How you Hold your Traumas Over a Lifetime is a Secret we Learn to Unlock Over Time ......
It used to be that photography was more of a process. Even if you did not consider yourself an artist in this craft, you were still part of it. One would take a day’s worth of pictures of their life, or perhaps a week of pictures while traveling somewhere new, or to mark a milestone or log an event. Regardless of who you were or what your purpose was, you had to take the pictures and wait to see them. Then, you also had to decide what to do with them and face the reality that you might not see them again for a while. They might lose their meaning over time, and the future pictures you may take linking one period of time to the next would exist separately, unless you choose to take them out and place them together for deeper meaning. This was the basic process we used to be in when it came to pictures. No reminders from Facebook or Google that you took or posted a picture on a certain day exactly 10 years ago, calling you to look back and reflect. No accidental or intentional scrolling through your phone to see them all at once, easily and instantly, undamaged by time.
How we hold our lifetime of traumas, as well as how we hold onto our various chronic or episodic stressors, is a lot like the process of old-school picture taking. The packets of pictures don’t store ready to be revealed easily, many of them are not on display in our minds. Many of our memories are trapped in sensations and feelings we had and not reflected in our language or visual replay of what happened at all. However, imagine if one day, rummaging through boxes of poorly organized memories from your life, you started to come across all these little pouches of pictures. Imagine if, because you intended to sit there and find them, the putting things together from different pouches of your life experience started to “just happen”. That is what The Toolbox Approach (TM) or any inner work structure and intentional journey triggers, heartfelt and intentional assembling of pouches of experience that start to make you profoundly see how your story “developed” you on a grander scale than just one picture or packet of pictures coming back into view only shortly after you took them, or immediately in modern times.
This article is going to reveal a recent “assembling of things” I had that relates to how our food stories, when compacted by shame, disease, disorder, health or weight issues and imbalances, deny us our right to the truth of what happened or is happening in our mental and emotional life. This will unlock more faith in inner work if you have questioned it as an endless self-help marketing scheme to get us to fix endlessly. It started to show me a story that made sense of all the stories I have heard as a therapist that hint at how food, eating and relating can have broken narratives that need to be seen without the fixing mindset. We need to have a sense that when we take our packets of pictures, they are not for labeling disorder, but for seeing things as a storyline. Stories are not fixed; they are understood, and in that understanding, the life that is read about becomes connected to. A sense of presence with our own stories heals the wrongness and brokenness we assume they carry in some places. When this occurs, healing can begin.
For me, it took me 7 years of rigid food intake and feeling broken to come to a Celiac Disease diagnosis, but other digestive challenges, and hypervigilance with food and eating “right” for my conditions, were still there. The story was that I had “issues with food” for so long, I just believed I had to stay broken and limit my food choices and my relational freedom to congregate with others over food. It turns out, my food story tells the story of what happened to me in my life in raw detail, I never knew how to look at. I can see that is profoundly true for others if we know how to look without just labeling conditions and disorders or disease, and listen below the story of “weight issues”, “issues with food”, or even “picky eater”, and many others.
Food holds many meanings depending on the culture you come from, the family you grew up inside, the body you live in over time, and even economic factors that determine one's class or rank in society and the resources one has. Food and its preparation can symbolize connection, receiving, creativity, a sense of home, and give us a metaphor of what it means and how it feels to be nourished on a deeper level. However, food, relating, and eating can tell us a lot about the subconscious way we left highly complex emotional experiences undigested. We quite literally consume life. We have a conscious way of doing this only 5% of the time. This means, a good amount of the time we take bites out of life experience, chew them a bit, and swallow somewhat thoughtlessly and unaware of the process that may be needed for those harder to consume things. Do we need more chewing, more saliva, better discernment about our choices, better company around us, more sleep………you get the point. There are parallels between the way we experience life, fuel ourselves for life, and relate while doing both these things. They tell a story before we can label a condition for what has gone wrong.
Trauma-Informed About Food, Eating & Relating
What is openly enjoyed when it comes to cooking and communing over food, can also leave those who struggle with food feeling excluded. Whether it is due to allergies, addictions, autoimmune conditions, hormonal imbalances, mental health, cancer treatment, poverty, eating disorders, diabetes or otherwise, feeling excluded over time can act like a trauma. For many of us, putting together the little pouches of pictures shows us how the events can coincide with conditions of eating, absorbing nutrients, processing hormones, weight, and gastric distress.
Being trauma-informed when it comes to food means approaching food, eating habits, conversations, and publications around food with awareness, sensitivity, and respect for the impact of each individual's and group's unique life experiences. This experience greatly affects a person or group's relationship with nourishment and their body. Relating responsibly through the creation of this article today means ensuring I have a piece that is trauma-informed and creates a safe space for everyone viewing. That is both my intention and my dedication. I hope you enjoy this space. I hope it will nourish whatever needs to be fed inside. First, let’s consider what it means to be trauma-informed about the connection between food, eating, and relating.
What it Means to Be Trauma Informed About Food
Understand How Life Experiences Affect Food Relationships.
Trauma, especially in childhood with regard to abuse, neglect, or food insecurity, can impact:
Eating patterns such as restriction, binging, emotional eating
Body image and self-worth
Food trust such as feeling unsafe with unfamiliar food or being hypervigilant about food.
Control and Autonomy such as using food to feel a sense of control.
Prioritize Safety and Autonomy
Never force, pressure, or shame someone into eating or not eating a certain way.
Offer choices and support a person's right to say "no".
Respect personal boundaries around when, what and how someone eats
Use Neutral, Nonjudgmental Language
Avoid language that moralizes food as good or bad.
Steer away from diet talk or body shaming. ("I can't eat that I will be huge for the wedding, I'm on a no-carb plan")
Focus on how food feels, not how it looks or aligns with trends.
