Category: Eating

Shame and emotional abuse

This client feels guilty about her body size. Her pattern is feeling bad about herself, eating, then feeling guilt, shame and anger about eating and food choices. And it all stems from emotional abuse.

"I feel ashamed of my body, and what I am doing to myself. I eat because I feel worthless." "Every day, I meet people I went to university with, who knew me then, and I know they remember my behaviour. People are still judging me for what I was then".

"And what were you?" "At Uni, I was the party girl, the girl who got drunk at the student bar most nights,  and went off with anybody. I was always first up for the wet tee-shirt competition, the one who struggled with every assignment. A loser. A waste of time. An embarrassment."

History of emotional abuse

We discussed her upbringing at some length. I wanted to try to identify where these feelings came from. Her mother was mentally unstable, a prescription drug addict, only focused on herself.

She told one story of when she was eight years old. Playing with her brother and a knife, she cut her finger badly. She preferred to let it bleed rather than risk another outburst from her mother. Eventually her brother made her go and tell her mother. The mother immediately screamed, "Look what you have done to me, my day is ruined, now I have to take you to the hospital!"

All her life, she was told "Stop crying, get on with it, harden up". She was not allowed to show emotion growing up, and now she can't. My client grew up feeling not wanted or valued. She always felt not good enough.

Reacting to emotional abuse

After a while she began to realize that how she feels is the result of the emotional abuse she went through. She is now examining the effect it had on that child's beliefs about her self. It explains why she was the class drunk at uni. She wanted love and affection and would do anything to get it, including throwing herself at anyone.  I  told her there is no basis for guilt about that, "You were merely trying to get what you never got at home".

Reversing feelings of emotional abuse

She said she feels angry all the time. I did the WHY-WHY-WHY exercise on why she resents her mother. She was not able to get any image or memory but liked the exercise. I told her to do it when she gets some spare time.

Then I did Metaphor Replacement Therapy MRT on her feelings of anger. She got a feeling of boiling lava. Seething, red, constrained in something. She said it was like in a beaker. Then she said "there is more, much more, huge outside as well".

I decided to do the therapy in stages. I got her to change the smaller flow of lave, the one in the beaker. After guided suggestions, the lava in the beaker got dark, and solid. Then she broke the chilled rock into pieces with a hammer.

Then I turned her attention to the massive lava flow. After a lot of persuasion, she got it to shrink and cool and go dark. Again she broke it up into pieces with a hammer.

It is early days yet, but she said afterwards, "I am feeling that I have made progress and I understand my own feelings better now."

Smoking for attention

This client could not stop smoking. She went into hospital recently with some sort of pulmonary obstruction. She did not smoke or even feel like smoking when she was in hospital. But the moment she left hospital she started back smoking.

Clearing the need to smoke

I got her to think of a picture of her feelings about smoking. She said "It is a huge cigarette rammed into my gob". I used this as material for a Metaphor Replacement Therapy. I got her to describe the cigarette she was picturing. "It is black and brown. It is being pushed down into my throat." "I can't breathe." I asked her "What would you like to have happen to that huge cigarette rammed into you gob?" She said "blow it up. Or shred it." I asked "which do you prefer?" "Blow it up" So we did. She blew it up in a great explosion. Bits were floating through the air and she could breathe.

I then asked her to check if there was anything left of those feelings of smoking. She said "there are still some cravings."

Working on her cravings 

MRT on her feelings of cravings. So I asked her what the cravings looked like. She said they were there in her chest. They were "black with a bit of yellow. Not that big." I encouraged her to start making changes to the images she was getting. "Getting more yellow." The yellow was getting stronger, but she could change the image more than that.

I was thinking of lungs and the image of balloons came to my mind. I used this imagery to convert the cravings into black and yellow balloons and get them to rise up into the sky. She was comfortable doing this. They shrank and went up and popped in the air.

I finished with some direct suggestion about "feeling good, capable, worthwhile, having a role in the family and so much to look forward to, etc."

Then I gave her images of flicking a switch, going through a closed door, changing clothes, and suggested she would find the right thing to represent how she was changed.

Smoking for attention

We started talking about her upbringing and why she felt bad about herself.

Her mother was a total slut, she went out drinking, fighting, totally ignored her children,  but brought her daughters up to be complete prudes. She mentioned that her mother and other men were into voyeur sex and all sorts of things. She mentioned a rumor that her supposed father might not be, and her grandfather was the real father. Nobody knows.

We talked about smoking. She smoked since she was fourteen. "It was surprising that I kept at it, because is made me really sick. So sick my grandmother had to nurse me. It was lovely."

I then suggested that perhaps she kept on with the smoking because that was the only way she ever got any attention? She thought about that and said "You know, I think you are right". She then told me about moving to a new school and pretending to be sick so that she could have time with her mother. "Maybe I am smoking for attention". "I have felt rejection all my life."

This client hated smoking when she started, they made her sick. But being sick meant she got attention.

Smoking for attention maybe a common reason for smoking.

Fussy eaters are created, not born

Fussy eaters can be a problem. Kids are always making comments on their food and declaring that they don't like this or they don't like that, but by the next time they see that food they have forgotten all about it. Except where an overanxious mother feels she needs to try to please the child all the time. The basic anxiety in this situation is the mother's fear that the child will not love her if she forces the child to eat something. The child then uses food to start controlling the mother. Then a tussle of wills begins with the child always the winner.

Most mothers recognize this behavior for what it is and distract the child and the matter is forgotten. Some mothers go in for the 'you will eat this or won't leave the table till you do!' style of management and set the child up for eating disorders in adulthood.

And some mothers give in to every demand, and then reinforce it by constantly reminding the child 'Oh you don't like beans do you?' The mother tells anyone who will listen 'No, he can't eat ...' whatever it is. This sets up a reinforcing cycle in which the child is brainwashed into believing that they can't eat certain foods and so they don't get offered them, so they don't eat them and so on. In one reported case the child would only eat orange juice and crackers.

Satisfying fussy eaters

The solution is to work on the child's psychology. A good approach is to use every child's belief in magic to convince the fussy eater that they can eat something new. Hypnotize the child and tell them a story about a boy who ate a special soup. Describe the magic soup as being some particular color, or having some noticeable ingredient like corn kernels. Then get the mother to make a soup that matches the description of the magic soup.This gets the child eating whatever it is that is missing for their health. The hypnotist can suggest that once the boy drank the soup he was able to eat anything at all.

Then the mother can reinforce the idea of the magic soup to empower the child to try new things. As soon as the child has tried a new food the mother can use this to give the child  a unique sense of importance.