Develop Two-Way Trust

We are in the middle of a deep dive into the eight solutions to unwinding binge eating. 

If you are just tuning in:

Episode 1 is my story and what I mean by binge.

Episode 2 summarizes the 8 reasons why you binge.

Episode 3 gives you the solutions to each of the 8 reasons. The how to. 

Episodes 4-8 have been a deep dive into each reason.

Each episode stands alone, so if you join me for the first time, you won't miss anything. You may want to go back and listen to the others, but you don't need any background for this to be a breakthrough concept for you today.

This week we are talking about the #6 reason you binge - it's an attempt to control.

Many people who struggle with feeling out of control around food logically think that the answer is that they need to control themselves more.

They try to control their weight, their appetite, and their intake.

They don't trust themselves - especially when it comes to making food choices, or they don't trust themselves to be around certain foods.

So what's the solution? Develop trust. If you trust someone, you don't need to control them.

Learn what trust is and how it's developed, and discover the essential component of two-way trust.

Remember, this takes time. Trust is developed. As you continue practicing the skills you are learning on this podcast, you will naturally build and establish trust with yourself. 

You can develop the necessary two-way trust to unwind from binge eating with commitment, consistency, connection, communication, and compassion.

Want to know why you struggle with food and what to do next? Start watching The Food Freedom Mini Series today. 

