Over the past few months, I’ve been writing and sharing what has become a mantra: that binge eating, overeating and other food compulsions are healed through relationship – through connection.
Many of you have written to ask – this sounds so beautiful – but what does it mean?
Many of you have also written to say: connection is simple, but not easy. How do I do this?
Respecting our human vulnerability
Connection, indeed, is simple in theory, but not necessarily easy in application. For we’ve all been wounded in relationship, and we all bear these scars.
Inherent in relationship is vulnerability. For when we connect, we’re opening ourselves to greater intimacy, exposing our neediness, and putting ourselves in a position of depending upon another, of receiving help.
There may be fear – is this safe? Will I get hurt? Will I be okay? It is the risk we take in healing through connection.
While the potential rewards are great, this opening takes courage. It takes trust for our hearts to open, and for our defenses to soften.
It helps if we approach ourselves, our defenses, and our wounds with reverence: with gentleness, compassion, and non-violence. And that is it’s own relationship, it’s own learning curve!
Simple, yes; easy, no.
Moving from an idea into action
So how do we move from an idea – “the answer is connection” – into action, where it’s more than just a rallying cry?
It begins with a shift in understanding – how we see the “problem” of overeating. Then we bring this idea down into the nitty gritty of your daily life, into your daily experiences with food.
This is not necessarily easy either, for the results aren’t immediate. Much of what you try won’t work the first time. It will require creativity, courage, and resilience – finding your way.
You will be asked to trust, to allow time for growth to unfold. This takes patience, and faith.
And: this is a worthy, esteemed, and noble challenge – one I know you’re up to. You wouldn’t be here, reading this, if you weren’t. Something in your heart longs for this. Trust this, and trust yourself.
Internal and external connection
I find it helpful to break connection down like this. Connection/relationship moves two ways – internally, towards yourself – all your many and varied emotions, needs, experiences, and selves.
Connection also moves outward, externally, towards others – with the people whom you love, and who love you; with your community; with our culture, and with Source.
A change in consciousness
The opposite of connection is disconnection. Historically, our culture has been mired in disconnection – how we relate to each other, to our planet, to children, to other cultures, to our emotions, and to our human vulnerability itself. So most of us have lots of painful residue from experiences of disconnection.
Today we’re seeing a change of understanding – a change of consciousness – in how we understand and approach children, our humanity, addiction, our messiest behavior, our needs, our vulnerability, our emotions, our need for relationship and more.
Our perspective is shifting, and we’re moving from a state of disconnection/separation and into connection/a deeper understanding.
We can rightly call this change of consciousness what it is: a profound change of heart.
A shift in how we approach children
I see this change of consciousness arising in many places, but I personally have seen it appear in parenting and how we understand children. (This is probably because parenting is where I’ve spent most of my time these past 20 years!)
When I was a child, a whiny child was just being a brat and needed punishment, a child who was having a tantrum was trying to manipulate you and should be ignored, and most of us were spanked, scolded, or shamed when we misbehaved.
Today, this is starting to shift: a whiny child is now seen more as a hurting child – a child who feels overwhelmed, disconnected, and who needs their parent’s support, love and care. There is greater compassion and understanding for children’s needs, emotions, and development and how this impacts behavior.
A shift in how we approach addiction
You can also see this change of consciousness in addiction. Dr. Gabor Maté, Johann Hari, and others are offering a new perspective – where it’s no longer seen as a problem of will power or choice, and something to be punished, but a cry of deep pain and a need for support and healing. And while it’s not a perfect document, our surgeon general’s new report is affirming that addiction is not about will power, or morality.
In both of these examples – parenting and addiction – you can see how a change in how you see or define the ‘problem’ leads to different feelings, thoughts, assumptions, reactions, responses, and caring.
I see parallel shifts in how we understand food compulsions. The old way of thinking is to look at these things as behavior problems. In fact, the old way of thinking about food parallels the old way of thinking about children.
Seeing food compulsions through a lens of separation
This old way of thinking is a lens of separation. When we view overeating from a space of disconnection or separation, our overeating is filtered through the eyes of:
- guilt
- blame/judgment
- alarm/fear/anxiety/panic
- frustration/anger/self attack/disgust/shame
- an obsession on fixing the self
In response, we resort to some form of violence. We punish ourselves. We try and control or suppress our ‘bad behavior.’ We use bribes, carrots, sticks, punishments. We compare ourselves to others. We feel frustrated and disgusted by ourselves.
We talk to ourselves in painful, violent ways – “You’ll never heal. What’s wrong with you? You are such a worthless piece of s**t.”
