight, flight, or freeze themselves. This is often the case actually. I'm learning that with my partner, when I feel he has been brisk or disengaged with me, it's because he has something of his own going on, or I do. It's only once I've calmed down, been understanding with myself, and become more objective about the situation that I can feel into the subjectivity of him or the other person. The idea here is that you learn how to downregulate your shame, your fear, your rage, and you learn to upregulate pleasure and joy. The thought is that when you find the safety in yourself, you will then find it in and with others. I've seen this play out so many times with my clients and also in my life. Remaining emotionally connected with yourself or with anybody else is key. And the thing that we don't do when we're in defensive mode. This is the domain of the right brain of emotion. And it's this part that needs to be contacted to heal. Like I said last week, the two sides of the brain have totally unrelated domains and jobs, so we have to work triggering through in the unconscious emotional experience of the right brain. The left brain cannot rationalize emotional experience until there's been an experiential right brain shift. Mindfulness is one of the ways you can evoke this self-intelligence. This is attention to how you feel, observation of your body and the state that you're in. Here you're in the present moment where you can re-establish control and learn to recognize your choices. Here you can recognise that before you assumed something outside you was in charge. I can't tell you how many times people who come to me say that they feel like something else is making them eat. Whatever we believe is happening is what we will see. So if I believe my partner or men are cruel, selfish, and critical, that's what I'll see. And I'll look for evidence of this. But to heal, we need to open our systems to relate to others. Which is of course what we're also afraid of. With trauma, we're just looking for safety and survival. We're focused on fear. Our nervous systems are too triggered to be curious or to explore. So allowing these interactions to arise gives us an opportunity to work with it. You can see every conflict as an invitation to explore. In staying connected, you allow co-regulation or interrelation to happen. Here are some of the ways to explore what's going on for you and how to take back the control. For one thing, you can be a secure attachment figure yourself. Be someone you can rely on and turn to, particularly for you. Get your adult self to nurture your child self. Sit with your child feelings. Tolerate and validate those feelings. I talked about this in the Self-Worth podcasts about a month ago. Another thing you can do is to create more secure attachment relationships. Find secure attachment figures. That's what therapy is, but it's also powerful in my groups, where people learn to relate honestly, perhaps for the first time. Another thing you can do is hang out with people who can self-regulate. If you do this, you'll start to resonate and corregulate with them. Something else you can do is use animals or imagery of animals to explore connection. Sense the feel of fur as you touch it with love. Experience the warm feelings you have, maybe in your chest. This is particularly helpful for people who don't feel safe with other people. Allow this practice and experience it. Something else you can try. Binge or comfort eaters have more difficulty tolerating positive emotions. So you need to expand that vocabulary and the feelings themselves. List all the positive feelings that happened this week. Assess how much positive emotion do you tolerate? How long do you tolerate it for? Do you slip into negative when you're actually feeling positive? And then another thing that you can do is build your observer of all the different parts of you. For example, explore in a safe environment, and you may need a professional or therapy group to explore this, but you can also imagine it yourself. Notice what it's like to receive a hand on your back for support. What does that bring up in you? Explore is the operative word here. It may not feel safe at first. Kindness, compassion, and empathy can also be triggering or overexposing, and can invigorate feelings that you can't tolerate. In fact, anyone may be a trigger for someone at any time, so it can't be avoided. You may, for example, explore how you keep yourself small. One part of you may be physically dissociative, or you may explore a part that wants to fight back. Just like with the child and adult work, the idea is to get these parts communicating, to integrate through your bodily experience of both states, and as I say, you may need a professional to do this safely. What's it like to push out versus to recoil, for example? What can you learn about yourself here? Something else you can do. You can also explore how occasionally you cope better. Write all about how you do that sometimes, and what it takes to be able to do that. Even if it is quite rare, even if it was a long time ago that you felt that you did that. Think of a time when you did cope with something you don't normally cope with very well, and just think about what it took for you to be able to do that. And then conversely, you can explore what do you need when you get dysregulated? Look at each different need separately. For example, if you stub your toe, do you need a hug or a moment alone? Another way of exploring is to ask what would life be like if you weren't repeating this pattern in this trauma response, and to really visualize that. And then finally, how would you know when you're done with needing help with this? Who would you be and what would be happening? If you no longer needed help with your eating, what would your life look like? The aim is always to reinstate choice, because that's what's been lost. The choice of feeling trust and safety. So the learning is about feeling safe in your body, tolerating affect, and learning to tolerate others. One of the other areas that I work in is love addiction and codependency. There are surprising parallels between these and comfort eating, and often all of these go hand in hand, where they're all used to regulate difficult emotion or experience. So next week I'm going to talk about a fear of abandonment specifically, and about rejection. Thank you so much for listening. If you want to get all the information about everything that I have to offer, which is more than this podcast, please sign up for my newsletter. The Understand Your Comfort Eating group that I'm running in October is almost full. So please be in touch if you want more help with quitting comfort eating. People have been asking me to run the programme that I run about relationship and looking for love. So I'm gonna be running that one soon as well. Please let me know if you're interested in that. There are a few people who've already signed up, so I'm expecting it to go quickly. As ever, I would so much love to hear your comments or answer your questions. So please do ask me anything that you feel you need to ask. It won't be irrelevant, I promise you. Somebody somewhere, and probably a lot of people, will find it an important question. So please do ask anything that you want to. Your name will always be kept confidential unless you ask me to do otherwise. Thank you so much for listening again. I'll see you next Wednesday.