Transcript

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Welcome to Binge Breakthrough. The pocket design to help you finally break through the barriers to keep you stuck feeling out of control. I'm Master Certified Coach Jane Poker, and I want you to know that no matter how long you've been struggling or what you've tried, food freedom is possible. I'm here to show you how to hear the therapy, eating disorders treatment, restrictive diet, and reading all the second cycle of restricting and big able to see it all from a new perspective. Each week I will share the strategies, tools, and mindset that allowed me to overcome my decades-long battle with binge eating. Your journey to body trust starts now. Let's dive in. Hello, trusted listener. Welcome to episode 9 of Binge Breakthrough. I consider you a trusted listener because I trust that you are listening to this episode at a time that is going to be so pivotal for you. No matter what you are doing, no matter where you are, why you are listening to this episode, I trust that this is going to be a powerful time for us together. And this may just be the concept that changes things for you as you work on creating your own personal breakthrough as it relates to your eating patterns. So we are in the middle of a deep dive into the eight solutions to unwinding binge eating. If you're just tuning in for the first time, let me give you a little bit of a roadmap of where we've been. So in episode number one of the podcast, I shared my story so that you can understand where I've been and how I might be able to help you in your own journey. I also talked a little bit about what I mean when I talk about binge eating. And then in episode two, I shared the eight reasons that I see why most people binge, the main eight reasons. And then in episode number three, I gave a summary of the solution to each of those eight reasons, the how to stop. And then what we're doing now is we are in the middle of a deep dive where each episode is a deep dive into the solution for how to stop for each of the reasons why you binge. Now, I want you to know that each of these episodes stands alone. So if you are just joining me for the first time, you are not missing a thing. Now you might decide that you want to go back and listen to the others, but you don't need any other background for this episode to be a breakthrough concept for you today. All right, so this week we are talking about the number six reason why you binge. And that is an attempt to control. So many people who struggle with feeling out of control around food logically think the answer is they need to control themselves more. If I already feel out of control, then all I need is more control. So they try to control their weight, their appetite, their food intake. And this is because they don't trust themselves, especially when it comes to making food choices, or they don't trust themselves to be around certain foods. So what's the solution to this? The solution is to develop trust. If you trust someone, you don't need to control them. And what happens is that when we attempt to control, when we don't trust and we have this attempt, we're trying to control so hard. In that attempt to control, we're actually creating more of the out of control feeling. So it makes a lot of sense that logically, oh, well, I feel out of control. I just need more control. It's actually the opposite is true. You need more trust. You don't need more control. If you needed more control, your attempts to control would be working. So I want to offer to you that trust is actually what you need. It's not more control, it's more trust. Okay, so what is trust? If you listened to last week's episode where I talked about emotional capacity, I talked about one of my favorite resources, which is word hippo. Word hippo is a uh, you can get it, you can get an app, you can get it on the internet, and it basically will give you definitions of words, it will give you synonyms of words. Um, if you are a crossword person, word hippo is a great uh resource also. But I love to go to word hippo. And so, of course, I go to word hippo to look at the definition for trust. And three definitions really caught my eye that I wanted to share. So one is complete faith in the reliability of someone or something. A second definition was the protective care or guardianship of someone or something. And the third definition was to have faith in. And I loved all three of these, especially when it talks, when it comes to trusting yourself, trusting your body. So, number one, complete faith in the reliability of someone or something. Now, this does not mean that your body has to be perfect or that you have to fully rely on the reliability of your body because our bodies are going ever changing, always and ever changing. But we can have faith in it that it's going to communicate with us. Now, this isn't perfection, none of this is perfection, but it's the reliability of it. The second definition, the protective care or guardianship of someone or something. Do you protectively care for your body? If you don't trust it, maybe not. A lot of people don't. But when you do have that protective care, it's so powerful to have faith in. Now, none of these things, again, this is not perfection. This doesn't mean we don't make mistakes. It doesn't mean there are times that we don't protectively care for ourselves, we don't rely on ourselves, we don't have faith in ourselves, but we can always come back to that. So now that we have some basic definitions of trust, how is trust developed? Trust is not developed right away. This is not a switch that we just turn on a switch and all of a sudden we have trust. It's developed generally over time. But I want you to think about this. As I talk about trust and how it's developed, I want you to think about how it's played out for you personally. Think about someone in your life that you trust. The person, if you could think of the one person in your life that you trust the most, do you have that person in mind? Now, if you had a hard time coming up with somebody in your life that you trust, that is very important information. This is not a bad thing. It doesn't mean something's wrong, but this is very valuable information. So you can start to get really curious. Wow, do I have a hard time trusting anybody? If so, if trust is a very difficult concept for me, it's something that I have a hard time um building, developing, what how does that make sense? Why do I think that trust is challenging for me? Now, if you are somebody who does trust somebody who has at least one person in their life who they very much trust, think about that. I want you to think about this person. Did you trust them right away? Or did it build and develop