Hypnosis to Stop The Overweight From Stuffing Feelings by Stuffing Food

We’ve learned
about “emotional eating habits”, those eating behaviors that
are related to emotional longings rather than the body’s real
need for nutrition. The first thing we explored was the
infantile programming to overeat created by the common
practice of bottle feeding when accompanied by parental
neglect. We learned how to heal these traumas from infancy
and thus permanently change these habits. In this article, I
will address the use of food to suppress emotions, in other
words, stuffing one’s feelings with food.

Many of us were raised in families where the expression of feelings was discouraged or even punished. Such phrases as
“Shut up or I’ll give you something to cry about!” or
“Children should be seen and not heard” represent extreme but
regrettably common examples. More frequently however we find
the parent who is simply too busy and stressed to listen to
their children’s feelings and needs. Sometimes children
discover on their own that eating some food can help them
suppress their anger and tears. Sometimes they are
programmed by their parents to eat in this dysfunctional way.

A child cries with pain, or needing some attention, and even
a well-meaning mother will shove a bottle into the child’s
mouth or give her a cookie to silence her. It doesn’t take
long for the child to learn this life-long eating habit.

The solution is to return the client in trance to the time he
or she first learned to stuff their feelings with food. Then
we can bring in the resource of the client’s adult self to
encourage the child to express their feelings. As a therapist
I will often need to encourage my client to express their
feelings, anger, tears, etc. in a loud voice. “That’s good!
You tell them! You deserve to be heard” are all expressions I
frequently use. Then we use the empowered adult self along
with, if necessary, the presence of a new inner parent to
respond lovingly and approvingly to the child’s expression of
feeling. Then we help the child experience the incomparable
joy of their needs being met. The client is encouraged to
feel in their bodies the fulfillment of these experiences.
Finally, we bring this newly developed skill of expressing
feelings into the client’s present life and present
communications, sometimes through assertiveness training,
sometimes through mental rehearsals. In effect, we are
training the client’s subconscious mind to express feelings
safely and confidently.

Here’s an example. Sarah (not her real name) is 50 lbs.
overweight and reports that stuffing her feelings is a
problem. Her subconscious mind takes us to a memory of her
mother and her in the kitchen. She’s crying about a broken
toy, and feeling neglected by Mom who’s on the phone. Mom
hands her a cookie along with a look that clearly implies she
is not to be disturbed. While this kind of daily neglect
rarely gets the media attention of sexual or violent abuse
incidents, it is these supposedly mundane events which
repeated often enough produce the syndrome we’re describing
in many of my clients. Our therapeutic intervention begins
with bringing in the client’s adult self. The adult self
tells mother that she is making a big mistake. I encourage
her to loudly express her anger. Mom is immediately
remorseful. Then we ask her child to express her tears
again, which she does out loud. Then, we gently instruct Mom
in how to listen to her child’s needs and respond to them (If
Mother were less warmly responsive it might have been
necessary to release her and replace her with a new mother in
the client’s inner world. This would not significantly
affect the adult Sarah’s relationship with her present time
mother, but simply provide a symbolic new resource for the
child of the past.) We then embed this new resource in the
client’s body and memory, with words like “Now breathe in
that wonderful feeling as Mommy holds you. And now she’s
looking at your broken toy, and promises she’ll get you a new
one soon. Now she’s going into your room and helping you
find another toy to play with. Breathe in this wonderful
feeling. Notice how wonderful it is to let Mom know how you
are feeling. This is how she knows to take care of you.”
These words are called “counter-programming suggestions” and
are essential to re-enforce new core beliefs and behaviors.

Now we link this new resource to every time she feels an
uncomfortable feeling in her present life. “Now every time
you have an unpleasant feeling, the kind that made you want
to eat, we remember how safe it is now to tell your husband
or children how you feel.” I then walk Sarah through a quick
rehearsal of expressing this feeling to her husband. I may
even advise her on the best ways to express her feelings to
him in a style that he finds it easy to respond to. We’ll
also follow through in our rehearsal to see that her needs
are being met afterwards in some way. I can give her more
help in her skills of emotional expression. “Perhaps instead
of blaming him we could just tell him how this behavior makes
you feel?” I persist in this rehearsal until her
communication is comfortable, and it works to get her needs
met. While shouting and crying may be a useful part of the
client’s therapy, opening up the channels of emotional
expression, it isn’t so useful in our daily family lives.
Instead the client needs to develop adult communication
skills, which in many cases have never been properly
developed.

We re-program half a dozen similar memories provided by
Sarah’s subconscious mind in this way. This includes both
repeated rescue missions for her child of the past and lots
of mental rehearsals of her new communication skills in her
adult life. After only four hours of therapy, and two weeks
later, Sarah reports. Not only is she eating far less, she
is finding her relationships are changing in dramatic and
wonderful ways. Her experiences of victimization and
powerlessness are disappearing, and love and intimacy are
growing in her family. And she is losing weight. She tells
me however, that the other changes in her life are much more
important to her than the lost weight. She is already
beginning a life that is no longer ruled by her weight
issues. I find it typical of my work with weight issues that
many other aspects of the client’s life change dramatically
for the better as we work, because we are addressing core
problems, of which weight per se is only one symptom.

In our hypnosis, we will explore how compulsive eating is
programmed to replace creativity in our lives. How we
recognize when this is happening, and how we fix it.

About Alchemy Institute of Hypnosis: We offer a list of
hypnotherapists in your area. Our website also offers an
extensive library of information about hypnotherapy. This
includes articles on weight loss. If you are interested in
further explorations of this topic, or would like a copy of
the other articles in the series, or perhaps are interested
in making changes in your life through the techniques of
weight loss described here, call our office at 1-800-950-4984
or visit our website at http://www.alchemyinstitute.com/Weight-Loss/.

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