Ann Weiser Cornell: The Real Reason You Keep Going Back to Sugar

If willpower, meal plans, and “just quit” advice actually worked, sugar addiction wouldn’t keep coming back.

In this deeply honest conversation, Florence sits down with Dr. Ann Weiser Cornell, a pioneer in trauma-informed healing and Inner Relationship Focusing, to explore the real reason so many people relapse with sugar and ultra-processed foods — and why it has far less to do with food than we’ve been taught to believe.

This episode unpacks how trauma, emotional shutdown, and inner conflict drive compulsive eating, why control and restriction often make cravings worse, and how learning to relate differently to our emotions can dissolve the inner war that keeps us stuck.

You’ll learn:

• Why sugar is often used to avoid overwhelming emotions
• How trauma disconnects us from body wisdom and choice
• Why “shoulds,” discipline, and control backfire with addiction
• What it actually means to heal the root of cravings
• How self-led decisions create peace — not inner rebellion

This is not a conversation about dieting.

It’s about safety, presence, and learning how to meet what comes up when the sugar goes down.

If you’ve ever wondered why you keep going back to sugar — even when you don’t want to — this episode will change how you see addiction, healing, and yourself.

Chapters

• 0:00 Meet Ann Weiser Cornell
• 3:32 What Makes Therapy Work
• 6:45 Trauma, Freeze, And The Felt Sense
• 10:52 From Focusing To Inner Relationship
• 16:20 Ann’s Story: Addiction And Awakening
• 24:20 Radical Acceptance Of Conflicting Parts
• 30:55 Tangled Patterns And Self In Presence
• 37:00 Focusing vs IFS: Key Differences
• 42:20 Safety, Partnership, And Everyday Practice
• 49:30 Trauma As Stoppage, Not Brokenness
• 56:30 Bringing Exiled Parts Back Home

Transcript

FLORENCE: 0:01

Hello and welcome to an interview today with Dr. Anne Weiser-Cornell. It is my pleasure to introduce you to her. She has spent a lifetime exploring the roots of emotional suffering. And she has taken her wisdom over decades, almost 40 years, and put them not into one, not two, but six different books. And what she has discovered is that the roots of healing come from awareness, compassion, and radical acceptance. I have one of her books here. It's her latest book, but she has written the book called Focusing in Clinical Practice, the Radical Acceptance of Everything. And most recently her book called Untangling, How You Can Transform What's Impossibly Stuck, which was co-authored with her friend and colleague, Barbara McCavin, and has been a leader in the focusing community. And she created her own form of focusing called interrelationship focusing. So it's kind of like her own her own unique form of parts work, really, teaching. And she's taught at the renowned institute institutions like SLN, the Psychology Psychotherapy Networker Conference, the APA, the Embody Lab. And through her organization called Focusing Resources, she's helped thousands of people around the world come into deeper connections with themselves and it untangle the different things that can get um that can create stuck patterns in our lives. Welcome, Dr. Cornell. Thank you so much. You can call me Ann. Okay, okay. I'll probably call you Wiser Cornell. Sorry about that if I got that wrong. No, actually, Cornell is my last name. Okay, okay, great, great. So I just wanted to say that I discovered Gene Janlin when I was a philosophy student in undergrad back in the late 1980s, early 1990s, and I came to Chicago to do a conference on um a philosophy conference where Dr. It was Dr. David Michael Levin. I don't know if you ever heard of him. Of course, I have one of his books right here. You do see that when philosophy came alive for me. I thought, what is this stuff? This is amazing. And I loved his books and I thought, I gotta go meet this man. I want to do my, I want to do my PhD with this. I actually that morning was my master's, I was thinking about. So I met and I I we had a conversation and we talked about Dean Jenlin and he talked about focusing. So I've been in the focusing world sort of peripherally for decades. And then of course I found your book, and then I started to sort of, and then I kind of drifted away from it, which was the worst thing any person once they've discovered focusing could ever do. But I love that all these many years later, you're still keeping it alive, you're still evolving it and you know, bringing it to the world. So thank you so much for doing that.

ANN: 2:54

Well, inner relationship focusing just keeps growing, yeah. It keeps and keeps enriching my life. It's one of those things that never gets stale or old. And helping people turn toward themselves, accept their emotions, learn how to get free of what's been holding them back. That never gets old either.

FLORENCE: 3:20

Never. Tell us a bit about focusing. Um yeah, let's just go there and then maybe we could circle back and look at how you discovered it and and what it's been.