over time? It's very likely that it happened over time. Now, the reality is that trust is a decision. We make a commitment, we make a decision, and then we start developing it. Then we start taking steps, consistent steps over time to create that trust. But many of us don't make that decision right away. It's something that happens over time, it develops over time through experiences. Here are the key components to developing trust respect, open communication, consistency, expressing your feelings, and vulnerability. Now, if you're thinking about trust with somebody else, you can likely think, and you do have somebody who you trust deeply. It is likely that all of these components are present for you. Respect, open communication, consistency, expressing your feelings, and vulnerability. It is likely that all of those are present in that relationship. Now let's look at your relationship with yourself. Respect. Do you respect your body? Open communication. Are you openly communicating with your body? Remember, episode number seven, we talked about how to connect with your body. We talked that the body is always communicating with us. We just aren't always listening. So that open communication, it is part of developing trust. Consistency. Are we doing these things? Are we having respect and open communication? Are we doing these things on a consistent and regular basis? Or are we checking out? Are we disconnecting more than we are connecting? What about expressing your feelings? This goes back to the last episode, episode number eight, where we talked about expanding your emotional capacity, your ability to express your feelings. This starts with just knowing what you're feeling, being able to check in, to name your emotion, to see what it feels like in your body, to inquire with yourself to see what you might need, expressing your feelings. Vulnerability. Vulnerability is when we open ourselves up, when we might expose something that we typically don't want to expose. Now, when you do this with yourself, it's going to be some of this might literally be, it might be very vulnerable for you to expand your emotional capacity, to turn inwards, to attempt to connect and see what's going on for you, to invite yourself to a tablespoon more of emotion than you generally than generally feels comfortable for you. Each of these ways is how we develop trust. And it's how we develop trust with other people, but also with ourselves. So these are all such key components: respect, open communication, consistency, expressing your feelings, and vulnerability. When it comes to self-trust, our awareness is so important. The awareness of what's happening, our thoughts, our feelings, and the ability to express and to communicate them. It's this trust in your own ability to handle whatever arises. So as you do the work that we talked about in the last two episodes, connecting with your body, communicating with your body, expanding your emotional capacity, you are building trust with yourself. The other way that you build trust and you develop trust, it's by honoring your commitments to yourself, by setting boundaries. Those boundaries might look like what you tolerate for yourself, what you tolerate from yourself, from other people. What are those boundaries that you want to set for yourself? The other component that's so important is being kind to yourself. Think back to that person you have in mind who you have trust with. Is there kindness between yourself and that person? Are you their biggest advocate? You want to become your own biggest advocate. Now, we talked about this is not perfection. So what happens when trust is interrupted? I love thinking about this as an interruption of trust. You might hear out there, you might hear like a breach of trust, or my trust has been broken. That sounds very permanent and it sounds very um, it sounds very harsh. I like to think it, think about it as trust being interrupted. So this isn't black and white. And remember, those of us who struggle with binge eating, we can often have black and white thinking. Trust is not black and white. It is not on or it's off. So trust is developed. If there is an interruption in trust, it doesn't mean that it's broken, that it has been breached, that it's not possible, or that it's not available. It just means it has been interrupted. Consider it like your Wi-Fi signal. Sometimes our Wi-Fi signal gets interrupted. We don't make that mean a big thing. We know there's a drop in the signal. We need to fix it. So we go, we can go to work on oh, the interruption, but we can bring that signal back. So the key steps, if trust is interrupted, are to take responsibility, reflect, understand what happened, communicate openly, honor your commitments, and kindness and compassion have to be at the key, at the center of all of it. Okay, so let's put this into practice. What would this even look like? Let's say after a bench, if there has been a bench, if you have benched, this would be an interruption in trust. So what are you gonna do after a bench? What are you gonna do? You are gonna take responsibility for it. Okay, I made this choice. What where did where did that happen? Now, when we take responsibility, there is a difference between responsibility and blame. We don't have to judge ourselves, we don't have to blame ourselves, but we can see that there was a decision made. Now, sometimes it doesn't even feel like a decision when it comes to binging. That absolutely is the experience that it feels like it wasn't even a decision. But as you go through this process and over time you reflect on what happened, you can see, oh, okay, I can actually see where I made that choice, where I might have even started to think about binging what I might eat way before the food actually entered my mouth. I can see, oh, this reflection of when did that all even start? We reflect on it, understanding it. This goes back, this whole thing of understanding, it goes back to the number one reason and the number one solution. The number one reason why we binge is shame and judgment about the behavior. As we're looking back on an interruption in trust, if we're looking back at a binge, we have to remember step number one, which is removing the shame and judgment. And it's understanding. So we want to understand why, how does this make sense? And then this open communication. We want to communicate openly with ourselves. It does not have to be the beatdown and the shame and the judgment. Think back to the other person, the person you have that you trust. If you can think about that person and there is an interruption in trust with that person, what do you do? The most effective communication is going to be open communication, discussing what happened, reflecting