The Part of You That Checks Out

This episode explores the part that goes numb, zones out, and checks out when things get hard, and what it means that so much eating happens while we're not fully there. I draw on my own experience of surfacing mid-binge and not knowing where I'd been, and look at why eating on autopilot makes complete sense as a protective strategy, and what it actually takes to start building enough safety to stay present.

What You'll Discover:

• Why eating on autopilot and zoning out around food aren't about willpower and what the part doing the checking out is actually protecting you from
• Why the checking out tends to get harder to interrupt over time and what it costs you to keep not being there
• What the part that checks out actually needs and why trying to force yourself to stay present tends to make it worse
• Why the most useful moment isn't when you checked out and everything to do with what was happening right before

If you've ever found yourself coming back to awareness mid-binge and genuinely not knowing how you got there, this episode is for you.

Previous episodes referenced:

The Part of You That Hides

Understanding the Part of You That Wants to Binge (Part 1)

If you would like to explore getting support with your eating challenges, schedule a Breakthrough Call today.

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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You come back to yourself and the food is gone, but you have no real memory of actually eating it. You weren't even there for the experience. And that's the part that's hardest to explain to anyone who hasn't felt this themselves. Not the eating, but the absence. Today we're talking about the part of you that checks out, why it learned to do that, and what it might actually need. Welcome to Binge Eating Breakthrough, the podcast to help you stop feeling out of control around food and build trust with your body. If you've tried everything but still feel stuck, you're not alone. I've been there too. I'm Jane Pilger, and I'm here to help you see binge eating in a new way so you can finally break free. Each week you'll get the tools and insights to create peace with food and your body. Your breakthrough starts now. Hello, trusted listener. I consider you a trusted listener because I trust that even when you don't fully understand your own behavior, you keep showing up to try to make sense of it. And that's exactly what today is all about. We're gonna help you make sense of a part of eating, binge eating, feeling out of control around food that can feel a little confusing. And my goal is for you by the end of this episode that you will have a little bit more clarity about what happens when you really kind of go dark, checks, check out of the eating experience and some clear next steps that you can take. So this is the second in a short three-part series where we're talking about the parts, different parts of you. So last week's episode, we talk about, we talked about the part that hides. And if you haven't yet listened to that podcast, you might just pause here and go back and listen to last week's episode. I'll make sure to uh link it in the show notes as well. But this episode does stand alone. So you don't need to have listened to last week's episode in order for this to make sense, but this was created to be a little three-part series, if you will, and this being part number two. So I've talked before about my very first binge, and I mentioned it in last week's episode as well. I was sitting on the floor of my dorm room with that care package, with wrappers strewn all around me. And I don't remember eating most of that candy. I remember the beginning. I remember opening the box. I remember how I felt when I was opening the box. I remember starting to eat. I maybe remember the first piece or two of candy that was in that care package. And then it's just blank. There's just emptiness. And my next memory is being surrounded by the empty raptors, wrappers, that empty box in front of me with no real sense of what had happened in between. And I remember thinking, oh my gosh, what have I done? But I didn't have a sense of it. And I thought it was weird at the time, almost a little unsettling, but I didn't really think too much more about it because I was convinced at that point I was on a mission for it to never happen again and for nobody to know. But then it happened again. And again, binge after binge. It was the same pattern. I would start eating and then I would just be gone. And then at some point, I would come back to the aftermath. That lights off feeling was there from the very beginning. I didn't really have a name for it yet. And in a minute, I'm going to tell you about how I came up with that name. But that sense of just being gone, of not actually being present for the experience of the eating itself. And for so long, I thought this was a willpower problem. That if I could just stay present, stay conscious of what I was doing, I wouldn't do it. We hear so many people talk about mindful eating. If I could just be mindful, stay present, I would have this thing figured out. But what I have come to understand, and what I want to offer you today, is that that checking out was not a failure of discipline. It was not a willpower problem. It was a part of me doing exactly what it was designed to do. So the way that I would describe it would be turning the lights off on myself. And that's really the best description I had for what it felt like. It's not I was not watching myself from a distance. I was not even aware enough of what was happening to actually observe it. I was literally just off, gone, gone somewhere that didn't have a name. So it was like the lights would be on, I would be with myself, and then boom, lights off, pure darkness. There's no