ANN: 3:32

Focusing was discovered through research on psychotherapy done by Eugene Genlin and colleagues. Originally, the research sprang from the legendary Carl Rogers, who Genlin studied with and then became a colleague of. And the research was looking at what makes a difference. Why is some psychotherapy more successful than others? And what I love is about this story is that when they taped those sessions and took a look at them, they thought they would find that the therapist was doing something different, better in the therapy sessions that were ultimately going to be successful. They didn't find that difference. And the second thing I think is cool that they didn't stop there. But then they looked at the client. Was the client doing something different? And it turns out the clients were those that tended to be successful in psychotherapy, were doing a kind, they were paying a kind of attention to themselves, even in the first and second session. So it wasn't something they learned how to do from being in therapy. If they were already exhibiting the ability to do this funny kind of thing that Jenlin later called getting a felt sense, then their therapy tended to be successful. And if not, then all the kindness and empathicness and brilliance of their therapists didn't really help. And that's what became focusing.

FLORENCE: 5:23

Right. And really, this is where trauma starts to come in because I think I think it's fair to say there's times in my life where I've done focusing, finding the felt sense, dropping into a felt sense of something. Like almost like I couldn't talk until I had a sense of connecting to my body to make sure my words were right, that I was tuned into what I most wanted to say or what I thought and was feeling. But there's times in my life when I've been in more functioning freeze, or I've been in high sympathetic and I'm not connected to my body. It's there's too much going on in there. It's unpleasant. I don't want to be connected, or I'm, you know, I'm on this sort of checked-out spectrum. I can't get a felt sense very well. So I can see how trauma can pull us away from a connection to body wisdom, to the way that insights emerge from the felt sense. We get cut off from that. Did you want to speak to that?

ANN: 6:21

You've put your finger beautifully on the actual reason that Barbara McGavin and I felt we needed to evolve the method we had learned from Gendla. Fine, it's fine to help people get felt senses, but what if they're in a state where their felt senses are not available to them? And if you're in that kind of state, focusing doesn't work. So we need it almost like a pre-focusing. What do we need so that focusing will work? And we developed the concept of an inner relationship that is only if the inner relationship is one of acceptance, allowing openness, that the felt sense can even form. Now, this isn't contrary to what Gendlin said. He said the felt sense needs a certain kind of environment. So we were simply developing that side of things, making it more practical, giving people actual things they could do so that they could turn toward what they were feeling, including when they felt the freeze of trauma response or the shutdown. You could actually turn toward that and have a relationship with it so that felt senses and next steps could emerge. Yeah. So yeah.

FLORENCE: 7:56

Oh, I totally get that. And I there's times in my life where I wouldn't know what you're talking about. Until you've had a collapse, until you've dropped into the freeze or the trauma response, you don't know what it's what it means to be disconnected, to not have the capacity. You're so numb or dissociated, or it's so unpleasant to be in there that the last thing you want to do is be invited to drop in and feel, right? Like that is the worst advice someone could give me at some points in my life. I think that is exactly what I don't want. I want the solution to not feeling how, right, which is where addictions come in, which is where food can come in, which is where all these complicated tangles can come in. Um so tell us a bit about. I I wonder, I think it might be helpful to know a little bit more about you. I didn't start there, but let's go there and then we can get more into the into the practice, the work that you do.

ANN: 8:54

Do you mean tell you about my addiction?

FLORENCE: 8:57

Sure. Or I was thinking, how did you find focusing, or how did you land into this space and become a world expert in this? Well, okay, life story.