This hurts us deeply, creates more separation, and compounds our food suffering. It leads to an obsession and fixation on ourselves, and our food problems, and worsens them.
Ouch.
We can even experience separation and violence in spiritual or self help approaches to healing. They may be more subtle, but their messages often contain elements of shame and judgment that arise from mental concepts.
There’s often a subtle blaming of the self when we’re struggling.
Healing food compulsions through connection
Now let’s try an alternative perspective. When we see overeating from a space of connection, our overeating is filtered through the eyes of:
- compassion/mercy
- acceptance/a deep invitation, where all parts of ourselves, all our needs, and all our experiences are validated, and welcomed
- insight/understanding/reverence/respect
- trust/faith in the healing process/trust in our ability to steer ourselves through hard times, loss, and painful situations
- rest/ease/room to make mistakes
- respect towards our human neediness
In response, we offer ourselves non-violence: connection, deep listening, empathy, validation, limits/boundaries (connection is not the same thing as permissiveness, a free for all), help, and support. We offer help, not punishment.
With this new perspective, we experience shifts in how we relate to ourselves, how we understand ourselves, how we feel about ourselves, and how we respond. Instead of compounding our pain, we ease it, and we ease the overeating and binge eating.
And instead of increasing separation, we bridge it. Like the archetype of the loving mother, we feel compassionate towards our human vulnerability, and we move in to help care for it.
What is being born through you
So shifting out of this approach of separation and moving into an approach of connection is your (our) beautiful and necessary labor. Like all labors, it asks us to surrender to it: to support and midwife this birthing.
By choosing to respond to your cravings, binges, overeating, and sugar addiction with compassion, connection, and respect instead of disconnection, punishment, and judgment, you’re not only easing your own pain, and midwifing your own healing, you’re also helping to bring about this change of heart, this shift in consciousness into the world.
You’re assisting something greater, something beyond your own relationship with food. How beautiful!
Indeed: you are the one you’ve been waiting for.
How connection heals
So this is our task: to bring more connection and less separation into all the ways we relate to our desire to binge, overeat, or use sugar/food.
We bring connection into how we see and understand ourselves, how we label ourselves, how we label our behavior, how we treat ourselves, how we talk to ourselves, how we listen to ourselves, and how we care for ourselves.
And when we judge ourselves, or speak harshly to ourselves, we bring connection to that, too. (Connection is not perfection. In fact, connection is a big, wide, deep container that holds all.)
It’s this ground floor, daily connection with yourself – as well as the connection that you have with others, and with Source – that fosters healing with food. It’s the womb of growth.
You can call this connection love, loving relationship, forgivness, or secure attachment.
At the root, they’re all pointing to this: that connection is how we grow, how we transform, and how we heal.
This may be your most important article yet because of how you’ve given context to the quest for healing.
Question: is connection synonymous with compassion? The latter part of your article seems to suggest they are the same.
Dear Patrick,
I’m glad you found the context helpful.
And what a great question! I think compassion is a part of connection, and a very important one. But connection also includes other things: room, rest, security, spaciousness, a “holding container,” an all embracing love, acceptance, patience, trust, faith, and a sense that something larger than your self is holding you.
Connection is a word that includes and stands in for so many things. The closest synonym would probably be love. It is love that holds us, and that heals us.
Love, Karly
Connection provides all of the things (mercy, healing, breathing, loving, calming) that the “separation” mentality does not. I lived for so many years with abuse, from others and myself, that it was very hard to see the good, the peace, the moving on. Now I am in a place where I can understand where you are coming from. Just sitting and being quiet and letting the good things seep in connects me with a whole new world! It is not a place of ultimate solution, sometimes it requires deliberateness, and when I take the time it is so worth it! It is becoming easier and easier to be in the right frame of mind to let positive things happen.
Dear Barbara,
What a beautiful comment, and what courage!
It makes so much sense! When we experience too much separation, the brain moves in to protect us from further wounding – it does this to preserve functioning. Healing is in many ways, a thawing out process. As the brain and heart feels safe (through relationship and attachment), these defenses begin to soften. And as they soften, our understanding and our perception shifts. New feelings, thoughts, arise – including hope.
Yes – you are connecting to a whole new world.
May that connection continue to fill your heart with peace, and rest.
Thank you for sharing!
Warmly, Karly
I agree with what Patrick says that this is a very important article and how you explain the foundation of where healing and connection needs to take place.
It is through your teachings in the past that I have developed an inner voice that has love , compassion and forgiveness towards myself. I’m able to accept an episode of overeating and say to myself, of course you did that , it makes sense that you needed rest and comfort and that’s ok.
