How To Overcome Emotional Eating When It Is Connected To Complex Trauma
Written by: Mariann Sebestyen, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
Complex Trauma
Emotional eating is the most common symptom of complex trauma. Complex trauma is described as the person being exposed to multiply traumatic event for a longer period of time, which mean it is repeated and can happen from early childhood to adulthood and committed without adequate emotional and social support.
People with complex trauma develop PTSD, which stands for Post–Traumatic Stress Disorder, and it is a mental health disorder. The PTSD symptoms are divided into four categories: intrusive symptoms, avoidance symptoms, alterations in cognition, mood, and arousal.
Four Categories of Symptoms
Intrusive symptoms can be flashbacks, distressing memories, distressing dreams, and distress at exposure to internal or external cues that symbolize or resemble the traumatic events.
Avoidance symptoms describe as avoiding the traumatic event, thoughts, or feelings associated with the traumatic events. Avoidance of people, places, activities, objects, conversations, or situations.
Alterations in cognition and mood can occur as distorted blame of self or others, negative emotional states such as fear, horror, anger, guilt or shame, negative beliefs system or expectations about self and others, and feelings of detachment from self, others, and inability to experience positive emotions.
Alternations in arousal or reactivity could appear as being irritable or aggressive, hyper-vigilance, a problem with concentration, sleep disturbance, and self-destructive behavior.
Emotional Eating
When those lives who experienced childhood trauma are filled with those strong, negative, and disturbing feelings, and thoughts, then it urges them to do something to soothe those feelings.
It is called self-medication, and emotional eating is the most commonly applied. Emotional eating refers to the behavior pattern when you eat to deal with emotions that you are feeling. Well, this pattern is also used when it is celebrations or when the individual feels good. However, in this situation, emotional eating occurs when the individual experiences negative emotions such as stress, depression, fear, guilt, shame, or anxiety.
Although, emotional eating does not necessarily state that the individual has an eating disorder. To make the diagnosis of an eating disorder, you have to meet the diagnostic criteria that are laid out by the ICD-11 or DSM- 5 mental health illness manual used by the mental health professional.
Emotional Eating can be an automatic cycle where you lose control over the urges to eat when the negative emotions arise, but this can be an initial sign of the development of an eating disorder.
Conversely, you can feel that engaging in this type of behavior can self-medicate negative emotions generated from the traumatic events but simultaneously, this also provides a negative emotion such as guilt because of being unable to control your eating habit and that is a symptom of binge eating disorder.
Regrettably, this now moves from self-medication behavior to a vicious cycle. A vicious cycle is described as several negative events that reinforce each other. Therefore, emotional eating is not helping you to feel better, mostly is just keeping you in the same negative feelings of the effect of trauma and making those feelings more vivid. It regenerates those negative emotions that keep you stuck in a loop or cycle.
It is well known by dietitians that food does affect our mood, health, and mental health. Therefore, dealing with the effect of trauma can make you take part in this emotional eating behavior and be unaware of it at the beginning. In long term, it becomes a self-harming behavior rather than a self-medicating one.
Self-Harming
The self-harming cycle looks like this:
1. Emotional Suffering: This could be negative thoughts, images, flashbacks, nightmares, or bodily memories of the traumatic event. It also can be negative self-beliefs such as I am worthless, I am unloved, a waste of space, and what happened to me is my fault. These thoughts are internal, which causes internal or emotional overload. Traumatic memories can be activated by a trigger such as smell, places, or people that recall or bring back those traumatic details.
2. Emotional Overload: The internalized emotions and feelings raise and it is so powerful and also difficult to manage. Those powerful emotions and feelings stay trapped inside, and they start to overwhelm your system as having extreme fear, feeling desperate, or numbness.
3. Panic: When you feel out of control or feeling numbness but experiencing a compelling urge to engage in self-harming behavior. An urge to soothe or find a quick fix for those overwhelming emotions.
4. Acting to Self-Harm: Engage in the action of Self-harm which provides a temporary solution to soothe the feeling of guilt, shame, internalized rage, or alienation.
5. Temporary relief: It can make you feel calmer, more in control, and reduce the level of physical or emotional arousal to a level where it becomes tolerable able. The internal chaos is temporarily soothed or medicated.
6. Shame: When you become more aware of what happened then the cycle starts you can feel shame, guilt, self-disgust, or self-hate. Therefore, you are not feeling control over the situation and the underlying issue remains unsolved, and the cycle continues unless changes happen when some healthier coping strategies are introduced.
Post-Traumatic Growth
How you can overcome Emotional Eating when it is connected to Complex Trauma:
1. Find the root cause of the problem: It is significant to identify where this emotional eating habit is generated and what else attach to this and treat it from the root cause. This can be as mentioned above feelings from the traumatic events, limiting beliefs, or learned behavior. There is a myth going around that when people experience eating problems it is “just go to the gym” which is not helping in their situation. It is believed to overcome emotional eating, it is essential to treat the root cause of it. Often an eating problem is just a top-layer symptom, but the underlying issue is deeply held inside you. When it refers to finding the root cause, it means discovering the triggers as well that induced the emotional eating behavior. Another important factor is to seek someone who has experience with trauma effects because the Therapist/ Practitioner can understand you better.
2. Healing the self: It often can be a slow process as complex traumatic experiences leave injury inside. Healing the inner self can mean 2 parts, your inner child and your current adult self. You responded to the traumatic experiences normally to survive but to move away from those painful after-effect experiences, requires implementing new experiences to start to change and apply strategies to create a healthier you where you feel grounded, emotionally regulated, and safe by learning skills and strategies and expand your viewpoint. Often I just describe it as bringing your younger self to the present to heal and process those events in a safe environment where you receive unconditional positive regard, empathy, acceptance, and understanding. Working through layers, peeling off those limitations to allow your true self to shine and use your strength.
3. Creating a New, Healthy Life: Healing yourself means that you bring to the surface your authentic self and create a new life exactly like that one in which you are happy to live. This means having a healthy relationship with yourself, and others also the right amount of self-confidence and self-esteem, and changing the relationship with food and eating only when you are physically hungry. So, start to think right now about how you want to feel, what healthy food you would like to feel, how you would like to live the rest of your life without those negative emotions and how you would feel when you know you can have solutions. Be open and view the new possibilities.
4. Keep repeating each day: We learn by repetition, consistency and commitment are necessary to implement the new healthy habit every day and keep our mind and feeling in the life we want to live. It is possible to heal from complex trauma, but it requires your commitment and willingness. It is available to you and the changes are possible.
When you read this article, you know that your journey begins, and you are going to change just as a beautiful butterfly does.
If you are interested to know more, just click the link to reach out to me or connect on social media.
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Mariann Sebestyen, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Mariann Sebestyen is an expert in inner child wound healing, breaking free from unhealthy patterns and restoring a healthier self-concept. Adversity in early life left her with developmental challenges, childhood wounds, unmet needs, and the feeling of powerlessness and helplessness. Mariann generated strategies to extraordinarily change her relationship with herself, step into her power and create a positive self-image to become. She has since dedicated her life to helping others unleash their power, letting their true selves shine, and confidently move towards a new life. She is the founder of Inner Child Wound Healing and the Childhood Trauma Healing Journey program. Her mission: Self Restoration.