ANN: 9:05

All right, so I was 22 years old, and that's 53 years ago, because I'm 75 now. So we're talking about the early 70s. And by a series of coincidences, I found myself in a community center in Chicago, the southern south side of Chicago. There was this guy teaching something that was gonna help people with their emotions. Now, I came from an alcoholic family background. My dad was a drinker, my mom was an enabler, and in my family, it wasn't really safe or recognized that kids had emotions. We were supposed to always be quiet and cheerful. So I responded to that by really cutting myself off from my body. I was a smart kid. I went to, I was in, I was in grad school at this point, studying linguistics, and I felt like my emotional life was a mess, but I wasn't really in touch with that. So then I'm in this room with this guy saying, So now go to the place in your body where you have feelings. And I I don't have such a place. And I looked around the room to see, I mean, there were about 40 or 50 people there. Uh are other people understanding what he what he's saying, and they like had their eyes closed and they were nodding, and some of them had tears coming through. I don't get this at all. And from that beginning, I became a focuser because the the structure that we were using back then that I still love was called focusing partnership, where you would meet with another person and just trade the skill. One person's going inside and sensing the other person is being their companion, holding the space, not adding anything, just giving their presence. And then after half an hour, you you you trade and you take the other role. And we found everybody could do that. It's a it's a community wellness model, it's so different from people everybody having to pay for therapy. I respect therapy, but I think the world needs people to be able to give mental health attention to each other. Anyway, I was up to four focusing partners a week, and uh focusing was wonderful, it was healing a lot of blocks inside me. And uh I found myself after a few years changing my life. Instead of becoming a linguistics teacher, I became a focusing teacher. But if we fast forward about 20 years, I'm I have a I have a profession teaching focusing, I have clients, I have classes, but I'm also in a marriage to a guy who didn't really meet me, wasn't really the right partner for me. And my father had just died, and I found myself getting drunk three or four nights a week, but without any recognition that this was actually a problem. Like I'd I'd go to the liquor store, buy a bottle of wine and some junk food, go home, get drunk, then skip dinner because it would have sobered me up, and but I didn't have a problem. Part of me said, This isn't really right. What if people knew about this? Don't you think this is not a good idea? And another part of me said, I deserve to relax, other people drink more than I do, don't be silly, you know, and then I'd go to the liquor store again. And in the midst of this, I received in the mail, because this was the this was the 90s, I received in the mail an article written by Barbara McGavin, who was a new friend and colleague. And this article was her story of how she had found a way to work with her suicidal depression, which she'd been struggling with for years and hadn't found help even in focusing, until she found a way to turn with radical acceptance toward the part of her that wanted to die and the part of her that wanted to kill it. And in the article, sorry, I didn't mean to do that. In the article, she tells the story of how she had to learn to say to each of those parts, you can be the way you are as long as you need to be. And I'm sitting there in my office planning to get drunk that night. I read these words, you can be the way you are as long as you need to be. And I felt like I can't do that. But at the same time, the message from a deeper part of myself was that's what you need to do, and so within a few months I had quit drinking, but I felt confused, I felt worried that the drinking would start again because I didn't know the roots of it, I didn't know why it had been there. I thought this was a battle between two sides of myself, and temporarily the one that wanted to stop had won, but the other one was gonna burst out. And so luckily that happened when Barbara McGavin and I were together, about to teach a workshop together. And I confessed to her the state I was in, and she said, then let's do focusing. So we did, we traded focusing in every free moment. We were teaching six hours a day, and every other moment, morning, noon, night, we were trading, focusing, and making notes afterwards. And what we discovered was there's a part that wants to drink, and there's a part that is horrified, ashamed, trying to suppress it. But I don't have to identify with either one of those. I can develop the ability to be the space, just as she could. Say to her part that wants to die, part that wants to kill it, you can be the way you are, as long as you need to be. That didn't mean it could drink, but what it meant was I was not shaming it, I was not disowning it, and that enabled me to be curious. And the language Barbara had developed that she helped me say inside is you might ask it what it wants for you from doing that, and sure enough, the part that wanted to drink wanted all kinds of positive things for me. That I'd relax more easily, that I'd be creative, that I'd be spontaneous, and I acknowledged what it wanted, what it wanted me to feel from having that, and my body began to change. So the the split that comes from the lack of attention, the lack of ability to be in touch with ourselves, into this inner war between the part that wants to do it and the part that's ashamed and horrified and is trying to stop it. That inner war ended. And instead of that, I could feel myself becoming more fully myself.

FLORENCE: 17:55

Thank you. Yeah, and and what struck me when I read Untangling, which is a brilliant book, and you must get a copy, is in these totally unbeknownst parallel universes, there's Richard Swartz discovering in his psychotherapy practice this idea of parts and building relationship to these parts. Totally, you guys were not collaborating, you didn't know about each other. He's developing, you know, internal family systems, and you're developing inner relationship focusing. And they're very similar, I mean, in essence, and the heart of it, that we drop in and we connect to parts. And but the idea of a tangle, I really liked the way this relates to women in food because the ultimate tangle. There's so I I don't know anyone who doesn't have some tangle with food, even if a little bit, right? Like I think most of us are on the spectrum of a tangle. There's so many different voices in our heads about what we shouldn't eat and should eat and when we should eat and our fasting. And like there's that, and then there's pressures around weight loss for women, and then there's addictive foods. Like it's a complicated mess. And so I just feel like this untangling process that you organically with Barbara really stepped into and did your own deep healing work around is so relevant to women who struggle with food. Because for many of us, it can be decades of being in a tangle that feels impossibly stuck. So, how can what you teach and the work that you've discovered help women who are in a tangle with food?

