Weight Loss for People Who Feel Too Much (11 page)

B. Are sympathetic and even empathetic, truly feeling their distress, their joy, and their anxiety. However, you have your feelings and moods under control so that you're able to serve others without becoming drained. You know how to pace and replenish yourself.

C. You become overwhelmed by the suffering of others and, much as you'd like to help, you're too distraught to reach out to people; instead, you tend to reach out to food to ground yourself.

D. You are quickly sucked into the emotional experiences of others and become angry or zealous as you try to solve the problems of the world. You try to ground yourself with food when you start becoming overwhelmed, but it's so hard for you to slow down and rest that you often become physically or emotionally burned out.

Scoring

Mostly A's:
Logical Thinker.
You rely more on logic than emotions to make decisions, and your thoughts dominate your feelings most of the time. This causes you to be sympathetic but not empathetic: You feel for others but you don't feel, or take on, their pain or strong emotions.

Mostly B's.
Balanced Feeler.
When you make decisions, you rely equally on logic and emotions. You're able to be empathetic and truly feel other people's strong emotions, but have strong boundaries that allow you to remain grounded and centered most of the time.

Mostly C's:
Isolating Feeler.
Your emotions dominate your decision making, and can be quite intense. You're very empathetic, and you respond to taking on others' strong emotions by withdrawing and isolating yourself.

Mostly D's:
Connected Feeler.
Your emotions dominate your decision making, and can be quite intense. You're very empathetic, and you respond to taking on others' strong emotions by trying to become closer to them, either through caretaking or getting drawn into the drama as a player who hopes to direct the action and make the situation better for all involved.

How balanced are your feelings? Can you imagine being able to feel emotions without having them knock you over and cause you to isolate or become too involved in other people's problems?

You may have learned growing up that love means always being connected, even if it's painful. Have you met people who take the attitude, “If you really love me, you'll engage in a drama with me?” Do you have close family members and friends like that? It's hard to set healthy boundaries with people you love if this was the message that was drilled into you in your youth!

In my home, my mother didn't let me close my bedroom door, and would walk into the bathroom anytime she pleased regardless of what was going on in there. It wasn't intentionally intrusive, but boundaries just weren't allowed in my house. Survivors of sexual abuse and rape have a very difficult time setting healthy boundaries, too. My mother and I both had similar experiences of being victims of sexual violence, and I believe those contributed to the unhealthy survival skills we both exhibited around intimacy. Consequently, I've had to learn to establish new patterns in this area that still can cause me to pause before I remember it's okay to take care of myself.

Don't forget that you can always visit the inner sanctuary you created and experience safety, and there, you can even meet your childhood self and reassure and comfort her.

SOURCES OF SHAME

Too often, people who feel too much have shame that goes all the way back to childhood. It seems to me that shame is a very destructive feeling because you can't do anything with it—you can only feel bad. Anger, fear, jealousy, or embarrassment can wake you up to something you have to address, but shame puts you into a state of inertia. It cripples you when what you need is self-love, strength, and optimism to help you make changes. It makes you identify with your negative behaviors, so that you don't see yourself as a good person who has taken some actions you're not proud of; you see yourself as a bad person who will always be bad and will always take actions that feed and perpetuate your shame. The deep embarrassment that we are not whole, that we hide a terrible secret that will inevitably prove us to be unlovable, unworthy, and a living mistake, is reinforced by our own desire to disown the part of us we think we need to hide.

We people who feel too much have lots of shame about eating because our eating patterns are tied up with our emotional patterns, and we're ashamed of our inability to control our empathy overload and porous boundaries when it seems everyone else can do it. We compare ourselves to others and think there's something wrong with us, that we're somehow damaged. We eat to ground ourselves and carry great shame about that, so we hide the eating. At the same time, many of us—particularly those who grew up in a household where we developed a fear of scarcity—hide what we're eating in order to be sure that no one takes our food away from us. This is a very emotional behavior and we can be very irrational about our secret stash of caramels or potato chips. In fact, children who have experienced emotional trauma very often will steal food and may hide it rather than eat it, just to reassure themselves that they are in control of the food, that they will never be without. Sneaking food can feel like an assertion of the self when we're feeling the discomfort of being flooded by feelings that aren't our own, when we feel our porous boundaries are wide open and taking in all the emotional detritus around us.

We also will often be secretive about the amount of food we consume. We'll snack before going out to lunch with friends so we can pick at a salad and pretend we really don't eat all that much. We eat the fine chocolates, remove the empty wrappers from the box, and carefully rearrange them to make it look as if the box were still full.

What messages about shame and control have you internalized? Think about the source of those messages. For instance, did you have an overweight mother who was terrified that you, too, would be overweight someday, stuck in an unhappy marriage, and unable to attract someone else? Did your mother control the amount and type of food you ate, and use treats to reward you? Were you jealous of one of your siblings, and did you respond to your feelings of being not good enough by secretly bingeing? Did you always dream of having the “good snacks” your wealthier cousins or playmates had, and associate name-brand goodies with being safe and secure?

Maybe there are identity issues around what you eat. Some children are ashamed of the foods their families' tables—too ethnic, too fancy, too cheap or plain. Did you grow up longing to eat certain foods in order to be like everyone else? Eating is a very social event and as social creatures, we want to fit in.

I remember how ashamed I was when I was a girl and my mother insisted on giving me coarse rye bread with salami and cheese for lunch that had a distinct European smell, as opposed to the peanut butter and jelly my friends were eating. My decidedly Canadian friends in my grade 2 class made fun of its odor and moved to another table, which really hurt. I can also remember how my mother made a beautiful German almond cake and brought it to our annual bake sale at our school. No one bought a slice of her cake because it wasn't “Canadian.” She was upset when she brought it home uneaten, and I felt the shame of how different we were from the others. It was in the early 1960s and I imagine WWII was still fresh for some people, so German food seemed somehow suspicious to them. Although I have come to accept and love that I come from a diverse ethnic background, those memories still sting.

