Freedom did come

Maybe you were taught that you hurt other people’s feelings and that other people hurt yours.

You hurt your mother-in-law’s feelings by not eating ALL of the hefty slab of lasagna she slammed onto your plate. Or … Jackie’s quip that you “must be on another wacky diet” because you’re not eating dessert hurt your feelings.

If you believe these things, you probably try to act in ways that don’t piss off mom-in-law or that don’t result in a stinging heart.

For decades, I believed that I hurt other people and they hurt me.

I became a contorted acrobat in response.

And while I navigated diligently around other people, I was totally lost.

No matter what I tried to do to make people happy, it was never enough. No matter what I tried to do to prevent people from hurting me, I was always hurting. I watched others vigilantly. I knew them well.

But I didn’t know me.

At all.

I wanted to be kind.

But I wasn’t.

I was a fraud.

A fraud in a prison. And I longed to be free.

Freedom came when I learned that I had some say in what I thought about other people’s actions. Freedom came when I learned that I had no say in what others thought about mine.

I learned that Terry could mock that I “ate like a bird” when I didn’t eat three platefuls of dinner and that I didn’t have to make that mean that I was doing something weird. I could make it mean that she had a thought about me eating less than a heaping plateful of food for the first time in 20 years.

That thought generated a feeling in Terry that led her to make the comment.

What her thought and her feeling were, I did not know.

And I didn’t need to.

I just needed to know my own, and they were these: I am learning how to feed my body in a way that fuels me.

When I remembered that, I felt hopeful.

Hopeful that freedom might come.

And freedom did come.

After all.

Describe any urgency you feel to heal your pattern of binge eating. Please 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.