ANN: 19:34

And by the way, Barbara McGavin had a food tangle, and we write about that in our book as well the part that wants to eat when I'm not hungry, the part that wants to eat when I have a I have an emotion that I would rather not feel, and so on. So tangles are complexes of parts, they're contradictory. Parts trying to control each other, or often with addiction, there's something that feels like it wants to escape and just do what the heck it wants to do, and something else desperate to control it. And the tragedy of that is the control is never complete. You cannot solve an addiction through control. So if we try, we feel like we're failing over and over again. But that is what a tangle is. When you try to solve it from inside it, you stay inside the tangle. So we have to get bigger. And get bigger means I'm not the one who wants to do the addiction, and I'm not the one who wants to control and stop it. I, and we call this self-in presence. I am the self who can compassionately turn toward anything inside me with curiosity, acceptance, and simply wanting to get to know it better. So we're allowing a process to happen. What I think is important to notice is that any kind of should and should not is a pretty good indication of a tangle because it means that a part of us has separated out to and feels helpless but desperate to try to control the actions and behavior of another part of us. And it uses language like should and should not, it uses um we call them disaster movies like scary images of you homeless or you, you know, 350 pounds on the couch, whatever. It it can send scary images and voices of doom, like you will never and you will always. That's a part, it's not the voice of conscience, it's not the voice of truth. And in fact, the should part is a young part. It wants to look like your, you know, authority figure inside of you that's telling you what you should and shouldn't do, and then you get identified with the one that's trying to sneak around and get away and escape from it. I mean, that pattern is just it's eternal. So if I turn toward these two parts, I say to one of them, yeah, I really hear. You want to do what you want to do, you have a longing for that kind of taste, that kind of comfort. I get that. And I turn toward the should part that wants to control, and to that one I say, please tell me what you're worried about. What you're worried will happen if you can't be in control, and then I become the listener to the worries of my, we call it a protector part, my should part that wants to say should and control everything. And it begins to change. And the reason it begins to change is that tangles happen in the absence of an actual adult self. So when I show up and I'm self-in-presence, and I'm the one turning toward everything inside, saying, I know you're there, I know you're there, I know you're there, something new has finally happened. And I'm not just repeating the tangled pattern, which is also a trauma pattern. It's a pattern of survival. It's the best we could do. And now it's not. There's something we can do that's even better.

FLORENCE: 23:59

Right. Right. It's the it's the it's the ultimate intimacy. It doesn't make sense to you experience it. That the love you can feel for a pet or a child or a partner or anybody can feel the exact same when you go in and connect to yourself that way. It's this, it's it's beautiful, um, intimate, pleasurable work once you learn how to do it and get a bit of support. But at first, when you first hear about it, when you're coming from a traumatized background and you're in a tangle, it sounds perfectly awful.

ANN: 24:34

I know that's how I felt when I first read Barbara's article. Like, what? It can be the way it is, forget it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, step by step, step by step. People don't have to buy the whole picture. I I think one easy way to start is just by practicing turning toward your emotional states with the language I teach, which is I'm sensing something in me feels. So I'm I'm anxious, change that to I'm sensing something in me feels anxious. Notice what happens, and if that much helps, then you're on track because it's not all of me that's anxious, and when I say I'm sensing something in me is anxious, and I'm saying hello to that, and I'm letting a gentle hand go to the place in my body where I feel it. What's happening is called inner relationship. Anxious has now what, for example, anxious has some company, it's not alone, and that feels good, and then that can spread to the most difficult, hopeless, can't ever change this areas of our life. I'm here to testify.

FLORENCE: 26:12

Yeah, I mean, this this is basically parts work, it's it's just your own sort of within the lens of focusing.

ANN: 26:18

Um it's parts work, but I also want to say that we differ from Richard Schwartz in that we don't believe parts are permanent. So we don't believe that ultimately your parts will change from being uh distressed and dysfunctional to being helpful and positive. No, in our work, what's what we're building is the self. This the self is growing, and you won't need a part that says you shouldn't, and a part that wants to do it. You you will be the one making those choices. And naturally, without any effort through this process, parts actually fade. And we believe parts came from trauma, that they came into existence because of trauma. And when trauma is healed, they naturally fade away like a like a river flowing into the ocean.

