A strange gift

What is involved in the journey to ending your struggle with binge eating? Healing will involve:

• slowing down
• developing conscious attention skills
• finding a strong inner adult
• nurturing love and compassion
• turning toward oneself instead of turning away
• learning to face, explore and witness difficult inner feelings
• walking into fear with a compassionate heart
• cultivating gratitude
• letting go.

Our problem has led us to begin a journey that will demand that we learn all of these skills. If it is possible to avoid grimacing at the path ahead with resentment and overwhelm, but instead to behold it as a strange gift that has led us on a tremendous journey of growth, healing, and discovery, we allow ourselves to be filled with gratitude, with readiness, with steadiness.

As compulsion wreaks havoc on our lives, we are called to respond. It asks us to come with an open heart and mind. The compulsion deserves acknowledgment and respect. How else can we learn from it? Powerful and provocative questions can help us to approach our struggle with grace:

• What has binge eating offered me in my life?
• What can I learn from my binge eating?
• How might this problem move me forward in life?

To many, regarding binge eating as a gift will seem ridiculous. Often we hear that we need to banish the binge.

There’s no doubt that the pattern of binge eating keeps you feeling powerless and brings us to our knees when a binge storms through. But bingeing may have gotten you through some of the toughest times of your life, when no other way through seemed possible.

If bingeing was the best that you could do, honor the process that helped you get from there to here and honor yourself for using whatever means worked to survive.

The trouble with binge eating is that once the crisis abates we may miss the fact that we have become more self-sufficient and that we no longer need such an extreme coping mechanism. The habit can linger beyond its true usefulness, morphing into a way to help us hide from the magnitude of our calling in life.

In what way might binge eating have been a strange gift in your life? Please feel free to email me your reflections.

Would you like someone by your side on your path to recovering from binge eating? Book me for a free mini-session, and let’s explore what lies ahead.