Dear Petalinthewind:

You are welcome. Good to read that you are doing great in regard to not interacting with him. As far as the overeating, you wrote earlier in March: “I ate as a child too in secret. My dad was an alcoholic and my parents fought… I was always anxious. I always tried to keep the peace” –

– when your parents fought again and again, they took away your own peace… again and again, until you were “always anxious“. You “always tried to keep the peace” in between your parents because you hoped that if they were at peace, you will finally be at peace.

As a child, your only option to feel anything close to peace, anything that felt good, was to eat, and it became a habit. Here is an exercise I suggest that you do, if you choose to do it: while sitting calmly and comfortably with the computer in front of you, on your lap perhaps, imagine being the child that you were. Imagine your parents being calm, pleasant, and kind to each other and to you. Imagine how this would look like, sound like, feel like…  and type away the experience. Would you like to do this exercise sometime?

anita

Dear Patelinthewind:

My idea behind this exercise is to get in touch with the original, most desired (and by now forgotten) feel-good experience that you longed for as a child; an experience that has been poorly substituted by overeating. Once you… sort of refresh this original feel-good experience in your mind, over time, whenever you feel compelled to overeat, you can purposefully invite the original feel-good experience to your mind and be content with it, no longer desiring to overeat.

anita