FLORENCE: 27:14

Right. It's like they become integrated. I think of it as like they get absorbed into the whole again, um, the energy. And I I resonate with that, Anne. So I I I I love Richard Schwartz, I love his work, I love Parts Work, but for me, is a better fit because the radical um independence of the way they frame parts work, it just doesn't resonate for me. What resonates is that it is a part that's it that's become, I like the word exile, it feels exiled, right? It does that feels like the right word for me, but that it can be brought home and when it integrates, it becomes part of the whole again. Um that resonates with me. And it feels like um it feels like a part of a family or let's say a workplace where everyone feels heard, they feel safe, they have a voice, they're appreciated, there's harmony, everyone's gonna sort of work well together. But if there's one person that's exiled and they're brought back in, you know, their gifts are brought back in, their perspective, their concerns. Like that's all we're doing is trying to figure out what parts of us are carrying wisdom that are exiled right now, that are terrified, and other parts that don't want that part being brought in. And we get to do that harmonizing. Um yeah, anyways, so I'm I'm glad you you noted that distinction because I feel it in my own body, in my own life, that there's a slight difference. And my preference for me is the focusing. But the other reason, and you mentioned it earlier, that I really, really appreciate this about Jean's work and your work and the whole focusing community is that they have destigmatized the idea that we need to work with a professional, that this there's something scary about going in to work with our stuff there can be, and professionals have a place. Absolutely. But at the same time, what about what if it was possible for someone to hold space or for you to go in and titrate the experience for as little or as much as you want? That that work can be safe. That radicalizes the whole potential path forward in terms of approaching working through trauma.

ANN: 29:30

Developing the ability to be self-in presence, to be the large self who can turn toward anything inside. That is safety, that is emotional safety. And just today I was reading a comment from somebody who was learning my method, and this person wrote, When I say something in me, the consequence is that I feel like I become a caring observer of my own feelings, and my nervous system calms down, and I feel a greater sense of inner spaciousness, and I start to feel like I'm no longer defined by my emotions, and that's basically what we need in order to do inner work safely. We need that kind of space, and we can be that space, we can be it for each other, and when I teach this process to people, I teach them to do focusing partnership, and you can be safe to do deep emotion work. The other thing I really want to, the message I want to give is that emotions are not scary. There is nothing in our emotions to be afraid of. So that's that's why healing trauma is a key factor in healing addictions. Because we often become addicted because emotions are scary. I don't want to feel that, I don't want to go there, I don't want to feel how sad I am, I don't want to feel how anxious I am, I don't want to feel how angry I am, I don't want to feel how lonely and abandoned I am. But those feelings drink from an earlier time of life, they source from an earlier time of life. It's when trauma is unhealed, the past and the present exist at the same time. I still have something in me that's frozen, that's in that time when life was too much, emotions were too much. I had to shut down, I had to find a way to survive. Yes, you did, but you don't have to now. So as we're talking about safety, I think it's also important to talk about the ability to turn toward the traumatized places inside of us. And understand that trauma doesn't result in a permanent damage, it doesn't result in brokenness. The word Barbara and I like to use is the word stoppage. Trauma is a kind of stoppage of life flowing forward in the way it needed to at that time, and that hurts, and so there's the stoppage and the hurt that we carry in our bodies, and that at the time something it was too much, and so it got layered over with processes of cutting off, not allowing, not feeling, process of freezing. Now, when you learn to be self-in-presence, and you maybe have a focusing partner who can be self-in-presence with you, you can turn toward that. Even even the hurt places, even the traumatized places, even the frozen places, they're waiting to come to life again, to take the steps of life that they were needing to take way way back then. So when we talk about people being able to heal, not necessarily with a professional, and yes, I too think professionals are wonderful, and it's wonderful that we have therapists who are who are good and all these wonderful methods that help them. We need more than that. We need we need listening and listening to ourselves to be woven into our lives, so we can give these skills to each other. And I have a vision of a world in which people know these skills, they've they've learned them in school, they learned them in their communities and their families, the skill of skills of listening and accepting and allowing, and which is the opposite of blaming and shaming. Wouldn't that be a great world? One step at a time.

FLORENCE: 34:27

A great, great world, yes. And it really sort of brings us back to the idea of self-love and why why do you believe that it's key that we we learn to love ourselves so that we can heal from trauma and addictions?

