Episode 26: The Hidden Link Between Emotional Eating, People Pleasing and Boundaries

When people talk about emotional eating, the conversation usually focuses on food.

Cravings. Discipline. Willpower.

But when I work with women around emotional eating, the pattern rarely begins with food at all.

It often begins in a moment where something didn’t sit right. A comment that hurt. A boundary that was crossed. A moment where you felt dismissed, unseen, or taken for granted.

And instead of expressing what you felt, you swallowed it.

In this episode, I explore the connection between emotional eating, people pleasing, and boundaries, and why many emotional eating patterns are rooted in years of suppressing emotions that never felt safe to express.

We talk about:

• how people pleasing develops as a survival strategy in childhood
 • why boundary setting is not just a communication skill but a nervous system response
 • the trauma response known as fawning and how it shows up in relationships
 • why suppressed anger, frustration, and resentment often show up through food
 • how emotional eating can become the place where unexpressed emotions finally find relief
 • why scripts and mindset advice rarely work if the nervous system does not feel safe

I also share why healing emotional eating isn’t about controlling food.

It’s about helping the nervous system feel safe enough to express what was never allowed to be expressed before.

Because when the pressure of suppressed emotions begins to release, the relationship with food often changes naturally.

Not through force.

But from the inside out.

The Self Led Woman podcast is intended for educational and informational purposes only and is not a substitute for therapy, medical advice, or professional healthcare.

If this episode brings up anything difficult for you, please consider reaching out to a trained healthcare professional, therapist, or support service.

In Australia you can contact Lifeline on 13 11 14 or the Butterfly Foundation National Helpline on 1800 33 4673, which provides support for people experiencing eating disorders and body image concerns.

Come find me on Instagram → ⁠⁠@megandarnelltherapy⁠⁠

Breaking the Emotional Eating Cycle is coming. If you're ready to understand what's actually driving the cycle — not the food, the parts underneath it, join the waitlist to be the first to know when doors open and receive founding member pricing. → ⁠⁠[Join the waitlist here]⁠⁠

