Crack Your History Code - How Your RELATIONSHIP HISTORY Affects You

Today I start to talk about your history in relationship, and how this might have caused you to comfort eat in the first place.

Another podcast you might love: How Do I Stop Self-Criticism?

Citations
Attached - Amir Levine & Rachel S F Heller
Some ideas here were inspired by a Nicabm training on working with relational history. You can buy your full training programme here

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:07

Hi, this is Shelley Treacher from the Binge and Overeating Recovery Podcast. Today I'm gonna start talking about your history in relationship. But first I've got a really valuable comment. Someone has said that they felt a little like I was telling them what to eat in a previous podcast, and so they felt what told what to do. They said that it sounded a bit like I was preaching what was right or wrong about what to eat, which bothered them. I really appreciate this comment for so many different reasons, and the first is it helps me to refine my language and it helps me to be more inclusive. This is so important with the work that I do, but it's also going to be important for you to learn. So I'm really grateful that I get the chance to do that quite often. This kind of consideration about how you feel is the key to reducing your frustration with yourself and therefore to reduce your need to cover up that frustration with food. So it matters to me that you felt got at or that somebody felt got at. And it needs to matter to you too. It needs caring for and repairing. This is an ongoing project. And then the second reason that it means a lot to me this comment is it means I can clarify my true intention, which is also quite important. I certainly don't want to tell you what to eat, what's healthy, what's not healthy, or to tell you that what you're doing is wrong. I'm simply not qualified and don't have any expertise in that area. And I don't believe it would be helpful to you either. I may have some idea of what's healthy for me, but it's not in my interest to judge you for what you eat, because that's exactly what you need to release. Judgment leads to feeling bad, so may make you want to eat more. And then there's a third reason why I really appreciate this comment. I now have a vehicle for starting to explore something that may be essential to learn in trying to manage eating. And that and this leads very nicely onto today's subject. Feeling upset with me or irritated that my I may have been judgmental towards you could be extremely valuable information about yourself. It could tell you exactly what it is that you need to heal from. Because it tells you how you're wounded and what you struggle with. This may be the very thing that causes overeating in the first place. Here's a question you can use to start exploring this. Is this a familiar experience for you? Do you often feel told off or told what to do? Or do you often feel like you're getting something wrong? This is something that comfort eaters may be very familiar with. Inbuilt in the mechanisms of comfort eating is a kind of a rebellion, and I hear about this over and over again. If you ever hear the words in your head something like, I don't care, sod it, let's do it anyway, just before you overeat, you might be able to relate to this. Often this is fuelled by a feeling of rebellion. A feeling of you can't tell me what to do. More often than not, I hear of criticism, restriction, or a lack of attention in the upbringing or history of the binge eater. And this can lead to feeling resentment and to rebel in response. A way to explore this is to remember feeling this for the first time. Explore how it makes you feel, and ultimately offer kindness towards this part of yourself for having had that experience or for re-experiencing it. And so this leads really nicely on to talking about your history. I want to start talking about relationship today because it's actually something else that I specialise in working with. But relationship is also a major contributing factor in overeating. How we relate to each other can send our spirits soaring or leave us shattered for days. What gives us more meaning than connection? But relationship or lack of connection can also cause us the most immense amount of pain. In this series, in the next few podcasts, I'm going to show you how it's possible to move beyond the effects of an insecure childhood. But first I'm going to explain what that means. So let's start right at the beginning by talking about how you learnt to relate the way that you do. I want to start talking about attachment theory and your history. Attachment theory is the label that's given to the study of how we internalize the way we felt we were treated as we were growing up. It's the exploration of the way we felt we first were related to, and consequently the way we learnt to relate to ourselves. In turn, this shows up in the way we relate to others. It's a pattern that we cannot avoid learning very early in life. It needs uncovering because it might be the real deep-seated reason that you overeat. The subject that most trauma therapists work with, and indeed most therapists, is interpersonal trauma. Trauma that occurred in the context of primary relationships. This means that relationship is possibly the greatest challenge that we face. It's true as well, though, that genetics and life experience also influences us, but for the purpose of this podcast, I'm just talking about your childhood history. And so there are two categories of attachment history. There's secure attachment history and there's non-secure attachment history. If you had a secure upbringing, your needs were met and attended to enough by sensitive, available, and responsive caregivers. So the person in this kind of upbringing feels that their emotions are worthwhile and expects people to respect them for how they feel and to provide what they need. They also feel comfortable with intimacy and are usually warm and loving. This secure person may take or leave food or be able to take or leave it. In the category of non-secure attachment, there are roughly three categories. One is avoidant, one is ambivalent or anxious, and the other is