ANN: 34:43

So trauma starts when something that your living self needed wasn't available. And maybe it was to have your body integrity respected, or maybe it was to have somebody look at you, smile at you, be glad you exist. So I like to say that what's meant to happen, right, what our bodies are ready for is to be treated with uh with love by those around us. Sure, to be fed and to be held securely, but studies have shown that children and orphanage, children and orphanages, if they're only given their physical needs, but they're not smiled at and laughed with and played with, they fail to thrive, sometimes even die and certainly don't do well, both physically and emotionally. So we're we're born into this life needing a kind of relationship from the people around us. And when all is well and the people around us weren't aren't also carrying stoppage, they'll do that naturally. But it often doesn't happen the way it should. So what I understand trauma as being is when the next step of life that our bodies were naturally ready for wasn't available, wasn't possible. I I have recovered the memories of reaching for my dad to for him to smile at me and love me. Dad was a veteran of World War II. He carried trauma from that and probably from his own childhood. It was it it um it was too much for him that he had a little kid dependent depending on him. He would prefer to go in his study and read and do and do his thinking. So he would turn away from the little girl reaching for him with love. So what happened to me inside? I must not be lovable. It's natural to be loved, we're born lovable, and we're born ready to love and be loved, but when that doesn't happen, we carry the lack of it, and it turns into beliefs like I'm not lovable, there's something wrong with me. Why? Because kids like to make sense of the world, and the most obvious way to make sense of dad doesn't like to be with me is I'm not lovable, and that turned into a whole, I don't know, 20 or 30 years of uh getting crushes on unavailable guys and uh finding myself in relationships that weren't really good for me, and eventually I traced that all back to something something missing at the very start. Dad wasn't trying to hurt me, that's not what is classically called abuse, but it happens that there's something in us longing for love, and rightly so. Every child is born lovable. So now let's love ourselves, but it's not maybe as simple as that, because many methods have said just love yourself, and then we're like, how do I do that? So I think when we use the methods that I'm that I'm advocating, where you pause and sense your emotions, and you can sense them in your body, and then also sense the objections, like that's too much to feel. Uh, if I feel that I'll get in trouble. Uh, if I show how I feel, other people won't like me. They're called resistance, you can call them objections. Those also we turn toward. So it's really a radical acceptance of everything, is in the title of one of my books. That we turn toward anything that we're feeling with curiosity. Well, it's really easy because if you're turning toward something you're feeling and you want to be curious about it, and then you're not, I'm not curious because I don't like it. Then you turn toward that. So it grows with practice, but that's what leads to self love, is what I'm saying. Is that as you treat in a loving way everything that arises inside you, it is a practice that ends up with self love itself growing inside. And and then you can especially Turn toward those thoughts and voices that say, I'm not good enough, I'm not as good as other people, I'm not beautiful, my body isn't right the way it is. And have a process of listening and gentleness with those parts. And what they ultimately are worried you'll have to feel, what they're trying to protect you from. And that also leads toward loving ourselves.

FLORENCE: 40:36

And what happens if you're doing this work and you drop in? I just for some reason, I think it's a Sinead O'Connor song. It's just keeps coming to mind as I'm having this interview with you. And it's a line from a song, and I think it's by Sinead O'Connor, and she talks about feeling like a little girl who's on the outside of the house looking in the window. Like she's exiled, right? That she's I know that feeling. I totally. And maybe the people inside the house are laughing and connecting, and you just feel alone. So in our childhood, there's abuse, neglect, and abandonment. And abandonment can be so invisible. Obviously, it could be someone left. That's different than those subtle moments when we feel like you did as a child when you reached out for your dad and he just wasn't there. He just wasn't able to meet you there. And so those little moments of abandonment, and we sort of feel like we're the child that, you know, we're outside the house looking in. And what we're doing is we're trying to figure out those parts that are outside, holding the pain of abandonment, holding the pain of neglect and abuse from the past, and how to invite them in to the warmth of present. You're welcome here. It's okay that you're scuffy. Maybe you've got mats in your hair, maybe you're a bit jittery or weary, or you don't trust people, you're a bit snappy or a bit, whatever. You're still welcome. You're still safe here. You can still, you know. And so we're collecting these parts that have been exiled and we're bringing them home. But what happens if you do bring in a part that feels OCD or not? I didn't mean to say that, the ODD, the oppositional defiance, if they feel disruptive and like it's too much anger or it's too much grief, or you feel like you're still afraid of the feelings that that child is carrying and bringing up. What do you do in those scenarios?

ANN: 42:24

Then you turn toward the part of you that's afraid of the feelings. Who is it in you that's calling it too much?

FLORENCE: 42:34

That's the one to turn towards so bringing it back to food. So foods can be food can be a huge tangle. So for example, if you come from the background of sugar addiction or food addiction, and you're taught the concept of abstinence, these foods aren't real foods, they're not great for the body, they're they have opiate properties that can trigger cravings and binge eating. How about we just not eat them like alcohol? We just let them go, right? So it seems like a reasonable, rational, very life-changing decision for many people, but there can be parts that don't want to let them go, and you can get up into this tangle. So uh walk us through what someone would do when there's a part that rationally, so it's a part that rationally believes this is a really great decision for my health, my body, my mental health. I'd like to make that decision. I'd like to move forward with that. And then there's another part who's like, can we have treats sometimes? Like how get into the food tangle with us a little bit.

