When you're in a grounded, secure emotional space, it's easy to say no to the impulse to binge, overeat, restrict, or purge. But what happens when you feel powerless, hopeless, or helpless?

When you're in this emotional space, you can believe you’ll never heal from binge eating, overeating, or sugar bingeing. As these feelings churn around and around, you may succumb to the impulse to binge. You may collapse into food in a gesture of, “Why bother?”

If you find yourself collapsing into food, it helps to remember that collapse is a feeling, and one that comes and goes.

But there's something deeper going on. When you get stuck in an emotional space of helplessness and powerlessness, you’re stuck in your child self. You’re feeling the helplessness, hopelessness, and shame of a child who’s in emotional pain and who feels powerless to make it better.

As you step back and recognize - ah! these are the beliefs, feelings, and voice of my child self - you move from your child self to your adult self. Rather than being identified with your child self, hating this part of you, or thinking that this powerless, hopeless young child is you, you become the mother bear, the loving alpha that cares for this tender being. As you move to care for the tender feelings and for that young part of you, you find emotional release and healing.

This creates an internal boundary where you no longer feel compelled to act from this young part of you in a binge, purge, or sugar free for all. You support a new way of responding with food, release what doesn't work, and reclaim your wholeness.
Wanting more hands on help?
If you feel stuck in powerlessness with food, I invite you to join me for When Food is Your Mother. In this 8 week class, you'll learn how to heal the emotional dynamics that drive overeating and binge eating. Instead of ping ponging from one food compulsion to another or trying to control the overeating, you'll learn how to create lasting relief with food.

Our first live class is on June 19th. Learn more here.
Read a transcript
"That feeling of collapse, that feeling of, "I'm not going to be able to handle it, like it's too much," those feelings like you're not capable or that you're small, it's helpful to remember again that those are feelings that come and go. But, what I find for people is that when they're really stuck in those feelings, what they are really stuck in is their child self.

Those are the feelings that we have when we're little. They're the feelings we had when we were little and in pain, and we felt powerless where we didn't feel like we could cope. Maybe we didn't feel like . . . because we were dependent, because we were children, you know we weren't in charge. And so there isn't that power.

There's all kinds of things that happen to us as children that we might not have felt were fair or wrong, and we might have suffered some real injustices and some real pain and suffering that certainly wasn't ideal. And because we're children, we're not adults. We don't have the ability really to say, "no I don't like that, stop that," because we're in the dependent position and we have these caregivers and adults who are caring for us.

It can be this place of pain and helplessness and powerless, a feeling of there's hurts and there's nothing I can do about it. And as children, what we also tend to do is when there's something that isn't working because we don't have the ego strength because we're children, we're not meant to, we're not able to separate and detach, and look at it and realize like, oh, this is about this other person.

We personalize it and think it's about us and ourselves. This becomes the basis of some of that conditioning that then we carry forward into our adult lives where that early childhood conditioning can start to form an identity that then we think is us. We then act out of that identity, so we think of ourselves as too much, or we think that we're too sensitive,