And I know when I first started getting recovery for emotional eating and stress eating and binge eating, I just felt a huge amount of shame. But now I have come to know that every bite I had to take  was helping me survive and helping me emotionally keep it together through the ups and downs and the trials and the tribulations and all the stresses and tragedies and successes of life. I just didn’t know another way and so when we can lighten that feeling of shame, when we can make sense of where we are, make sense of our past. Essentially what we’re doing is allowing the Lord to shine his light into this area of our life so that we can see it the way that he sees it, which is through his truth. And when we can live in the Lord’s truth and the Lord never shames us, does he?  We feel a lightness and life doesn’t feel so burdened.

So let’s talk about maybe the way that you grew up and a lot of us were taught things about emotions that really didn’t equip us for life. And I say we were taught things about emotions, but we weren’t taught them in the way that we were taught other things like sharing toys or tying our shoes. We were taught how to share toys and tie our shoes by people telling us how to do it step by step and continually revisiting these skills with us. We knew if we were doing it right, we knew if we were doing it wrong, it was very black and white. But we were taught emotions not by them being discussed, but how they were handled. So let me give you an example. Imagine there’s a little girl named Olivia. And Olivia is a very tender child. She’s very shy and very easily moved to tears. 

Now her tears are met by one of two responses. Number one, her mother would tell her, stop crying, I’ll give you something to cry about. Or her grandmother would say, oh honey, don’t cry, that makes me sad. Now in both instances, if you ask Olivia why you’re crying, she has no idea.  But in both instances, she has learned that her emotions create a reaction in another person that they didn’t want and they were not happy about. She learned that her tears either angered others, which scared her. And so she grows up feeling unsafe in the presence of her own feelings and in the presence of other people’s anger. Or she learned that her tears made them sad, which made her feel responsible for hurting them. That’s a lot for a kid. 

And she grows up believing that she’s the one that’s responsible for other people’s happiness.  We call these people pleasing. She continues to practice over and over holding back her tears and becomes very proud of herself when she notices that she doesn’t cry in instances that she used to. She represses her feelings so much to the point where she becomes unaware of her own feelings and grows up stuffing her feelings down with substances like food, alcohol, scrolling, or stuffing her feelings down by avoiding conflict and she just doesn’t feel safe to address her troubles or even to feel. 

That’s one story. Now I want you to imagine a little girl named Sarah. And Sarah was a tender child, shy, and very easily moved to tears. But her tears were met with someone inviting her into their lap  saying, Hey honey, come on my lap. It’s okay. I love you. This person talked to her about her feelings, helped her name her feelings, learn more about her feelings and get curious and explore them with her. He even gave her language for her feelings. Do you see how her relationship, how Sarah’s relationship with her feelings would be way different than Olivia’s?  Now I know these are two extremes, but you can relate more to one or the other of these girls.  You see, the risk of us living as Olivia, the risk of shutting down our emotions is a cascade of fear and unsafety and living in fear of our own emotions, of expressing our own feelings or opinions leads to a lot of disordered attachments in this world, right?

We start to have this ungodly self reliance as kids. We’re not bad kids. We just didn’t know a different way. See, here’s what I believe happens. I believe that a child endures an injury. And unless that injury is healed by a caring adult saying, Oh, this is why that happened. And unless it’s explained to us as a kid would understand it, we as children start in our childlike ingenuity to create that safety and to create that, quote, healing for ourselves, but that healing is just continuing to turn inward and more inward and create this self reliance and these protective layers. Now, pushing our feelings down and repressing them is like holding a beach ball under the water. And what’s eventually going to happen is that the beach ball will explode. And you can probably look back in your past and see where you have had massive explosions or breakdowns, whether in sadness or anger, that just didn’t make sense to you. 

One of the things that we have learned by repressing our feelings and that they are so unsafe.  Is an easy way to do that, to create that safety is to just stuff them down with food. Now other people stuff it down with perfectionism and cleaning. Or over drinking. But I see a lot of women in our community who even create this quote, safety for themselves by stuffing down their feelings with perfectionistic tendencies.