ANN: 43:33

Well, what comes in me right now is paying attention to the actual way your body feels. So we've talked about parts and how to be with parts, but focusing in a relationship focusing is also about sensing your body. And when I was working with the part that wanted to drink, and I asked it, what do you want me to be able to feel? And I got the message of a sense of freedom, a sense of relaxed sensuality, a sense of spontaneity, and I realized I can feel those things now. So I paid attention to how did my body actually feel and how did I want my body to feel. Now, about eight years ago, I quit eating sugar, and I did it because I noticed that eating sugar was interfering with my sleep, and that I'd made a choice that sleeping was more important to me than the joy of eating the chocolate bar with comments. But sometimes I still eat something with sugar, and I always pay attention to how it makes me feel. What's the feeling that comes? And what's the wanted feeling? A friend of mine is is working on not putting sugar in his coffee. And uh the other day I saw him put the two sugars in as usual, and uh and then I looked at him afterwards and I said, and and uh how does it feel? He says, I can feel the sugar, and I don't really like that feeling. So what we're growing, you know, as we say say hello to parts and as we say hello to the shoulds, because the shoulds get in the way of actually feeling how we want to feel. We're growing our ability to choose positively, not because we are supposed to, not because we have to, but because we actually want the result, the way the body then feels. And so that's blended in in any kind of addiction. Like I thought it felt wonderful to drink, but not drinking turned out to feel even more wonderful. I mean what felt wonderful about drinking was not having to feel anything. But and so not drinking opened up a whole complex of feeling what I actually feel, sometimes up, sometimes down. But I realized I do prefer that. So I want to help people stay with what they want and what they prefer, because it's really clear to me that if we rule our lives by should, by what other people tell us to do, and by so I need to follow those rules, that's gonna result in a backlash. That there's gonna be something in us that resents obeying the shoulds that will break out at some point, and it doesn't feel good to live that way, it's not a sustainable way of living. So, how is it? What do I choose? What do I choose because I like what happens when? Like my friend will choose not to put sugar in his coffee, not because he's supposed to do it that way, but because he likes what happens when he doesn't.

FLORENCE: 47:36

Right. So there's there's a part that can make a decision. We're not eating sugar, or we're not putting sugar in our coffee, or we're not gonna binge eat anywhere, or we're not gonna drink, or whatever it is. And when a part makes the decision, other parts will react and you're still in the tangle. But it's possible for the self to be so um aware of the two choices and to choose the one that feels better, that when it's a self-led decision, there isn't this inner rebellion that the parts are soft and there isn't the resistance and all the conflict. Um, I will say that for me, that when I first and I've been in and out of on and off of sugar and in and out of the ditch and in and out of food my whole life. And I've had long, long stretches, and I'm in a deeply, deeply peaceful place, but I choose abstinence, but I know it's self-led. There is zero conflict, it is completely effortless. In fact, I look back in times in my life where I thought it was almost impossible to get a day. An hour felt like I was like pacing. It felt really difficult to eat three meals and whole foods and no snacks. Today it feels like the easiest thing on earth, like what was ever hard about that? There's nothing hard about that at all. If it's hard, there's something else going on. Rare exceptions aside, when you're traveling or something like that, but it's not hard. And it's very, very, very, very peaceful. So I know that it's not a part that's trying to force an outcome, but it doesn't mean we don't get to the same. I'm an abstinent woman. I choose to be sugar abstinent. But I'm I'm I was able to get to a place where it has that feeling of the whole system is peaceful with that. And the focusing work was really, really important to that. But at the same time, I have to say there were times where there was a decisive decision that it felt like borderline part-like, where it was like, so, you know, where you kind of draw lines and you kind of have to sort of hold steady till the cravings are over. And I can also say, and I'll let you speak to this, I really want you to speak to this because I think this will be other people's experience. It wasn't like I immediately felt better when I dropped the ultra-processed foods and the snacking and the binging. I didn't feel better. It didn't feel better at all. I felt like a skinned cat. I felt overwhelmed. I felt raw. I felt anxious. The food went down, my stuff came up. Right. So it's not like, oh, wow, I put the food down and I feel so great. Like, oh, I definitely prefer that. That was not my experience. So, but I still had to hold steady, hold steady, hold steady. So, anyways, I'll pause there and see if you could speak to that.

ANN: 50:24

Well, absolutely. The picture you paint is a more complete picture than the simplicity of it just feels better to not eat sugar and so on. Because one of the functions of addiction, perhaps the main function, is to help us avoid the unpleasant, stressful, overwhelming, unmanageable emotions. And they will come. And so if we have a way to be with those emotions, we're better equipped to choose to set down the addictive behaviors that we've determined are in our way of living more fully. And uh yeah, I agree. I agree with everything you're saying. It's important that it doesn't necessarily feel good. And I do, you know, when I when people say to me, Well, should I just do whatever feels good? I remember my days of drinking. And I say, No, I don't think the guidance is do what feels good. I think the guidance is do what feels right, and there's a subtle difference there because because to to feel your inner sense of rightness, of alignment with what you know to be true, it's actually a feeling, it's not just an idea, but it doesn't feel the same as just following whatever feels good.

