The Link between Emotional Eating and Early Trauma

Carly had been depressed for as long as she could remember. Raised by a single mom who worked three jobs to support her and her younger sisters, she was alone a lot. Due to her mom's long hours, she often found herself having to take care of her siblings while her mother was at work, cooking them dinner and making sure they were bathed and put to bed on time. After they were in bed, she was alone. And she was lonely.

She found herself grabbing bags of chips and candy with the family's food stamp card when she did the weekly grocery run. She would hide the junk food in the back closet, secretly looking forward for those nights alone when she could eat and watch movies. Eating became her safe space; her way to cope with the unresolved feelings of sadness and loneliness. As she ate, she felt better, and even more positive about her life and herself. She had learned to use food as a coping skill.

Image by StockSnap from Pixabay

While not all of those who eat for emotional reasons have trauma, and certainly not all trauma survivors turn into emotional eaters, there is a common link. Research shows overeating, such as when one is eating to satisfy emotional pain, is more common in those with trauma who find that using food helps to cope with negative feelings (Legendre et al., 2022).

In her 2023 book Healing Emotional Eating for Trauma Survivors: Trauma-Informed Practices to Nurture a Peaceful Relationship with Your Emotions, Body, and Food, Diane Petrella, MSW explores emotional eating in a caring, compassionate way. "When food helps you cope, you’re not only eating to satisfy physical hunger. You’re eating to numb emotional pain and calm the stress in your body," she writes.

Carly, like so many others who engage in emotional eating, can find support in this book's sensitive and supportive message while learning about what makes them engage in emotional eating. "When you feel overwhelmed by strong emotion, food becomes your sanctuary from inner chaos. When you’re focused on the food you’re eating, you’re less focused on what bothered you in the first place." (p. 25).

As a clinician who works with survivors of family trauma, I find that many of my clients engage in emotional eating to cope with the negative feelings and symptoms they live with every day. This book is both informative and straightforward, giving readers an overview of the medical and biological reasons behind a trauma survivor's urge to eat to calm emotional stressors.

"Early trauma and abuse, especially when chronic, causes nervous system dysregulation. The brain’s normal reaction to threats—the fight-flight-freeze response activated by the part of the brain called the amygdala—intensifies. This makes you hypersensitive to stress so that your body and emotions easily become dysregulated: You feel overwhelmed and experience unsettling sensations in your body" (Petrella, 2023).

Petrella uses research, combined with her decades of experience working with clients who engage in emotional eating behaviors to calm negative emotions. "In this stressed state, you emotionally eat to ground yourself even when your body doesn’t need food. Learning how to calm your nervous system will help because a calm body helps you feel safe" (Petrella, 2023).

Using trauma informed approaches of compassion and mindfulness, as well as some Cognitive Behavioral Therapy tips tossed in, this book creates a sensitive roadmap for helping those who want to heal from their emotional eating.

Here are some of the ways that Petrella encourages readers to heal their emotional eating patterns:

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Learn to recognize your body’s emotional cues: Learning what our body feels like when we are sad, scared, calm, or any other feelings can help us better manage difficult emotions when they come up. Trauma survivors often struggle to recognize their body's cues due to being flooded with physical and emotional sensations as a result of their experiences: "trauma-based emotions can block you from noticing your body’s hunger/fullness signs." (Petrella, 2023). Learning how to recognize cues within our bodies can help survivors better understand what their body needs at a given time.

Find other ways to soothe and settle your body: Eating to calm the body serves a purpose because it is often the only coping skill the survivor knows. Petrella recommends learning other ways to calm the body, such as using breathing techniques like diaphragmatic or box breathing, "to activate the body’s natural relaxation response" to help calm you in times of stress or dysregulation. (p.7)

Talk to your body with respect: Petrella instructs readers to say kind things to their bodies, such as "thank you lungs for helping me breathe." In our culture, especially for those socialized as female, we are often shamed for speaking kindly about our bodies, almost as if it is mandatory to shame ourselves. Therefore, when Petrella shares tips for readers to say kind things to their bodies, this is particularly impactful. "It’s easy to take our bodies for granted or wish they looked different. But when we reflect on everything our body does for us, it’s hard not to appreciate the miracle that it is." (p.60) Showing kindness to our body is an important part of healing and learning to show compassion towards ourselves, yet this is often not seen in many other books on this topic.

As a trauma survivor, as well as someone who has a history of using food to cope with this trauma, I found this book to be not only sensitive and empathetic, but realistic in its approach to a much-needed topic. By practicing supportive and empathetic ways to reach readers, this book feels welcoming and understanding. As I read, I kept feeling welcomed and understood, rather than judged as I do with many other books on the same topic. I have already recommended this book to many of my clients.

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