If I just do it right, I don’t have to deal with the discomfort of a feeling of being wrong. Because being wrong feels so unsafe. And so this is called buffering. We talk about it in our community and buffering is when you notice a feeling and it’s uncomfortable and we create space between ourselves and the feeling. We fill that space with trying to be really good in an area of our lives or overeating, over drinking. But I think on another level to this that tends to happen, especially if we’ve been taught since childhood to suppress our feelings, is what can be described as nothing more than a disconnect to ourselves,  an unawareness of our own emotions,  that they’ve just been pushed down so much  that we don’t even have access to them. And so I grew up a lot like Olivia. I was a very tender and shy child. Now here’s what’s very interesting about growing up in a household. is that I had a brother and sister, I have a brother and sister, and you can have three different people grow up in the same household and experience it differently just based on their personality, their temperaments, and their needs.

And so I am  by no means blaming my parents or my grandparents for the way that I interpreted their behaviors. Because I grew up with a lot of love and people who wanted to take really good care of me. But there was a piece of Denise as such a tender kid that she just thought it was so unsafe to have feelings. It was so unsafe to have an opinion that was different from other people. I have one client that I worked with who would express her sadness, her fears to her parents, she would express being picked on at school or mean things that other kids did to her. And her parents, very well meaning parents, were diminishing her feelings by saying, we better pray for that person. But what my client really needed was to go sit on her parents lap and for them to say, that’s really mean. I love you so much. What are you feeling right now?  And so what my client gets an opportunity to do now is to go to that six year old version of herself. And be that older sibling to be that lap that child can crawl into to start saying those things that she needed her parents to say to her. 

Because the result has been for my client  that she believed for decades that her opinion didn’t matter, her feelings didn’t matter. Why express them? They’ll just be shut down. And so the two differences between myself and my client, I learned to just not have feelings, to look to other people for what I was feeling because if I could align my feelings with what they wanted, I felt safe. I was a chronic people pleaser. My client, however, does know her own opinions, does know her own feelings, but would suppress sharing them with others. For fear of them being shut down, for fear of them not mattering to other people. Either way, what we see  is that we haven’t learned it’s safe to share our feelings. And so we can start to buffer in a variety of ways.  And one of those ways for my client is to just create more isolation. She feels safe being away from people. Which only breeds loneliness and isolation. And so I’m hoping this is drawing you a picture of why it makes so sense for your body to lean to food for comfort.

To lean to food to suppress your emotions. And that doesn’t mean that’s where you need to stay, but I just want you to understand that what you are doing is totally natural. And if nobody’s taught you how to lean to the Lord in those times, leaning on food is so effective and it makes so much sense and so socially acceptable. As you enter into a lasting weight loss journey,  I’m going to ask you to start to loosen your grip in this area of food and weight. To allow the Lord to come in and start to reveal to you what he wants for you, how he wants to lead you in this area of your life. Because no longer do you need that protection of excess food. And if you’ve been someone who has been praying like I was  for years and years and years and feeling like the Lord wasn’t stepping in, I’m going to tell you, I can look back and see that I was just expecting him to remove my obsession to eat, make me thin. And it wasn’t my fault. I just didn’t know that my grip was so stinking tight. 

And so I invite you into this healing journey. I invite you into letting the Lord  walk closely with you and lead you in how He wants you to take care of yourself. How He wants you to heal your emotions. And there’s a very simple way that you can start. We have a five day free weight loss challenge at Weight Loss with the Holy Spirit, and you can start this healing journey there. From the minute you start that challenge, you will see that the Lord is invited into this area of your life and you will feel an exhale, you will feel your grip loosening. And all the Lord needs is a crack of willingness from you. And once you give him that crack of willingness, he will throw the door open. And so I invite you to that 5 day free challenge. I also want to remind you that we’re starting our February challenge, January 31st. I know, it’s the day before February. But we’re starting our 30 day February challenge on learning the foundations. Of the weight loss with the Holy Spirit program. It starts January 31st for February, but get in now. We start  Wednesday with our very first group call, so go to www.weightlosswiththeholyspirit.com. You can get in our community right away to start the February challenge. It is the perfect time to learn the foundations of how to get to and maintain a healthy weight for the rest of your life. 

And we just got done with our weight loss over 40 “What’s really holding you back workshop”. So if you would like to get in with all of those women who are over 40 and are learning the foundations of The Weight Loss with the Holy Spirit program. You still have a few days to get in the program and start with them on January 31st. So go to weightlosswithaholyspirit.com  and get your spot today. Alright everybody, have a blessed day.