FLORENCE: 51:46

Right, right. Trauma is right, and this is why I'm literally doing this summit, because this was the missing piece for me. I tried, I tried the what feels right in the sense of what feels like pleasure, what feels like comfort, what feels like soothing, what feels like, ooh, I get to feel good, right? So I bastardized intuitive eating to be, ooh, how can I eat in a way that helps me to continue to avoid feeling anything unpleasant or too vulnerable or something that might be coming up, a part that feels an opportunity to rise to the surface to say, hey, I'm outside. Can you see me now? Have you got space? Can I come back in? I was like, what the hell are you doing here? So it's so important that for those of us who continue to struggle with food, and it's just, you know, a tangle that goes on and on. This is the missing piece. Like, how do we learn the skills to understand what trauma is, how to learn the skills that you teach so that we know how to meet and greet when our food goes down or anything goes down, our self-soothing fo-regulation, you know, goes down and what comes up that we know what to do with it. And understanding trauma and understanding the work that you do is the missing piece for so many of us. And it doesn't mean we can't be structured with our food choices. It doesn't mean we can't make a decision. I'm not smoking anymore. I'm not right. It just means that the way that it happens is not inside the tangle, it's with the self and presence in play, which which I hope is a bit of a summary of what I heard from what you're sharing today. Beautiful. Well done. Is there any final words you'd like to share today or say today on the topic of women, food, and trauma?

ANN: 53:31

Well, I just want to say that you can start now by using this language that I like to teach, which is if you say I'm angry, I'm sad, I'm anxious, change your language to something in me. Something in me is angry. Something in me is sad, something in me is anxious. And notice what happens when you do that. If it brings up a little more compassion and curiosity, a little more ability to turn toward what you feel, that's the first step. And I know you're gonna tell people some resources that I have that they can easily follow to take the second and third step after that. But people can start right now.

FLORENCE: 54:15

So I love the three steps that you shared earlier. And one of the things that you're teaching in your book is to say the word hello and welcome. Sense it in your body. If you can, that gets better over time. If you're numbed out and dissociated, that could be tricky. But take a wild guess. I say to I say to my clients, take a wild guess. If it was somewhere where we, you know, where's your wild guess? So you'd put your hand on there, you say hello and welcome, you put your hand there, and then you could say something in me is feeling anxious, something in me is feeling whatever. And you just hold space and you pause there. And then for sure, you're gonna want to get Anne's book and you're gonna want to access all of her many, many resources. There is a series of video videos that Anne um does called Focusing in Stressful Times. Have I got that right?

ANN: 55:00

It's actually called Support for Stressful Times. And yes, there's a YouTube channel, Focusing Resources. And I do one every month. It's a live webinar, too.

FLORENCE: 55:10

The live webinar, I make all my clients watch her stuff, all of them. Um I make them by her book. It's Mandatory Reading in my coaching programs. And she has nine videos there, and they're about a half hour long, and every single one of them is gold. It's a gem. And I have to tell you, I have clients that are in their 70s and 80s that are watching and still shining, healing, teaching, living, right? Like I feel like on so many levels, not only is your content healing and beautiful and life-changing for people, but you're 75 years old doing this still. Like I feel like that's such permission for people to still be alive and you know, living and giving. And like I just the opposite of being in an old folks' home in a wheelchair. Thank you so much. So say your websites again, maybe a few of your book titles, how people can connect with you.

ANN: 56:08

Focusingresources.com. And if you go there and click on the upper right, it says free intro course. That's the one that people should start with. So my first book is called The Power of Focusing. My second book is called The Radical Acceptance of Everything. If you're a therapist, you might like Focusing in Clinical Practice. I have a book called Presence, a Guide to Transforming Your Most Challenging Emotions. I have a book called 21 Days to Better Boundaries, a guide to setting boundaries with kindness and compassion. And then there is the latest and greatest My Life Work with Barbara McGavin, the amazing Barbara McGavin, untangling how you can transform what's impossibly stuck. If you want to get one, get this one.

FLORENCE: 57:03

Thank you so much. And I I don't love the words I love you. I don't know why, but I do I do like the words I send love to you. I feel love for you. You are a beautiful woman. Thank you for your work. Thank you for being on our summit. And uh thanks everybody for tuning in today. I hope you love this interview as much as I did. Bye bye.