What do Home Alone and a jacked up phone have to do with you and binge eating? Keep listening!

Welcome to The Done Bingeing Podcast. This is the place to hear about how you can pair the emerging brain science about why you binge with powerful life coaching to help you stop. If you want to explore an evidence-based, non-clinical approach to end binge eating, you’re in the right place.

It’s time to free yourself. You have more power than you know. To find out more, go to www.holdingthespace.co and click Programs.

And now, your host, Internal-Family-Systems-Level-3-Trained and Master-Coach-Certified Martha Ayim.

Last week, we talked about key number 11 to end binge eating—befriend the supposed enemy, which was an invitation to understand why the part of you that binges can be so fiery.

This week, we’re talking about key number 12: find the power in you.

You may have noticed that we’ve been talking about our parts more and more over these last few episodes.

The idea of parts it’s something that you may intuitively recognize if you’ve ever thought:

“A part of me wants to listen to Martha’s podcast, but another part of me wants to stick a fork in my eye every time she tries to speak poetically.”

Or:

“A part of me wants to eat that whole chocolate cake, but another part of me knows I’ll regret it so much later.”

Or:

“A part of me wants to just go to bed because I’m so exhausted, but another part of me want to have some fun today and food is the only fun thing in my life.”

Or:

“A part of me wants to go for a walk, but another part of me wants to crash on the couch with chips because this is the first moment I’ve had to myself all week.”

“Parts work,” as it is sometimes called, is the brainchild of renowned family therapist Dr Richard Schwartz. At the time of developing this model, much of Schwartz’s work involved clients struggling with bulimia.

His clients shared with him their internal cycle that often looked like this:

• A part of them binged, invoking the ire of a different part of them that was harshly critical of the bingeing.
• This often led to yet another part to try to compensate for the bingeing by using laxatives, purging, or excessive exercising.
• And, all the while, there was a part carrying feelings of worthlessness and despair, which triggered the bingeing part into action to try to ease the distress.
• The binge part offered momentary relief, but soon activated the critical part.
• And round and round the cycle went.

But what Schwartz’s bulimic clients also taught him was that, in addition to having parts of themselves with different opinions, emotions, and behaviors—some of which were harmful—they also had access to a core Self that could lead these parts and heal negative behavior patterns—even deeply entrenched ones.

Healing the patterns was often far more efficient than competing with the patterns by trying to establish a positive, but opposing, behavior pattern.

This approach came to be known as IFS, short for Internal Family Systems, because the systemic dynamics that Schwartz was gaining privy to within his individual clients mirrored the systemic dynamics he had observed when working with families in his family therapy office. In other words, what Schwartz found was that individuals had their own internal family system.

In his family therapy office, Schwartz noticed that family members resorted to unhealthy coping mechanisms when the leadership in the family had been lost due to any number of human reasons, such as:

• the parents were fighting or had recently had a contentious divorce
• a parent was ill or had died
• the family had recently experienced an uprooting immigration
• one or both of the parents had an addiction or another major mental health challenge
• a parent had recently lost their job or the family was experiencing financial duress

When the one or both parents, consumed by struggles of their own, had lost the ability to lead the family, other family members did their best to cope—sometimes by binge eating.

Schwartz found that when he was able to help the parents re-establish leadership in the family, the coping mechanisms used by the children tended to resolve. Likewise, when he was able to help an individual re-establish internal leadership, their coping mechanisms also healed.

Remember the holiday classic, Home Alone, in which Kevin McCallister’s parents forget to bring him on the family vacation to Paris? A winter storm had knocked out the phone lines, leaving Kevin on his own to cope with life in general and with two burglars in particular.

While separated from his parents, Kevin tried any number of things to protect himself and the house, including:

• icing the front and back steps so Harry and Marv would slip and slide, which they did
• lining the main floor with tiny toy cars, so Harry and Marv would skate and skid, which they did
• stringing up paint cans and an iron to clock Harry and Marv on the head, which they were

In any number of unbelievably creative ways, Kevin fell the bad guys again and again.

Did he nearly destroy the house?

Yes he did.

But he also survived until his parents came home.

You don’t need to ice the path to your home.

You don’t need to find toys from boys to roll across your floor.

And you don’t need to swing things from your ceiling.

Why?

Because inside, you always have the power of you.

And no robber, no thief, can ever, ever take that away.

That’s it for Episode 59. Thank you for listening! If you want to know what it’s like to not feel alone with your bingeing, if you want to heal your bingeing, if you want these holidays to be binge-free, then join me in The Soulfull Academy—that’s two Ls on “soulfull”—the new name for the formally called Done Bingeing Membership. It’s my monthly program with the support you need to end binge eating. And if you join right now, you get immediate access to December at no extra charge. Go to www.holdingthespace.co/join to learn more.

Thanks for listening to The Done Bingeing Podcast.

Martha has the highest-level training in both the evidence-based Internal Family Systems approach and in life coaching, and she’s available to help you stop bingeing. You can learn more about her programs by going to www.holdingthespace.co and clicking Programs.

Stay tuned for the next episode on freeing yourself from binge eating and creating the life you want.