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to the Self-Led Woman. This is a podcast about emotional eating, the experiences that shape our relationships with food, and the path back to self-leadership. These conversations overneath behaviour helped with deep respect for the wisdom of the body and the ways of learn to cope, adapt, and survive. And when we can peel back those layers and meet the parts of ourselves that need care, we begin to see that food was never the problem and we can return to who we really are. I'm your host, Megan Darnell. Let's dive right in. I want to talk today about something I don't hear discussed very often in conversations about emotional eating. Because obviously, emotional eating is treated like a food problem. People talk about discipline, willpower, cravings. But when I work with women around emotional eating, food is not where the story actually begins. Ever. The pattern usually begins in a moment where something maybe didn't sit right with you. A moment where someone might have said something that maybe just hurt you, or you had a boundary crossed, and sometimes these can be really subtle, like you might not even know in the moment, but you just feel pissed off later on, and you're like annoyed. Sometimes we don't clock this like cognitively in our minds, but our bodies will notice it immediately. But instead of expressing it or saying, hey, I just want to ask you about what you said before, like, or I just want to talk to you about that, that actually hurt my feelings. We swallow it. So I want to talk today about the link between emotional eating, people pleasing, and boundaries. Because many emotional eating patterns are connected to years and years, sometimes decades, of suppressing feelings that were never allowed to be expressed. So most women they'll say, I'm better at people pleasing than I used to be, or I, you know, really should set a boundary. They have these beliefs around that. But when you look closely at where people pleasing comes from, it's not about weakness or a lack of confidence. It begins very early in our lives. Girls are socialized towards being compliant. We're told these things like be nice, be polite, don't make a fuss, don't be selfish, don't be difficult, don't be too much, be a good girl. And our nervous system learns connection depends on us being easy, or receiving love depends on us being accommodating and helpful, or belonging depends on us keeping other people comfortable, and that can open up a whole other can of worms. I've spoken on a previous episode about when I do this work with women, most women have the part of I'm afraid to be seen, and a lot of the parts that we ask. Sometimes it can be I don't want to be getting unwanted attention from men, but sometimes it's I don't want to make other women jealous. So that it feeds into this identity we have around keeping other people comfortable and how we've been socialized to keep other people comfortable. So people pleasing becomes a very intelligent strategy because when we're young, when we're children, maintaining connection, receiving like love and attention for our caregivers isn't just about us wanting attention or validation. Children are very intuitive and smart, and they know that if their parents don't give them attention or love or approval, their very survival depends on that. So your nervous system adapts very cleverly and it learns how to read the room, it learns how to anticipate others' needs and how to smooth things over before conflict can happen. These skills can make someone incredibly perceptive and empathetic, but it comes at a cost. The strategy becomes so automatic that we don't even know we're doing it sometimes. And instead of asking, like, what feels right for you, the system or your body keeps asking what's going to make everybody else comfortable. And these are attached to little like the little girl in us who adapted this strategy for her survival. So you have to realize that like this is where it's coming from. When like where we have this conversation around boundaries, like it gets so oversimplified. Most boundary advice is just cognitive. It's like here, just use this script, like something like just say I'm not available for this conversation, just communicate your needs. But your nervous system and your body does not operate through scripts, it operates through whether am I safe or not? And it is your nervous system is at every moment of every day assessing the situation, like, am I safe or not? If your needs, if expressing your needs once led to rejection, withdrawal of love, or punishment, or dismissal, like say you're crying and someone says, Stop crying, stop making noise, you're being too sensitive, you're being dramatic. The body stores that information. So years later, when you try and set a boundary, your nervous system responds as if you're stepping into danger. But you might finally set a boundary with someone and you feel really proud of yourself, and then you absolutely fucking spiral for three hours after, and maybe text them to like soften it or like smooth it over if that person gets upset with you. Or maybe they don't, but you just go into an absolute spiral. Your nervous system's like, I'm in danger, and you might replay the conversation in your head 20 times over. You might go back on your boundary, like you said no to someone, and then you go, Oh, okay, well, I'll just do it this once or whatever. This isn't a mindset issue. This isn't going to, you know, fix itself if you are given a script or coached by someone to like just be better at communicating. It's a nervous system response. In the nervous system, like when we feel like we're in danger, we have fight, flight, freeze, and fawn, and the fawn response is what this pattern refers to. People are generally familiar with fight or flight, but fawning is just another trauma response, it's another way to respond to what we perceive as a threat. So instead of fighting the threat or running away from it, the nervous system learns to appease it. And obviously, when we're children, we can't fight or flight. We cannot. Like we are governed by our parents or our caregivers. So we learn to freeze or fawn if we can't complete that fight or flight response. So we learn to smooth things over to keep everybody else happy, to prevent conflict at all costs, because our survival depends on our caregivers. So losing connection for a child can feel life-threatening. And the body learns this very efficient strategy: keep the peace, even if it means ignoring how you feel, even if it means abandoning yourself and your needs and your feelings. And where emotional eating enters the picture here, like a moment for you where that is something someone said something that didn't sit right for you. Maybe your partner said something that hurt your feelings, and or a colleague dumped something on your desk when you just really didn't have capacity for it, or they just crossed a line with you. Maybe a friend made a comment that just landed badly. Your