Freeing Ourselves From Emotional Eating

JB: What a lovely, if hard won, revelation, Geneen. In preparation for this interview, I binge-reread five of your books (in no particular order) and then read your latest one just a few days later. While that experience was quite intense, it also allowed me to see more clearly the common threads running through your work. You draw us in and disarm us by sharing incredibly personal stories that don't necessarily reflect your best side and many of which are howlingly funny. We connect with you. We absolutely identify with you. The topics you discuss are dead serious. You, on the other hand, don't take yourself too seriously, which is a balancing act and a gift.

With each book, I've learned more about your challenging childhood, deep-seated eating issues, fears and anxieties, reframing your relationship with your parents, broken and reformed friendships, relationships with men and then Matt, pet mishegas, financial upheaval and more. And with each challenge, you've eventually pulled yourself together and emerge stronger than ever. It's inspiring. How are you able to share so much with us without feeling completely exposed and raw? Have any stories been particularly hard or simply too hard to tell? Are there any topics that are off-limits?

GR: Thank you for your kind words about my work.

I like lifting the covers up. For so long (and sometimes but not often, now), I felt ashamed of what I was feeling or believing. No one I knew was talking about their secrets, their fears, their middle of the night rantings, and so I wrote about them because in writing, I was able to understand what those secrets wanted to reveal, what they were attempting to express. Writing was (and still is) a way to know what I'd always known without knowing I knew it. It's like an arrow that penetrates the dark mystery that seems to be inexpressible.

By the time I write about something--financial losses, abandonment issues, lost friendships--I've worked through its charge so that it doesn't feel raw, but rather, as if it happened to me and not me. The me of the past. There are many subjects I wouldn't write about, but if I told you what they were, I'd be writing about them...

JB: Good point! Much of what you write about has to do with old stories that we've grown up with - oldies but not goodies. Can you talk about The Voice and ghost children? Recognizing and understanding them has been very helpful to me and I imagine it might be for many of our readers as well.

GR: I named what many of us know as the superego or the inner critic as the GPS from the Twilight Zone because it invariably steers us in a direction that is not helpful, and most of the time, causes us anguish. I also call it The Voice, as it rattles on all day long as the voice in the head that tells us to do this, not that, and that we've done too much of this but not enough of that. It is sheer torture but unless we recognize it, we are blended with it and believe everything it says.

The challenge with The Voice is that it also tells partial truths, but with judgment and morality. So, if I've gained fifteen pounds, it might say, "Look at you, you piece of trash, you fat sloth, you self-indulgent wreck, you gained fifteen pounds-- And then we feel shame because although it's true, we gained fifteen pounds, it is not true that we are therefore trash, sloths or wrecks. But we can't distinguish the objective truth from the glaze of disgust that it is spoken with and that it weaves moral judgments with.

The Voice also has an ongoing list of complaints: you're a failure, you work too hard, you don't work enough, you're selfish, you're ugly, you're skin is terrible, you use too much water, you need to be an activist, you need to stop being an activist and start taking care of the rest of your life. No matter what you do, according to The Voice, you are doing it wrong. You cannot get it right because its very existence is dependent on correcting you when you do it wrong and because it needs a job--it's developmental necessity, a part of the structure of the ego, that all of us have by the time we are four years old--it is always on the lookout for what is wrong. How terrible you are. How unjust.

I've been meeting this voice inside myself for many years and in consistent practice with naming it, questioning it, separating from it and as I say in my book, This Messy Magnificent Life, treating it as if it's a crazy aunt in the attic who can rattle on all day, but if I am downstairs with the music on, it doesn't matter. I don't engage.

The most important thing about it is to recognize that it's not our friend. That although it started out as a protective mechanism and an internalized set of guidelines that we needed to survive as children (i.e., to not bite people, throw food on the walls, walk into traffic, steal silverware from our friends houses, pinch people on the butts as they walk by--something I did and got in big trouble for--or various other activities that might, as adults, get us kicked out of our social circle or arrested, it is no longer helpful. I encourage my students to notice the second they suddenly feel small, paralyzed, collapsed, ashamed, needy and to track back and see what just happened and the statements they are reciting to themselves as if in a trance. Usually, we've been repeating the same top ten tunes of this voice for so long, that we no longer question them. We believe they are true and walk through the rest of the day feeling deficient and ashamed and small. But with awareness, this can and does change. And it's liberating when it does. It's like being given a whole new life in which we are not whipping ourselves. And when we stop that kind of self-punishment, we can ask true, fearless questions: what is the most effective way for me to act now? What I am being pulled to do? What is the truth here, now, with this person/job/situation and how can I act in alignment with that?

The Ghost Children--and although I did use that term in my book, so many people found it spooky that I no longer describe those early patterns that way--are those parts of ourselves that are frozen in the past. They are what many people refer to as "inner children." If we've experienced shock or trauma or abandonment, if we've experienced loneliness of rejection or depression as children (and really, who amongst us has not known at least a little of any or all of the above), then parts of ourselves stay as young as we were when we had that original experience. (This is only my observation, based on experience. I'm not a psychologist or a therapist. I'm describing what I've noticed in myself and with the many people I've worked with. It is worth saying that when there has been shock and trauma, I refer people to therapists because there is a kind of sensitivity and cherishing that is required to address those patterns, and without the training in that particular work, I and my team cannot provide that).

However, there are run-of-the-mill childhood beliefs which become patterns of thought and feeling that almost all of us have: we believe we aren't lovable, aren't worthy, or that we are selfish, lazy, demanding, good-for-nothing and on and on. Those structures or identities got fixed in place years ago and unless we meet and question them, they remain operative in our minds, bodies, relationships.

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