disorganized. In an avoidant attachment insecurity upbringing, the caregivers would have been distant, rigid, unresponsive. This child would not have been paid attention too much and would have learnt that no one would really respond at all if they had any needs. This person feels they haven't got what they need, so they survive by not needing anything from anyone. So they don't ask for anything from anyone. And with a partner later in life, they don't need that person. They equate intimacy with a loss of independence and constantly try to minimize closeness. There's a kind of an avoidant rebellion that says you can't tell me what to do. This person may turn to food when they're angry, but may also use food to dissociate. With ambivalent or anxious attachment, there would have been an inconsistent caregiving style. Sometimes the caregiver would have been there and sometimes they would have not been there. Completely unpredictably. And that person grows up to believe, I don't know if you're there for me or not. They crave intimacy, become preoccupied with love and relationships, and tend to worry about their partner's ability to love them. With being ambivalent or anxiously attached, this person might turn to food when feeling abandoned, worthless, or rejected. With disorganised attachment, none of this really matters. They can't regulate at all. And they will try to get it from relationship. This often comes from abuse, but it doesn't always. You know, I want to normalise this at this point by saying that we all fall into one of these categories, or a combination of these categories. For me, I was raised by a mother who managed her stress by overworking. I know that when I was ready to be born she was up a ladder painting the flat, and after a long week at work as well. But she also adored me when she was available. My father was completely unavailable, so I have a mix of ambivalence and avoidance in my history, and it still shows up in some of my relationships. And I can also tell you that me and my partner provoked each other constantly at the beginning of our relationship. We don't do it so much now, but it is still there. And we work with it. Let's dive into the neuroscience a little bit for this. So Alan Shaw is an expert in neuroscience and in the effect of the way we learn to relate with our primary caregivers. It's so fascinating. He states that the early developing right brain is shaped by our social and emotional experiences. The left part of our brains is the part that deals with logic, the verbal, and the conscious. The right part of our brain deals in emotion and the unconscious. It processes social information. Those two are entirely different. Something that is central to my work and huge for human beings, yet so little understood, is that the two sides find it hard to understand each other. Logic cannot figure out implied meaning and emotion cannot be reasoned with. Early trauma, which may mean insecure attachment, interferes with the right brain processes. It harms the processing of social and emotional information. And what's more is that the right brain, that's the part that deals with the unconscious and emotional experience, speaks to the right brain of other people. Physically, in the tone of your voice, in your affect, in your facial expression. It's our right brain that picks up all of those things. When we relate to each other, we are always listening at a deeper level, as well as to just the words. How we interpret speech is affected by both sides of our brain. We pick up what's not said, how we communicate underneath those words. This kind of makes me think of gaslighting, how if someone pretends nothing is wrong or tries to convince themselves or you that it's in your head and you're crazy, we always underneath know that that's not right. But because our left and right brain gets so confused, we end up doubting ourselves. That's just human nature. Living in the left brain more results in under-regulation or over-inhibition of the right brain functioning. We become blocked to our right body, to emotion. According to research, and I'm not making this up, this shows up much more in men. I'm not here to politically debate that. So children raised by a left brain usually can't get a sense of their own core self or how to relate with others from that core self. I'm just going to repeat here that there are other influences on how you behave. Some of them you can skip a generation, you can get them from your grandparents, and some are genetic. Let's end on a summary of the key concepts relevant to comfort eating. Our early regulation with others is critical for being able to regulate how we feel. How we are held, supported, and understood happens through non-verbal communication, unconsciously via right brain communication. Many binge or comfort eaters didn't have good enough mirroring, attention or caring for. So we expect this style of relating that they learned to repeat in relationship. With comfort eating, this shows up as avoidance and poor emotional or state regulation. Next week I'll talk about ways that you can start to regulate and recover from insecurities that stem from your history. But to be honest, any of my podcasts deal with emotional or self-regulation. So have a listen to some of my previous podcasts, particularly ones around emotion. Thank you so much for listening today. If you want to go any further, please add yourself to my newsletter. That's the best way to hear about everything that I have to offer. I also want to say something about the groups that I run. Often I hear from comfort eaters that a group is the absolute last thing that they would want to do. But it is actually the thing that I would encourage you to do the most because it starts to create a healthy attachment relationship where you learn to be able to speak your real authentic truth with people who really understand it. So please ask me about the group and I'd be delighted to explain something about it to you. And as usual, I would love to hear your comments and your questions. They shape what I do not only in the podcast but in everything that I teach. So please do get in touch. It's wonderful to hear from you. Thanks again, and I'll see you next Wednesday!