weight matters
Legal Law

weight matters

There is no doubt that divorce is a weighty matter both literally and figuratively. This often dire and life-changing event can flood us with emotions and make our defenses as porous as Swiss cheese. During these times of crisis, the ambush of misunderstood and therefore often unacceptable feelings, fantasies, and impulses trigger stinging self-reproach. When we reflexively turn on ourselves with limited or no awareness of being our own worst enemy, it is human nature to react to such helplessness by looking outside of ourselves for someone to blame. That’s why when our children express normal, age-appropriate complaints, demands, or protests that have nothing to do with the impact of divorce on their lives, we can become very defensive.

Have you ever noticed the tendency at times like these to go straight to the kitchen cupboard and numb emotional wounds or soothe anxieties with a chemically enhanced chocolate you wouldn’t dream of feeding a stray cat? Or maybe you’ve thought about shoving such sweet morsels down our children’s throats to shut them up before they hear shame- or guilt-provoking messages.

As you can tell from my last comment, it’s easy for us humans to confuse signals from our “emotional guts” with signals from our appetite regulation mechanisms hardwired into our physical guts. The emotional gut, when fully functional, acts like a tuning fork that we place inside our bellies. It channels all kinds of “vibrations” into higher brain centers where they can be translated, thought about, and discharged constructively. If these energies are not thought about, dysfunctional ways of feeding ourselves and our children can emerge. Psychosomatic symptoms that mimic hunger, nausea, indigestion, and bloating can trick us into disordered eating habits. When these circumstances arise, many of us no longer eat to live, and instead live to eat and/or eat largely to cope with stress in our lives.

Our post-divorce emotional vulnerabilities can create an internal environment ripe for unhealthy dependencies on eating and feeding others. Dietary dysfunctions, even in their most benign forms, are perhaps the most insidious, because in a society where obesity is rapidly becoming the norm, they easily go unnoticed. One cannot stop eating; right or wrong? Furthermore, this activity is an acceptable social activity, a source of great pleasure and full of meaning based on lifelong associations with the earliest and most powerful experiences of being loved and cared for by trusted others. How easy it is to deny, downplay and rationalize this life-affirming activity gone haywire. We are not at risk of being arrested for binge eating or dieting to the point of malnutrition. We most likely won’t be walking around in a stupor as a result of overeating or being too hungover to pick up our kids for school. Have you ever heard of someone being arrested for buying a loaf of bread on the street?

Still, dysfunctional eating patterns can turn into powerfully damaging psychological and physical addictions for some, and for good reason. Imagine for a moment, after the end of your marriage you feel uncomfortable feeling needed, too eager to empower yourself to take on the roles previously filled by your spouse, too guilty to be proactive in taking care of yourself, or perhaps too depressed and ashamed. to the point of wanting to isolate yourself and withdraw from valued relationships to protect yourself from further disappointments and painful rejections. Any of these emotional scenarios can lead us to take refuge in unhealthy food dependencies. Just think for a moment how we can eat to enjoy stimulation and pleasurable satisfaction, to anesthetize ourselves from pain, to calm anxieties, to fill inner voids, to bury and defend ourselves from toxic messages, to punish ourselves, to discharge and defend ourselves from hostile impulses, to deny embarrassingly the needs of excessive dependency, etc., etc., etc. If you don’t believe my argument, just listen for a minute to the common expressions that stress the psychological importance of eating in our lives to invite an over-reliance on food to protect us from hostile inward and/or outward aggression.

You may be familiar with some or all of the following comments: “Why don’t you just fill your face and shut up?” “I’m afraid I’m so hungry I’ll devour you.” “I’m going to chew you up and spit you out.” “I need some comfort food like a Ring Ding.” “I ate nonstop all night and was still hungry.” “I have no idea what I’m hungry for.” “I’m so frustrated I want to bite your head off.” “What you just told me made me sick to my stomach.” “You are so delicious that I want to eat you.” “Stop shoving that crap down my throat.” “I lost my appetite when I heard he was leaving.” “I spend a lot of time at work thinking about what I’m going to cook for dinner.”

The answer to the problems created for us and our children by unhealthy relationships with food is for us as single parents to cultivate reliable and consistent support systems that listen to us, respect our abilities to change and grow, not judge and offer feedback compassionately so as not to reinforce dysfunctional eating patterns. There is nothing residing in our imagination that is inherently damning. Only our reactions to such stimuli are cause for concern. Learning to connect, hold, think, reflect, and talk with trusted others about what’s going on in our minds is the best insurance against disordered eating patterns or other dysfunctional patterns of coping with stress. If we can learn to tolerate and accept what is going on inside of us, then we will be more available to listen to our children and help them process life experiences in healthy ways. We all deserve forgiveness for using food defensively, as these patterns imply that “we don’t know what we’re doing.” However, if we don’t break these patterns when our children are young, we may be forgiven but never forgotten for the angst-ridden obsessions and food compulsions they may inherit from us.

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