As I’m engaged in a Personal Healing Program here at my Portland Center I am again aware of how much our eating behaviors are learned methods of dealing with trauma.

Trauma is best described as an event that occurs that is  overwhelming for the nervous system to process or integrate.  The bottled up fight/flight response gets stuck and the individual finds he or she can't resolve what has occurred.  If a child is young when a trauma like this occurs, she will "perceive" that she must be unworthy and/or powerless.  This pattern of unresolved pain, and the belief that we are unworthy persists into adulthood.  We may use food or dieting to cope with this unresolved pain and belief in our unworthiness.  Does this make us bad people?  Of course not!  But the use of food or dieting to disconnect us from feeling the painful experience that stems from a belief of “I am unworthy” or “undeserving” soon becomes a problem in and of itself and leads to further feelings of unworthiness and powerlessness.

The cycle is a vicious one and usually doesn’t end without a powerful intervention.

What is the intervention?

And how does a person return to a state of balance and reclaim their true feelings, their gifts and talents and right to joy and freedom?

There is no one way, but this I know to be true.  Unless we are willing to really look deep underneath the sabotaging patterns that continue to focus us on food, our weight and “fixing” or “making right” what we think is “wrong,” we cannot make true progress.

The KEY is always a return to Self.  NOT a FIXING of the behavior.  The dysfunctional behavior is always a mechanism that we use to protect us from an original pain.  No fixing of the problem will work unless we embrace the original pain, integrate it and it’s lessons back into our psyche so that we can utilize the purpose, meaning and gifts hidden within the original pain for our growth and development.

Quick fix methods can work temporarily, but they, too, will stop working as our Soul pushes our growth beyond the capacity of the temporary quick fix.  None of us are privileged to stay unconscious for long.  We must wake up! And it is in this waking up process, that the life-force pushes against all walls that resist.  This “pushing” creates further pain because, like sticking our fingers into a fire, our survival/thrival mechanisms need to know what isn’t working so that it can alter the direction we are going.

Pain is a good thing.  It tells us to STOP, re-assess and re-work what isn’t working.

Are you feeling the pain of a sabotaging pattern? If you want to find out how you can use that pain to grow yourself into your true purpose, your greatest Self and utilize the true gifts and talents that are yours to give, join me for my next teleclass which is tomorrow night:

Teleclasss ended.