awareness, there's nothing, just purely just gone, disconnected. And I discovered later that this actually wasn't new. I was doing a version of this long before the binge eating started. So as a teenager, when things got to be too much for me, for my system, I would go to my room and slam the door. Now, unfortunately, I don't really have any recollection of what I actually did in my room once I went in there and I slammed the door. But I'm sure that it was some form of disconnecting from whatever I was feeling. But that was the point. I needed to go somewhere where the feelings couldn't follow me. And so what I discovered was that the binge eating became the grown-up version of the door slam. It was a way to check out when there was nowhere else to go and no door to close. And just like that teenager in her room, I wasn't really present once I got there. The lights were off. And I hear this reflected back in the language that clients use. They might say something like, I don't know what happens. I just zone out. It's like I'm on autopilot. I come back and the food is gone. The next thing I know, the bag is empty. The details vary, but the experience underneath it is the same. You weren't really there for it. So I'm gonna guess if you are listening to this podcast, you know exactly what I'm talking about. You very much have a felt sense of being gone, of kind of coming back, coming to, and being surrounded by rappers or by the evidence of what happened, but not really having any recollection of the experience itself. And that's what the checking out part looks like. And it is far more common than most people realize. And I think that people don't realize that it's common because it's a little distressing. It's like, wow, what happened? What was I doing? Where did I go? And I know for me, I didn't want to talk about it. I didn't want anybody to know that this was happening, that I was doing this with food that I was so out of control, so broken, that there was something so terribly wrong with me. And so I didn't talk about it. And because I didn't talk about it, I was convinced I was the only one who was doing this. All of these other people must be eating very normally. They must have these normal, healthy, regular relationships with food. Yet I am here doing this thing that I'm really terrified of, that, but I can't tell anybody because I'm so ashamed. Now, what I know after working with so many people and so much more knowledge about all of this is it's very, very common. So if this is you, I want you to first and foremost know it is very common. You are not alone. You are not unique in this struggle. And I want to help you understand a little bit more about what is happening when this happens and why, and give you some really clear next steps. So last week we talked about the part that hides, the part that learned that keeping the eating secret was the safest strategy. So this week we're looking at a different protector, one that operates not through secrecy, but through absence, through going numb, through simply not being there for what is happening. So as we go through the rest of this podcast, I want to invite you to just sit with a question. Just to notice, here's the question for you. When things get hard, what is your version of checking out? And I want you to really answer this and be very careful to set aside any judgment, a judgment about yourself, judgment about what is happening when you do check out. I want you to just with awareness, what is your version of checking out? It might be food, it might be your phone, it might be busyness, it might be sleep. It could be just a flatness that settles in when you don't want to feel something. You will know what it is. So keep this in mind as we talk about this so you can kind of recognize your own version of checking out, so you can apply this to your unique situation. So now let's talk a little bit more about what I mean by the part that checks out. So we talked a little bit last week in last week's episode with this idea of parts. And if you're familiar with the idea of parts, you know that each one developed for a reason. Each part, and we all have many, they have a job that it took on at some point because that job needed doing. Some parts are really loud, they feel really urgent. Some are really quiet, some are hidden, some are careful. And some learned that the safest thing they could do was to make you disappear for a little while. So, this checking out part that we're talking about today is a dissociative protector. That's the clinical language, but what it means practically is very simple. This is the part that learned to create distance between you and whatever you were feeling. It figured out at some point that when things got too big or too painful or too overwhelming, the way through was to stop experiencing it directly. And food became one of the fastest ways to do that. So you may have heard the term of dissociate. Oh, I'm dissociated, I'm dissociating. It is that separating. I'm separating myself from essentially myself, my experience, whatever's happening in my body. So when you eat in a checked-out way, the food isn't really the point. What the food is doing is occupying just enough of your nervous system to take the edge off of whatever was there before. It provides sensation, it provides a focus point, it creates a kind of static that makes it easier not to feel the thing underneath. So the eating isn't happening despite the numbness. It's happening to create it. My husband used to say when I finally started talking to him about what was happening with my binging and what I was doing, I would be so focused on the food and what I was eating. And okay, here's what I need to do. I need to stop eating this or take this out of the house. And I was so focused on the food itself. And my husband coined