on it. It's not going to be blaming, shaming, judging. None of us uh respond well to that type of communication. You aren't going to respond well to that yourself either. So you want to reflect on it, understand, have that open communication with yourself. Some people like to do that in a journal, just writing out what happens. Honor your commitments. Honoring your commitments to yourself is like taking really good care of yourself. We talked before about one of those word hippo definitions, the protective care or guardianship of someone or something. You want to take protective care of yourself. So if there has been an interruption in trust, we want to look at it with kindness, with compassion, taking protective care of ourselves, understanding it, what happened here, reflecting on it. This is how we develop trust because no, you may not be perfect, but just because you're not perfect doesn't mean you can't develop trust with yourself. You can have interruptions in trust and use the way that you respond to them as opportunities to build more trust in the future. Think about this. Think about this person that you actually trust more than any other person. It is very likely there have been several interruptions in trust of some sort. Maybe it was an interruption in communication, maybe it was an interruption in understanding. There have likely been interruptions in that relationship. And the way that that trust gets strengthened and developed is in coming back after those interruptions and rebuilding and repairing. This is what you want to do with yourself. Rebuild and repair those interruptions. Okay, now I want to talk about the next level and one of the most important concepts when it comes to self-trust. This is the idea of two-way trust. So, what does two-way trust mean? It's not enough to trust your body. Your body has to trust you too. So think about this. Over the years, you have given your body so many mixed signals. Sometimes you withhold food from it. Maybe it's an attempt to lose weight or to make up for a previous binge. And sometimes you give your body way more food than it can comfortably process at one time. The body literally doesn't know if it's going to be in famine or in a massive overload. So this is why sometimes the body will go in binge mode, forcing as much food as possible when it has the opportunity, because it doesn't know when the next famine might be coming. A crucial part of developing two-way trust is your body being able to trust that you will feed it when it is hungry, and you remove the physical and emotional restrictions that keep the body in a state where it doesn't trust that it will be fed regularly and faithfully. When your body trusts that it will be fed on a regular and consistent basis, it will relax and you will see a direct impact on your nervous system. About the nervous system in a previous episode and how that is such a key and important part of stopping binge eating, understanding, regulating your nervous system. We also talked about those physical and emotional restrictions in a previous episode. You're beginning to see where all of these solutions they all work together, they come together to work so that you can unwind your ben genie patterns. You can trust your body to communicate with you and to tell you what it needs. And when your body trusts that you will listen and respond to this communication, you will both be in partnership with each other, seeking to honor each other's needs and desires. You are honoring your body, you're you are honoring your body, and you are trusting your body. You're trusting your body to communicate. Your body is trusting you to respond. And all of this, it happens from a place of connection, communication, consistency, kindness, and compassion. It does not happen from shame, blame, judgment, frustration. No, it's connection, communication, consistency, kindness, and compassion. So there's one other component of trust that I work on with my clients. It's this trust from the younger part of you. You know, they're that one who is often behind the secret eating, the binges. Have you ever had that experience where you look back on a binge and it doesn't even seem like that person who was eating in that way was even you? Maybe it was a younger version of you, the one who's just scared or just wants to be loved. Maybe it's a teenage version, the one who wants to rebel. For me, I could tell based on what I was eating and how I was eating, if it was a younger part of me or an older part, that more rebellious teenager part. Now, this is more than we're going to dive in on today's episode, but I mention it because it can be a relief to know that this is very common, feeling like there's a younger part of you that's behind those binges. There are very powerful tools to address this part and to help them get to a place of safety and trust where they no longer feel that need to disconnect through food. Trust is such a key component to unwinding binge eating. If you don't develop trust with yourself and your body, and that two-way trust where your body is also trusting you, it's not likely that you will experience the lasting food freedom that you desire. Now remember, this takes time. Trust is absolutely a decision, but trust is developed. As you continue to practice these skills that you are learning on this podcast, you will naturally be building trust with yourself. This is another place all of these solutions are working together with each other with commitment, consistency, connection, communication, and compassion. You can develop the two-way trust that is necessary to unwinding binge eating. If you are loving this deep dive into the eight reasons why you binge and how to stop, and you want to know how to take them to the next level so you can have your own personalized approach to these answers, I'm developing something amazing for you. And if you want to make sure you are one of the first people to hear all of the details, I want you to go to binge breakthrough.com forward slash blueprint to have this information sent straight to your inbox when it's available. That's binge breakthrough.com forward spoke forward slash blueprint. All right, that's what I have for you today. Be sure to tune in next week where we are going to dive deep into the number seven solution for how to stop. It's breaking the habit. You won't want to miss it. I'll see you then. Thank you for listening to Binge Breakthrough. If you would like to dive even further into these concepts that will help you break through your barriers to food freedom, come to my next masterclass. I take the ideas you learn about on the podcast to the next level in a way you may have never heard before. Sign up at bingebreakthrough.com. I hope to see you there.