Be Mindful of Food-Centered Events
Ask if someone has needs or preferences around food without a need for an explanation.
Understand that holidays, group gatherings and family meals can be stressful or triggering for some.
Provide quiet space or permission to step away for a break at any time, don't demand everyone must sit around the table the whole time to be included.
Support Gentle Reconnection to Food
Explore or model intuitive eating or mindful eating approaches
Encourage joy and pleasure in eating without guilt
Create a calm, predictable, and safe eating environment
Listen and Believe
Don't dismiss or downplay someone's food-related discomfort or history.
Validate their experience, even if you don't fully understand it.
Let them lead the conversation about food when they're ready.
Reflect on the Above
Look back at the content above and now consider it a self-inventory. The truth is, we are not trauma-informed inside our families and groups unless something has happened to a member. A scant few examples could be: someone is recommended to a food allergist suspecting nut allergies and suddenly we are nut-free, or a family member is on chemotherapy and needs a special diet, or we hear a member develops food insecurity when out of work frequently and relies on governmental assistance, and lastly, a son or daughter is bullied and won’t eat carbs anymore as the whole family starts to whisper and wonder what to do. These are a small sampling of how we might become aware and change, for the sake of an obvious problem. Even then, if we enter a classroom of understanding for our loved one, it is a short trip before an elephant is sitting there crushing the healthy conversation. Not many begin an ongoing dialogue and questioning that can form an understanding of how food, eating, and relating may not always be the collective celebration and gathering time it projects in all the commercials, home movies, and snapshots, or today’s social media feeds.
To make the above a self-reflective inventory, consider the following:
Do you have patterns of restricting, binging, or emotional eating?
Do you fixate on certain parts of your body, often try to conceal them, or make decisions of exposure to food events based on how you look?
Do you have safe foods and/or secretly decline foods not prepared the way you need them to make them safe for you to eat? Are you hypervigilant around food privately or publicly?
Do you use food to feel in control or independent in some way, even to feel separate, or do you use food as a boundary you can’t verbalize?
Do you talk about certain food, outwardly or inwardly, as good or bad?
Do you relate the experience of eating to how your body will look as a result?
Do you think of yourself as good or bad, disciplined or not, compared to others or trends?
At food-oriented gatherings, can you speak up for what you want or don’t want, and/or select freely, openly, and confidently what works for you to eat?
At food-oriented gatherings, can you feel the joy, stress, or range of emotions as separate from what is prepared and consumed?
At food-oriented gatherings, can you permit yourself to step away for a break at any time, or take some quiet time, without feeling excluded or bad?
Have you tried to break patterns with food by considering what you enjoy before, during and after eating it?
Have you been mindful of the parts of your life where you are in control of a routine way of eating that supports you like you would a growing child?
Listen and Believe
Now, as you reflect on the answers this brought up, try not to dismiss or downplay the discomfort or history.
Validate your experience, even if you don't fully understand it.
Try to start writing about what this brought up for you without delay.
After you write, use a gentle tapping method, with hands crossed over your heart. Gently tap back and forth on the collarbone with the fingertips and a whispered mantra “Even though this unspoken story is emerging, I am the powerful person that guides my life, I believe in awareness, I am safe, secure, and unharmed by this".
Keep writing daily shortly before or after eating, gathering, food thoughts, or food-related symptoms or behaviors.
Give yourself permission to learn about yourself.
Personal Story
In my 20s, I whittled down to 69lbs after a near-death experience at a concert. I admitted myself to a hospital. I was ashamed to be labeled Anorexic, but I wanted to be whole again. I wanted to be authentically myself and aimed to be a therapist one day. To be a "good" patient, I thought, would be my first challenge. If I fully immersed myself in becoming weight restored, I assumed I would have an authentic insider journey that would be good for the kind of therapist I hoped to become. I set my sights on weight gain and not the story of my loneliness, the disconnection I had from my mother, who was vacantly smiling at me behind her depression and disorganized nervous system, urging me to help her out and be a special girl. I ate their meals, but I was silent to myself and used my voice only for the community of women who saw me rising out of starvation. I wanted them to be encouraged. I can see I starved more inside the hospital than out, and how my body was trying to tell me something, which I missed.
The higher the caloric demand of the meal plan, the more they included double servings of carbohydrates. I was in a lot of pain but stayed on with a smile, pushing myself for 44 days of treatment and past what anyone expected of an Anorexic. It happened again 7 years later, I was finally a therapist and experiencing a deep unsteadiness inside after an assault on the job. My weight plummeted. It took nearly 9 years to diagnose the connection to trauma and physical reactions that were planted in me from my very first pre-verbal traumas in daycare, to childhood traumas, then teenage ones, and the later years. All of them coincide with food being a lonely companion I could never consume quite normally, just like relationships felt traumatic, so did food.
I have Celiac Disease, an autoimmune condition where eating gluten causes the body to attack its own small intestine. Gluten is a protein found in wheat, rye, and barley and, for me, when eaten, it damages my small intestine, which led to problems absorbing nutrients, stomach pain, fatigue, and other health issues. It is often triggered by stress. It turns out I had traumatic reactions that brought out the genetic predisposition to it. I looked back at a traumatic childhood as well and learned that connection. Now, my whole family has been tested, and many have variants that are milder and also include the exacerbation of traumas that were different from my own. I missed many holidays, despite being physically present. I was riddled with fear about what I could eat. Once I learned that food, eating, and relating were informing me on my traumas and telling a story of what happened, something slowly opened up in my awareness of how to begin healing it all. I won’t be telling you fancy steps and tips, we all have to reflect in our own private ways, learn what to share, and we all have to ‘do the work’. The inner work.
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