this term. He was like, the more he got to understand it, he was like, it seems to me like it's not the food, it's the mood. And I was like, oh, you are so right. And what's so wild to me is I was just convinced that he could not understand, that I couldn't talk to him about this because he's never had this type of problem or issue with food before. But what I discovered is that he didn't understand because I didn't let him in. I didn't let him understand. And of course, he actually knows me better than anybody else on earth other than myself. And so when I would be talking to him, he could see so clearly things that I couldn't see on my own. And that is the beautiful thing about having somebody else in your life, whether it's a professional or a partner or somebody who can help you see things that you just can't see on your own. But I thought it was so clear and so simple but profound. It's not the food, it's the mood. So now going back to this part that checks out. This part didn't choose numbness arbitrarily. It learned that numbness was better than what was happening when it stayed present. Remember, this is a protective part. So maybe what was happening was a level of stress that had no outlet and nowhere to go. Kind of reminds me of when I would go slam the door in my room as a teenager. Maybe it was an emotion that felt too big or too frightening. Maybe it was a home environment where feelings weren't safe to have, or where things happened that were genuinely too much to be present for. Maybe it was just the accumulation of a life where there was always too much to carry and not enough space to put it down. Now, I want to be really careful here because this can range from the everyday, a stressful afternoon when the feelings of the day are just too much and you need them to stop for a minute, to something much more significant. But in either case, the nervous system is doing the same thing. It is pulling you out of an experience that it has decided is more than you can handle right now. And in my own life, I can trace this back to times when I felt completely overwhelmed and I had no language for what I was feeling, and no one I felt safe enough to tell. The checking out was its own kind of relief. And the eating was what I used to get there. Not consciously, not with any awareness that this was what I was doing, but that was the function. The checking out part is not confused, it is not irrational, it is not bad or wrong. Given what it learned, it has been completely logical. It just doesn't know yet that there might be other options. Now, what we also have to understand is there is a big cost of not being there. So here is what I have seen happen over time. When this part that checks out is running the show, you lose the experience of eating. Not just the difficult eating, the times when you feel out of control or when you eat way more than you wanted to, but all of it. You start to be absent around food in ways that go beyond the binge moments or the moments where you feel out of control. Because the nervous system has learned eating is a place where you check out and it generalizes. Meals get harder to be present for. You eat and you don't feel satisfied because you weren't really there to eat. And then the hunger comes back because physiologically you need more when your nervous system wasn't regulated enough to complete the experience. There's also the cost of what doesn't get processed. The feelings that the checking out part is protecting you from don't go away. They just go underground and they tend to build. So the strategy that worked once, or even worked for a season, starts to require more, more food, more frequency, more intensity to create the same amount of distance. This is not a moral failing. It is how the nervous system works when a coping strategy gets overloaded. And then there's what I think is the most painful cost. You stop trusting yourself because you can't explain what happened. You can't account for your own behavior. And that gap between the person you want to be and the person who seems to do this anyway becomes its own source of shame and confusion. I've sat with people who describe feeling like a stranger to themselves. Like there are parts of their own experience they can't access or understand. And that disconnection, it's one of the most disorienting things about this pattern. And it's one of the reasons that it's so important to understand what is actually going on. So let's talk about what this part actually needs. Now I want to reinforce this checking out part is not the enemy. It learned to do this because it needed to. This is a protective part. The important thing to know is this: you cannot force it to stay present. Willpower will not work here. Accountability will not work here. Telling yourself to just pay attention won't work here because the checking out isn't a choice you're making consciously. It's happening at a level beneath conscious decision making. What this part needs is for the nervous system to have enough capacity to stay, for there to be enough safety, enough regulation, enough of what I like to think of as internal scaffolding, so that what used to feel too big starts to feel manageable. Now, this doesn't happen through a restriction. It doesn't happen through monitoring what you eat or watching yourself more carefully. And in fact, that kind of surveillance often increases the anxiety that makes the checking out more likely. Your body is always communicating with you. And what it's communicating when it checks out is this. I needed to leave because it felt like there was no other way. So the answer is to help build the other ways. So practically, that means to start to notice the moments just before you check out, if you can catch them. Not to stop the eating, but to get curious about what was