We help people soften patterns of self soothing with food and feel less judgment, anxiety, and shame about their struggles.
Welcome to Growing Humankindness! I’m Karly Randolph Pitman, the steward of this offering.
We help highly sensitive, presence oriented seekers – therapists, doctors, artists, mothers, poets, mystics, teachers, and healers – who want to soften painful habits with food and nourish a place of secure connection within themselves.
If you’re here, you probably care deeply about compassion and are generously compassionate with others. But your struggles with sugar or food may have you feeling despair, hopelessness, or shame.
You may isolate or hide your struggle from others. You may feel frustrated by a lack of progress. And you may have an inner voice that says ‘you should be doing better.’
We’ll help you turn your compassionate heart towards your own self, towards this tender protector of food.
In our offerings, you’ll learn about the relational, developmental needs that drive food seeking so you can make sense of your self soothing responses, soften shame, and deepen your trust in the healing process.
We don’t offer tools on what or even how to eat, but support you in healing your relationship with the wounds that drive the food seeking itself. We’ll help you create a more compassionate relationship with your developmental needs, the overeating, and places of frozenness and stuckness so that your healing and growth can unfold.
With safety, support, and care, we can tend these vulnerable places within so that our protective habits of self soothing with food and self judgment can gently fall away.
Where to start

We offer several levels of support, including lots of free resources, do at home courses and group classes. Our specialty is group classes as the connection, power and support of a group makes a profound difference in healing.
You can find the dates for upcoming classes on the events page here.
Free resources
You can begin by exploring our free resources and our pages on sugar, overeating and cravings. Our library of articles is also a good place to start.
Popular tools include the Sugar Addiction 101 video course; The Binge Rescue worksheet, our most popular tool for binge eating; and The Inner Rebel worksheet, a way to care for feelings of resistance and ‘I don’t want to.’
Books

Do at home courses
We offer two do at home courses, which you can begin at any time. Do at home courses are $200 USD or 2 payments of $100 USD.
If both courses are a good fit – which is true for most people – we suggest starting with Emerge, and then doing Align.
I also offer extra 1 on 1 support for our people who are going through our do at home courses. You can learn more about this support and schedule a call here.
Emerge – Create a New Habit
If you overuse sugar or food for stress relief, to care for your emotions, or to self regulate, this course will help you soften self criticism, set nourishing limits, and change your eating habits with a gentle, compassion based approach. You’ll receive daily emotional support and learn how to apply self compassion to the process of habit change, so you can create more nourishing self talk and build resilience, that internal sense of, “I trust myself to move through this.”
This course is our most popular and has been taken by thousands from around the world since 2012. *Note – this course used to be called The 30 Day Lift. It was renamed and revised in 2019 as Emerge: Create a New Habit.
Align: Heal the Battle with Your Inner Rebel
When you attempt to make changes in how you eat, care for your body, or care for your self, you may bump into your Inner Rebel – the part of you that strongly says “No!” The result? You may get stuck in collapse, resistance or inner conflict – fighting amongst these various parts and needs.
In this course, you’ll learn how to soften this inner conflict, understand the needs underneath the inner rebel, and playfully work with this part of you rather than against it. This will help you follow through on the changes you want to make and express a greater sense of power in your life.
Group classes
If you’re wanting group support, we offer 2-3 group classes a year. Course materials are delivered online along with a private, closed forum on Mighty Networks. We also meet regularly for Q&A webinars to connect, share insights, ask questions, and practice the exercises together.
To learn about upcoming classes, check the calendar or stay tuned to the newsletter.
When Food Is Your Mother
For many people, overeating and binge eating are not just “bad” habits or coping strategies but emotional bonds – a well intentioned coping mechanism to feel safe, secure and connected in the face of isolation, intense emotions, powerlessness, or pain.
In moments of overwhelm, this emotional bond with food – and the needs that drive it – can override other needs, such as a need for health or nurturing limits. In this class, you’ll learn how to nurture the internal and external safety that enables you to soften your bond with food.
Listen: Gentle Ways to Support Your Healing with Food
Listen is our newest offering. In this class you’ll learn how to care for common areas of vulnerability, tension and stuckness that arise in healing your relationship with food. You’ll explore these seven topics: befriending cravings, embracing neediness, caring for collapse, becoming more comfortable with the ebb and flow of satiation, softening perfectionism, leaning into limits, and receiving care rather than caretaking.
The Book of Love
When we experience heartache, hardship, or pain, or when we struggle with something long term like illness or trauma, it’s easy to feel like ‘damaged goods’ – like there’s something wrong with us.
Our struggles can become the lens through which we see ourselves, coloring our perceptions and beliefs about who we are. In the wake of this separation, we often lose our connection with ourselves: our hopes and dreams, abiding goodness, capability, and trustworthiness.
The Book of Love is a playful, art based class to reconnect to your wholeness: to birth the deeper story that lives underneath disconnection.
In this class you’ll be crafting a journal – using a blank book that you fill with images, stories, symbols and more – to create a book of connection, a chronicle and witness to your soul’s story. Through this creation and through sharing a space with others, you’ll reconnect with your deepest self, soften shame, and embolden courage.
In past classes, people have used The Book of Love to:
- say goodbye and thank you to a dying parent
- reconnect with a teenage child after going through a challenging time as a family
- say goodbye to a beloved home
- mourn the pain of mental illness
- grieve and honor the loss of a marriage
- mourn the pain of an addiction
- nurture the dream of writing a book
- move through a cancer diagnosis
- feel grounded after a difficult stretch with a child
- heal a painful body image
- and bring compassion to the suffering of chronic illness
Our team loves hearing all the ways people use this class to nurture their particular place of soul healing, and look forward to witnessing your creation.