body registers at that moment immediately. You feel the tension in your body, even if you don't clock it, it's there. And sometimes you might question yourself and go back and forth, and you might why am I so annoyed at that? Oh, then we may might make excuses. Oh, they're just having a really rough time at the moment. I just need to be more supportive, or I won't say anything, I'll just take the high road. Your nervous is insane. Or don't create conflict, don't make a fuss, just let it go. So you swallow it. You swallow the frustration, the resentment, the hurt. It might not be a big thing in that moment, but it still can be a little rupture. But your body also knows that like things weren't meant to be swallowed, some things are meant to be expressed, and when emotions are suppressed in us, the energy doesn't just disappear, it stays in your body, it stays in your nervous system, and the body has to do something with all of that activation. This is where food often becomes the coping mechanism. Food gives your nervous system a little bit of relief after holding many, many, many, many moments of tension. It also creates relief after emotional suppression. Food gives the body something to do with all that emotional energy that actually had nowhere to go, it was just being stored. Swallowing resentment is not easy. We sometimes think it is, or it's easier than that to have a conflict, than having conflict or confrontation, because that can feel extremely scary to our nervous system. But it's not easy, and those emotions create activation in your body. Food becomes one of the ways that the system tries to metabolize that activation. So what gets labeled as emotional eating is something much deeper. It's the body trying to process emotions that were never allowed to be expressed. And over time, those moments accumulate. Years of accommodating, of keeping the peace, of saying yes when you meant no, prioritizing connection over your own authenticity. All of those swallowed emotions go somewhere and they settle in your system and in your body, and they also settle into the relationship you have with food. Emotional eating becomes a place where your system finally gets to release pressure, where the feelings that were never expressed finally find an outlet. I did an episode, I think it was two or three episodes ago, about what your, I think it's called what your cravings mean. And I spoke about why we might be craving certain foods, and when people are constantly craving crunchy and salty foods, it's generally unexpressed anger and frustration because when we want to eat the crunchy and salty foods, well, first of all, salt will regulate us, it'll regulate our nervous system. But crunchy food allows us to crunch down on something, to break it, to bite it, to let that frustration out onto something. If you crave sweet food all the time, it can be that you're craving love. If you crave warm foods, like toast or like porridge, things like that, you're actually craving to be held. You might be someone that's responsible for everyone else, and you're always holding everyone else through things, but who holds you? And this is why emotional eating patterns can last for years or decades, because the relational dynamic underneath it all hasn't actually changed. You're still suppressing what you want to say, still avoiding conflict, and I want to say there's no shame in that. Your system doesn't feel safe enough to have those conversations, and that's where the work is. Because if it doesn't feel safe, that's going to feel terrifying. That's why, if you actually set a boundary, you're freaking out for hours afterwards, thinking, oh, maybe I shouldn't have been so harsh. Maybe I should go and smooth it over with them. But if you're still doing that and still prioritizing other people's comfort over your own authenticity, over your own truth, over your own needs, food is going to become the place where that energy gets redirected. This isn't about lack of discipline or willpower. This is the body trying to process something that never had the chance to be expressed. And healing emotional eating is about helping the nervous system to feel safe enough to experience the emotion again, to feel anger without then feeling a wave of guilt afterwards, for being safe enough in your body to say no without feeling like you'll lose connection. Safe enough to hold the boundary without your body going into panic mode, even if that person isn't happy with that boundary. But boundaries aren't for them, they're for you. And when we can start to change those things from the inside out, something really powerful happens. The pressure that was driving the emotional eating begins to dissolve. Or maybe for you, it's the pressure that of the emotional control. Some people don't emotionally eat, they emotionally control. But it begins to dissolve, and food no longer has to carry the emotional load for you, and your relationship with food begins to shift naturally. Why? Because we've actually started to repair the relationship you have with yourself, not in some surface-level way, in a really deep attuned way. Your system simply learned a strategy that once helped to keep you safe. Remember, those behaviors felt tied to your survival once upon a time. The work now isn't about forcing yourself to be different, about pushing through on things that don't feel safe in your body, because that will just create backlash somewhere else. It's about helping your nervous system discover that it's safe to exist without feeling bad or without disappearing, like being able to show up as your full self, being able to speak for your needs. This is going to sound maybe edgy for some of you, but being okay with other people being upset or disappointed, that's the real flex. When you feel safe enough in your body that someone else can be disappointed, and you can say, I understand, but I actually just need to honor this for me. This is important to me. And when that safety inside of you begins to return, the patterns that might have felt impossible or really challenging to change, they just start to change on their own. These things start to soften, they start to lose their grip. Not because you force them. This stuff is an inside job. And when we can work from the inside out, that's where real change begins. No, this podcast is for education and reflection only. It is not a substitute for therapy or healthcare. If this episode brought things up for you and you need support, please reach out to a trained therapy practitioner or health professional in your area. Thank you so much for listening. If this episode resonated, please follow or subscribe to the podcast, leave a review, or share it with someone who might benefit from hearing it. You can also connect with me on Instagram at Megan Darnell Therapy. If you share the episode or want to let me know what landed for you, you're always welcome to message or tag me. I love hearing from you guys. Until next time, I'm Megan Darnell, and this is the Self Led Woman.