happening right before. What were you feeling? What were you thinking about? Was there a specific moment where something shifted? That information is incredibly valuable because it tells you what the part has been protecting you from. And that is usually way more useful than anything you could learn from tracking what you ate. When you can bring some curiosity and compassion to the part that checks out rather than trying to eliminate it or override it, it tends to relax a little bit. Not all at once. But gradually. Because it doesn't have to work quite so hard when there's someone else paying attention. So here's a few ways you can begin working with this part rather than against it. So number one, notice when you come back. Not the moment you checked out. Because that moment, the moment you check out is really hard to catch because you're not there for it. But the moment that you resurface, it's available to you. So when you notice you've been on autopilot, just say to yourself, ah, I was gone. There I was. I checked out, but I'm back. Just orient yourself to that recognition that you checked out. That's number one. Number two, get curious about the before. So we were just talking about this. It's like once you've come back, you have a moment of calm, you've got access to that prefrontal cortex, your logical brain. Think back what was happening in that hour or two before, just to understand what was going on in your nervous system. That information is so much more useful than anything that happened after the fact. Number three, practice small doses of presence before things get hard. So one of the most effective things you can do for your nervous system is you can practice being present when you are not in an activated situation. So this could look like a few minutes of actually tasting your food when you're calm, noticing your feet on the floor. These small things start to build the nervous system capacity that makes it easier to stay when the harder moments come. You can't ask your nervous system to do something in a challenging moment that it is not familiar with doing when things are calm. Number four, let that checking out be information, not evidence against you. So if it happens, it happened because something needed relief. This was the way your system knew how to get it. So this is worth knowing. We talk about the dashboard lights, right? Binges, our moments where we feel out of control around food. They are lights on the dashboard. They tell us something is going on. So when you notice, I checked out. Whether I checked out with food or I checked out with social, and all of a sudden it's been two hours and I've just been scrolling. That's checking out. That is a dashboard light. So now what we want to get curious is what was going on under the hood. That's where the magic is. That's where the work is. That's where the change comes, is when we get under the hood to figure out what was going on. And lastly, consider what you might need that isn't food. Not as a rule, not as a substitute, but genuine curiosity. If this part checks out because it needed relief from something, are there other ways to create some relief for yourself? Rest, movement, talking to someone. Sometimes the part relaxes when it finds out there are other options available. Now, if you have been doing this for a long time, checking out and then not understanding why, I want you to hear that there is nothing wrong with you. This is way more common than anybody realizes. There is a part of you that learned a very effective strategy for managing what felt unmanageable. And that part has likely been working hard for a really long time on your behalf. So the path forward is not about forcing yourself to stay present through sheer will. It's not about coming up with the perfect plan or the perfect macros or the perfect whatever or keeping certain things out of the house. It's about building enough safety inside yourself that staying starts to feel possible. And that is the work worth doing. Now, this work of building safety when you haven't experienced it by yourself is hard to do alone. It often does require somebody else. For me over time, it has been this beautiful combination of my husband, once I decided he was safe enough that I could let him in, and many people who have specialized in eating disorders, in binge eating, who have experienced this for themselves. That is for so many people the path. So if you want support in doing this work, I would like to invite you to schedule a breakthrough call with me. I'll put a link in the show notes. But a breakthrough call is just, it's a place you do not have to have anything figured out. You can talk about what's actually been happening for you without judgment with someone, me, who has been in it and help you start to make sense of it and figure out what your very clear next steps are. So you can find that at janepilger.com forward slash breakthrough. And I'll have a link in the show notes for you. Now, next week, we are going to close this short little series on parts with an episode called, Who Are You Without the Food Struggle? And I want to be really honest with you. This is a question that was really hard for me to answer. And I know I was not, I am not alone in that. So I'm really excited to dive into that topic with you because I think the answer just might surprise you. That's what I have for you today. I'll see you next week. If you know you want to rebuild self-trust, if you know you want to stop looking outside yourself for answers and start listening to the part of you that already knows what you need, but you can't seem to do it on your own, I want to invite you to join me in the gathering. It's a monthly space where you can reconnect with yourself and rebuild trust from the inside out. Learn more at janepilger.com forward slash gather.