Small group intensive
Nurturing the Inner Mother
The small group intensive is for When Food is Your Mother alumni who want to come together in a small group to nurture spaces of inner ‘mothering’ within themselves – to create an internal refuge of warmth, welcome, compassion and courage.
Over a year’s time, we’ll come together to deepen and integrate the healing you began in When Food is Your Mother so habits of self soothing with food, isolation, and self judgment can gently fall away.
The roots of my approach
My approach is grounded in and woven from several threads: self compassion, IPNB (interpersonal neurobiology), attachment theory and developmental psychology; and presence, something that is supported by contemplative practices from many wisdom and indigineous traditions.
I incorporate collage, journaling, and creative expression into my classes, as these are ways of helping every part of ourselves feel seen and known. I also use Listening Partners, something that was inspired by the work of Patty Wipfler and Hand in Hand Parenting.
Teachers that have influenced and shaped me include: my teacher of IPNB, Bonnie Badenoch; my teacher of attachment theory and developmental psychology, Dr. Gordon Neufeld; and meditation teachers Tara Brach and Abby Seixas.
People who align best with my approach are those who feel comfortable with meditation/contemplative practices as well as psychological tools.
From these disciplines and my teachers, I hold these things dear, the bedrock for all that I offer:
- That our brains are shaped in and wired for relationship – what we’ve learned from IPNB (interpersonal neurobiology) and attachment theory.
- That all our internal parts are valuable and worthy of compassion, respect, warmth and curiosity – what we’ve learned from systems like Focusing, non violent communication, and IFS (Interal Family Systems.)
- That we’re fundamentally resilient, created in goodness, and rooted in love – what we’ve learned from our contemplative and wisdom traditions and from trauma research.
- That we heal in connection, community and compassion – what we’ve learned from all of the above.
- That we are beheld in a bond of Love that is sung throughout all of creation – what we’ve learned from attachment theory and our wisdom traditions, especially the Divine Mother.
- And that the safety we seek outside of ourselves can be found within, in the Womb of Love that cradles us all, the ‘arms we can never fall out of.’
My courses are here to help you create inner hospitality for the ‘not beautiful’ parts of your journey so you can care for the vulnerability that lies underneath coping strategies like overeating, overdoing, and perfectionism.
Being tender with our pain grows our love for ourselves, for each other, for life, and for all of humanity. It softens the tendency to blame or scapegoat, and deepens forgiveness, an understanding and an embrace of the complexity of being human.
How long does it take to heal?
I often hear this question from our people: How long does it take to heal?
It’s a powerful and sincere question! This question often arises when we’re feeling overwhelmed, longing for hope – or when we feel at our wit’s end. We long for relief, and to know that healing is possible!
While each person’s journey is unique – and full of its own timing, heart, and wisdom – in my experience, it takes 2-4 years to nurture and support the healing process that changes how you relate to food.
It’s a developmental process, and it takes patience, gentleness, and time.
During this window, several important things are happening. You’re supporting your body, nervous system, heart and mind in:
- softening self attack, perfectionism, shame and self blame, things that make healing harder
- cultivating the compassion, patience, and curiosity that supports healing
- moving out of isolation and into connection with others
- pruning out what doesn’t work
- grieving the losses that live underneath overeating
- strengthening your capacity to be with discomfort and feel uncomfortable emotions
- and becoming more comfortable with asking for help
Softening the pressure to ‘fix ourselves’
The shame of overeating can create a lot of anxiety and internal drivenness that has us rushing to try and ‘fix’ the overeating, and as soon as possible.
And if you feel like you’ve just had it with the weight gain and the pain of overeating, the underlying frustration can also create a lot of urgency to be in a different place.
The more we bring kindness to the very place where we’re at, then the more we can rest in the healing process and be carried by it.
This helps us trust how our body’s healing has her own wisdom, timing and pacing.
Acceptance also changes the way we relate to our overeating, our vulnerability, and our pain itself. We ‘come alongside ourselves,’ as my mentor Dr. Neufeld puts it, as ally and support, rather than coming ‘at ourselves’ as the judge, frightened young one, or frustrated seeker.
Surrendering to our journey is what softens our hearts so we become the midwifes to our healing rather than feeling caught in criticism, shame, contempt, or demands.
Each moment of the journey, rather than something to be endured or gotten over with as quickly as possible, becomes a moment of reconnection, of holding those youngs ones inside.
I invite you to bow your head and heart to what is being asked of you in facing your relationship with food, for it is for you, arising from love – from a desire to help you – and not something that is being done to you.
My yearning for the ‘Beloved Community’
Here at Growing Humankindness we also believe that vulnerability is a catalyst for nurturing economic, social, racial and environmental justice, equality, healing, and peace in our outer communities, something that we at Growing Human(kind)ness feel called to learn, support and nurture.
The pain and suffering of racism, sexism, sexual discrimination, poverty, and other forms of prejudice is a seering wound of separation that impacts individuals, families, communities, other life forms, and our Mother Earth.
We care deeply about nurturing and supporting a more just world of interbeing, where all can thrive and all are cared for. In our own small circle of influence, we yearn to create a community in our courses and classes where all colors, bodies, and beings are welcome, and we open ourselves to the humility, desire and willingness to grow and to make the mistakes that this learning requires.
Closing blessing
In closing, we respect your time, money, energy, and dreams of healing, your heart and your longings. We want you to get the support you need. We also want you to get the right fit for you.
If you have any questions if a course is right for you or if we’re a good fit, please reach out. We’re here to help, whether you work with us or with someone else.
We bow our hearts, bend our knees, and tune our ears to the beauty in your journey, to the longings in your heart, and to the mercy that holds us all.
Please go here to read our refund policy, privacy policy, terms and conditions, and more. We welcome all feedback and questions.
With warmth and sincerity, Karly and the Growing Humankindness team