I get to that point and am able to suspend the overeating for a day or two but then I repeat the cycle and this is where I need help.
You mention that through connection we can develop trust and faith in the healing process. This is my single biggest challenge. Even just saying having trust and faith in the process makes me anxious. I can’t imagine not having this compulsive behaviour that is so hard wired into my brain as a way of soothing my vulnerability, neediness and comfort.
I don’t even realize that I’m in a trance when I deliberately say it’s time to put the food down and I reach for more in the same breath!
What I want to develop is a deeper connection that builds my trust and faith within myself so that I believe that I can overcome painful or uncomfortable situations without turning to food.
In writing this I have realized that building trust and faith takes deep honesty and accountability. I believe that by developing a strong connection with myself that this will create a more loving container for me to allow myself to be more honest and accountable and to make mistakes and have set backs and that’s ok.
Thanks for this very insightful post!
Dear Kathy,
I’m glad that this approach has been helpful to you, and that it’s helped you soften your inner voice and how you relate to yourself. That’s a big shift!
The other part of connection that you mention is equally important – the trust and ability to move through discomfort/limits with assurance.
Let me see if I can help frame this for you: strengthening and softening are two expressions of connection. (They actually are two fruits of connection, what connection gives us.)
Connection gives us the capacity for softenness – for compassion, empathy, nurturing, attunement, and loving relatedness.
And connection also gives us the capacity for strength – to hold firm, to bump up again a limit or no, to let it sink in, and to adapt.
In many ways, they’re moving in seemingly opposite directions: the mercy where everything belongs, and the “no” where we face a limit. Both are forms of love.
In my experience, people tend to be naturally stronger in one of these movements than the other. So if one comes more easily to you than others, that makes a lot of sense.
Part of what you’re describing is developmental.
With overeating, many people use strength as a control strategy – to suppress the emotional energies that drive overeating. It’s a battle against the self. As this battle softens, and as you develop a softer, inner voice and greater compassion (as you beautifully describe), there’s often a time where the “strength” aspect of connection is lost. Your overeating can feel more “permissive.”
This is a stage in the journey.
What’s needed is a shift in how you use power and strength with yourself. We naturally resist power that feels authoritarian, domineering, or fear based. It’s disconnecting, feels overbearing, and we do not heed it! It’s power that’s working outside of relationship, and so it is based on force and overpowering.
What’s needed is power inside of a relationship – connection based power. This is strength/power/limit/no mired in connection and love. This form of strength is authoritative, not authoritarian. Through this power and connection, you’re able to move through the adaptive/grieving process that I talk about in my work – where we can accept a no, feel our futility and disappointment, and adapt.
I’ll be talking more about this process in the new school. It’s a very helpful shift – and it sounds like you’re right on the cusp of it.
Warmly, Karly
Hi Karly,
Not sure if you will see this but I wanted to post anyway. I have been connected to a spiritual community that views overeating and sugar binging as a “sin.” I feel this has been detrimental because it estranges one from the very source of Love that one is so desperately trying to please and, with Whom one is seeking, at the deepest level. I have, after re-reading some of your blogs, realized that assigning a moral value of either failure or success with eating, can put a burden on one that invites more control, either to continue to be successful in controlling the eating, or trying harder to control it, to gain success, thus measuring up to the moral standard one has assumed that God requires. It is so restful and peaceful to think of it, rather, as you have pointed out here and in other blogs, that it is physiological, but ALSO arrested emotional development. It is beginning to become clear to me that my emotional bonding with sugar began long ago, when certain necessary bonding and intimacy was not available, sugar was discovered, much like a narcotic, to quell and mask the pain of unrecognized, unmet (primal needs inborn in a young child). To summarize, for me, a person who has been able to have a successful life in many ways, education, family, interests, marriage, a growing spiritual life and ministry, but continue to be battling a sugar addiction and binging for so many years, the relief that the concept of ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT brings to my heart is very restful and freeing. Thank you so much for your work and ministry. God bless you, Karly.
Dear Mary,
What a beautiful post – I was so moved by your words and experience. Yes, I can see how seeing something like overeating as a sin can push your face into separation – where you feel as if you’re experiencing separation (that feeling of falling short) every time you make a mistake, or you face separation with simply the anticipation of making a mistake in the future!
It can foster a lot of fear/alarm (and all the accompanying striving and control strategies) and drive a strong sense of needing to be perfect.
I’m glad you’re feeling rest and peace in viewing the overeating from a different perspective – that’s been my experience, too. May you continue to feel that rest and ease!