Understanding Your INNER CHILD - Part 1

Understanding your inner child is essential to comfort eating recovery. This is our instinctive, unconscious, or reactive part. It's this part that demands comfort food.

In this podcast:

• The Inner Child - A response to the self-critic
• Feelings - The language of the inner child
• Triggering - How the inner child's response might relate to your past

Next week I'll focus on the physiology of trauma triggering & how to heal your inner child.

Another podcast you might like: Worry, Anxiety & Comfort Eating

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

I'm going to show you how making friends with your inner child is so important for comfort eating recovery. Hi, I'm Shelley Treacher from Underground Confidence. I'm a somatic psychotherapist and I help people to build back their self-confidence. A lot of the people I work with are comfort eaters who feel frustrated with not being able to stop eating. So this podcast is aimed at you. Please follow me or subscribe here for a lot more on comfort eating recovery. This week I want to introduce you to the idea of there being different parts of you interacting and reacting to each other inside you. This is really helpful language to use because one, it helps you to identify what's tripping you up in your unconscious, two, you can see that the parts are only each a small part of the bigger picture inside you, which might help with overwhelm or feeling drawn into a particular dynamic or part, and three, you can start to integrate and shift the roles that these parts play. What I've been talking about for the last few weeks is that emotional eating, comfort eating, binge eating, stress eating, or indeed any other kind of obsession or addiction comes from somewhere in your psyche and emotional well-being. I've also started talking about how the cause of this behaviour usually deserves human compassion. So this week is all about starting to understand the response you have to your self-critic. This is major because this is the part of you that needs the comfort. For the sake of having a label for this part and being able to work with it, I'm calling it the inner child, but you might have your own language for it or your own idea of which part of you this is. For instance, it may not be a child, it might be your teenager, or any other age that you've been. But what we're talking about for the sake of comfort-eating recovery is the irrational, instinctive, unconscious, or reactive response that you have. This might come after some obvious criticism or difficulty, or it may appear in any stressful situation as a reaction. It's so important to get to know this part because it is actually the child or this part of you that's choosing to comfort eat. The inner child is saying, I want this, I want this, I want this. And it's also saying, I'm not going to be okay if I don't have this. I need it. Some of your inner children might be stamping their feet when they do this. Can you hear some version of this voice inside you? What are the equivalent words that you have in your head? It's really a very instinctive response. The inner child is our emotional side, and it really needs taking care of, no matter what age we are. It needs listening, understanding, and compassion. Because it's not actually junk food that it really needs. It needs something more sophisticated that you actually probably could provide. So your first step here is to locate that childish voice inside you. Now that you know how you're giving yourself a hard time, if you listened to my podcast last week, notice what your natural response is. Notice all the times when your child feels bad tempered, throws a tantrum, gets upset, feels sad, or is scared or frightened. Notice the times when this part of you turns to the fridge or the cupboard because of these emotions. And make a habit of trying to spot this and let us know what that voice of your inner child is. Next, I'm going to start talking about feelings. Here I'm going to start showing you why gaining a language for feelings is important and how to do that. The primary language of the inner child is feeling and emotion. This is something comfort eaters aren't really in touch with so much, not comfortable with and don't really know what to do with. Because having feelings is probably something that has been actively discouraged somewhere back in your life. Also, with overeating, you learn to dissociate from feeling. Eating junk food gives us a quick fix to an uncomfortable feeling, which of course wears off. Accumulatively, this means that people who overeat are quite disengaged from feeling and from being able to express feelings. This means you might also not be able to recognise your needs, you couldn't create boundaries for yourself, you couldn't say no when you need to, and you might end up eating because you feel oppressed and exhausted. Or you might just feel a general dissatisfaction, but not really know why. So being able to widen your feeling vocabulary is a really good place to start. You might be surprised how many emotional words there are. See if you can jot down any emotional words that come to mind between now and the end of the podcast. Any words for feelings like happy or sad, and then see how many you've got by the end of the podcast. For an extensive list of feelings, you can check out the Centre for Nonviolent Communication. They have a great feelings inventory. It's a really long list of some fantastic feeling words. Now picture an iceberg. This is a classic representation of the unconscious. Often what you see on the surface is much smaller than the size of the iceberg underneath the water. This is like our brains. A huge part of our experience is unconscious. Our feelings are often very much in that realm. They're unconscious to us, especially if we stuff food on top of them. Being able to name our feelings, just being able to name what's in the unconscious, putting words to it, to what's going on for us, can actually help to liberate that feeling and to feel better. The inner child mostly needs attention. So if you help them to express themselves, they might feel better just from doing this. Sometimes we need to allow ourselves to go deeper to find out how we're feeling