Maybe as an adult, you find your family and friends tease you when you eat differently from how they do. If so, how does that make you feel? Are you taking on someone else's attitudes about eating and weight? Have you internalized them? Most importantly, are you ready to let go of those attitudes that are holding you back?

A LONGING FOR SAFETY

By now, you realize that feeling safe and secure is very important to people who feel too much. It's hard to control that anxious response to empathy overload or strong emotions. In fact, you feel it so intensely it's actually a strong physical sensation. Learning to make peace with the more difficult emotions is crucial to the success of this program. Knowing that “this too shall pass” and approaching your experience in small increments, maybe even one hour at a time, makes following the program so much easier. People who feel too much tend to feel assaulted and invaded by the energy of the world, which leads to isolation and/or other detour habits to avoid uncomfortable emotions. This sense of thin or porous boundaries makes for a tremendous amount of distress and discombobulation combined with worry and anxiety.

Again, while some people just seem to be born highly empathic, a great number of people who feel too much are affected by something in their past that caused them to become hyper-vigilant and hyper-intuitive. They may have had their boundaries trampled owing to being sexually abused or raised in families where there was an absent parent, fighting and rage in the home, or alcoholism or addiction. It's not difficult to see the genesis of the “I'm not safe” message for people who grew up in these types of environments.

Food is the gooey, crunchy, salty, sweet, all-encompassing, yummy safety blanket, the escape, the momentary inhalation that brings relief from the lack of safety. Weight acts like a wall between you and the world, preventing intimacy, attempting to create a force field that serves as a boundary.

Bessie is a woman from Texas who called me for a session a few years ago, before I decided to put this program together. When she and I spoke on the phone for the first time, she told me she wanted my help in figuring out why her marriage was unraveling. Yet quickly, the conversation moved to discussing her history with weight issues. She kept gaining weight, and didn't understand why she couldn't stop eating. Bessie felt there was nothing that she could do about it. On top of that, she was convinced her husband was having an affair, since they'd had little or no sexual contact since the birth of her second child, who was now an active 5-year-old. Having dieted since she was 18, Bessie, now 42, weighed 300 pounds. She told me there had been a few times when she had lost a substantial amount of weight, but then as soon as she was close to her goal, she would start experiencing anxiety and gain it all back.

I brought the conversation back to her emotional situation, and Bessie confessed that her husband was an angry man and that she could feel it coming off him like “steam off the griddle.” I asked her how she felt about her husband and her eating. “Horrible,” she said. “He calls me a ‘heifer' and other names.”

I just wanted to jump through the phone lines and hug Bessie because I could totally relate. I'd had a similar experience with a man I dated in my early 20s who would taunt me whenever I gained a few pounds, and would refer to me as “Little Lotta” after a chubby, dark-haired, pigtailed character in kids' comic books.

Bessie, like me, and many others, had spent most of her life riddled with fear and shame, anger and self-reproach. When we began to speak about her childhood, she told me she had always felt too much, and she sensed the anger in the air in her family's house, especially when her father would come home after a long day's work. Her father, a store manager, drank his way through dinner, then plunked himself down in front of the TV until she went to bed. He was gruff and distant, and would often fly off the handle at her mother, which of course, scared Bessie.

She remembered that she always had some kind of candy stash, which she would eat whenever the emotional temperature in the house got too heated. Her weight steadily grew into her adolescence when the yo-yo dieting began. It was worse when she went to college, although she recalled having a couple years at a time where her weight melted off her as she increased her dieting resolve. Then she would fall in love and as soon as she got close to the man, her dress size would go up. The fear of becoming too close to a partner wasn't conscious, but it drove her to disordered eating and, inevitably, she would gain weight. She laughed when she told me she had a wardrobe in enough sizes to start her own clothing store. In her Southern drawl, she said, “Hell, you know, I just want to feel safe inside my own skin and I know cupcakes aren't the answer!”

Like Bessie, many of us find that food makes us feel safe, then robs us of the very security we think it can offer us. We lose our sense of power over our choices, then revert to using food as comfort and protection. Then the weight piles on and the self-worth goes down.

Feeling safe in your own skin is important. Feeling that you have the power to set boundaries, and not be swallowed up in intimate situations, and to make healthy choices is tantamount to healthy self-esteem. It's important to know that safety is a state of mind. You can learn how to feel secure and practice feeling that way until it becomes second nature.

As you work this program, you'll find yourself feeling unsafe less often, and the insecurity that arises in you won't be quite so intense. Remember, whenever you feel threatened or insecure, you can use the IN-Vizion Process that you learned earlier—the Discover Your Inner Sanctuary exercise—to create a sense of safety.

THE TRUTH ABOUT YOUR DISORDERED EATING

One of the truths you must speak is the truth about your disordered eating. Take this Disordered Eating Quiz and see if you can identify your disordered eating patterns.

• THE DISORDERED EATING QUIZ •

1. When your schedule is changed suddenly because of an unexpected event you have to attend, you:

A. Come up with a plan for picking up a healthy meal on the go and healthy protein snacks to tie you over to the next meal.

B. Decide you'll just grab the healthiest food you can when you get really, really hungry. You figure you can eat better and according to schedule tomorrow, yet somehow, you always seem to have a poor diet.

C. Worry about whether you'll have enough to eat, and head to your pantry and fridge to wolf down what you can just in case you get stuck with no access to food—then end up snacking mindlessly throughout the event.