As I’ve said on this blog and will keep saying until we all hear it – emotional eating is an escape. It is a way of not feeling our feelings.
One of the most common reasons we turn to emotional eating is because of past trauma. It is not within the scope of this blog to dive super deep here, but just know this is a massive topic with loads of research around it and I want you as readers of this blog to just be aware that trauma and emotional eating are very often interrelated.
I’m not going to go deep into the science but in order to understand why emotional eating or disordered eating patterns are related to trauma we need to be aware of what happens in the body in a traumatic event.
When we experience trauma, i.e. when we are in a traumatic event or receive a trauma our body is the first thing to respond in order to protect us. You may have heard before of the ‘lizard brain’, that very ancient part of our brain that controls our fight or flight response, this response is the one which kicks in first when we are experiencing trauma.
In order to protect us, to keep us alive, our body reacts much faster than our mind and it produces a load of hormones, adrenaline, cortisol, and others, that tell our body to either fight, flight or freeze. There is also some literature around a fourth response, fawning, this is in relation to when you receive trauma from a primary caregiver or in a co-dependent relationship. Fawning essentially means that in response to receiving trauma from someone you deem as being vital to survival, rather than fight, flight or freeze you instead move towards them and try to placate them, try to make them happy and essentially get them to stop traumatising you. This happens a lot of the time between children and abusive parental figures or vice versa.
If in the moment of the trauma our bodies are unable to respond with either fight, flight or freeze in order to protect ourselves, then the trauma gets stuck in our body. In essence the trauma is received by the body and it is unable to process it in the way it wants to therefore the traumatic experience gets trapped.
If you want to read more on this I highly recommend Bessel van der Kolk’s book ‘The Body Keeps the Score’. Buy it here*
When we have traumas stuck in our bodies our lizard brain is constantly on high alert telling us to process the trauma (this is where PTSD comes in) and therefore our bodies are swimming in high levels of these hormones being pumped out trying to get us to react and move the trauma through our bodies.
These hormones are the reason we emotionally eat or adopt erratic eating patterns.
The hormones mess with our natural bodily functions and signals and therefore we are not getting the normal hunger and fullness signals we should be getting. Instead we are listening to the signals of our body in a heightened state. Cycles of high adrenaline will mean we don’t feel hungry for hours despite being active and not eating. Then as it crashes we will suddenly become starving and start craving a lot of calorie dense food to stop the crash.
Not dealing with trauma, releasing it and allowing it to pass through our bodies means it is stored and constantly triggered. This upsets our body’s natural rhythms and therefore constantly sends out signals that are very confusing for us to react to. This gives us the feeling of being totally out of control and of having an unpredictable appetite and relationship with food.
If you have done a lot of work on feeling your feelings and listening to your body and your relationship with food still feels out of control or completely unpredictable then find someone who you can explore potential past traumas with. Once these are healed your body will naturally come back into balance and it will be so much easier to manage your relationship with food.
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It is not in the scope of this blog to get deep down into the science behind how trauma affects your body, just please be aware that it can have a really big impact on how you eat. If you think past trauma could be affecting your relationship with food please reach out, you don’t need to go through this alone, drop me an email sasha@sashafardell.com