and what we need. For instance, what if your inner child really just needed a hug and someone to listen to? When she was upset, when your boss said that your work needed to be a little bit quicker? Or what if you just needed to work out that your friends were actually just stressed out, in their own worlds, tired, worried, and not able to see outside of themselves, when you thought that they were bored with you and seemed to want to spend time with everyone except you. You miss out on your own inner wisdom and joy when you stuff your feelings down or dissociate. What you need to start to learn is instead of seeing your body as something to be ashamed of, seeing your body as home. Gradually you need to learn that discomfort or feeling feelings are safe to feel and are part of being human, and that you're going to look after yourself there. I will talk much more about different feelings later on in this podcast, and I have talked about them in previous podcasts. But this is how it works, comfort eating recovery. By understanding that it's an emotion that leads to that instinctive, habitual reach for unhealthy food or alcohol, scrolling, or desperately wanting to hear from a certain person. And by making a choice to feel your feelings and be true to yourself instead. A lot of people come to me wanting to learn how to feel. Because it's part of the vibrancy of being human. There is no pleasure, passion, intimacy, excitement, fun, fulfilment in life without feeling. So my job is to liberate you into aliveness and into using this as your best resource. Because this is what your body really wants. And it has the full potential and capacity to reach it. Next, I'm going to talk about your history with your inner child. Here I'm going to explain what triggering actually is and how it's relevant to the comfort eater. Often what happens when you start exploring the reasons for overeating is that you find that the way you now treat yourself is a direct continuation of how you learnt to treat yourself early on. It's an interpretation of how you were treated as a child. So as I said last week, you internalised what you thought others thought of you, which comes back again in the present when you think someone else is thinking badly of you. Harmful habits can kick in to help you cope at any point along this journey of life. But the habit becomes chronic when it was used or is used to avoid or withdraw from stress. Triggering is a major contributor to this process. So what does that mean? What is the word triggering all about? People often use this word to start to explain any sudden upset or unfavourable emotional reaction or response. It's become a bit of a pop word. But this is only half the story. Being triggered in psychology does mean having a reactionary response, but it also means that the reaction may have come from having hit a raw nerve that relates to something you experienced in the past. We often call this a core wounding or a trauma. So for example, you might react every time someone says no to you. If your partner or your friends are busy and they say they want to do something without you, or they seem to want to do things with everybody except you, you might feel upset, sad, anxious, or angry. This experience often triggers a feeling of rejection, which runs deep, triggering an experience or experiences of previous rejection or even primal survival rejection. Even a lack of mirroring can be felt as criticism. If someone doesn't do what we expect them to do or what we expect of ourselves, we might see that as a rejection. Part of the brain can't tell the difference between the present and the past, and it's this part that gets involved with triggering. This is where our reactions and feelings in the present get merged with the same in the past. The most vivid and long-lasting experiences we had were in childhood and our young life, when we were incredibly impressionable. So this is what comes back when we perceive an emotional threat. We re-experience the trauma of feeling rejected or abandoned as a younger person, in those moments of feeling rejected in the present. I can't count the number of times I've explored this feeling of rejection with clients, only to end up talking about their childhood experiences of abandonment and the belief systems that they've developed from this early experience. As a child, when we're left alone, we might feel rejected. We usually interpret this as somehow being our fault, like there's something wrong with us, which really hurts. And this is what comes back when we feel rejected in the present. If this really resonates with you, I have talked about rejection in the past and I will be talking about it again in the future. Often there's avoidance or withdrawal because all of this gets too painful and complex. This is when people come to me, and what we end up working with is what triggers them, how to understand that and how to heal from it. Next week I'm going to start talking about your nervous system, what gets triggered there physiologically, and how this relates to comfort eating. But today what I've done is introduce you to the part of you that reacts to the inner critic, which is your inner child. I asked you to notice your inner child and what reactions you're having. Then I talked about feelings being suppressed by comfort eaters, so I encouraged you to start to notice and name your feelings. Finally, I explained how your inner critic might echo your past. Traditionally, as a culture, we neglect our inner children. We work too hard, we don't allow ourselves to be ill for long, we eat, we drink booze, we get hooked on games or tech or internet shopping, and we scroll a lot. We don't handle our triggering very well. We are often in denial of our feelings, and we look for something external to fix us. Next week I will be starting to tell you what you can do about this, but if you want to go further, if you want help healing from this triggering and from your inner critic or with your inner child, and you want to learn how to be a bit kinder to yourself, please look up my group, which will be starting soon at undergroundconfidence.com. This is Underground Confidence with Shelley Treacher. Thank you so much for listening. I will see you again next week.