EXCERPT. © FEELING TOO MUCH: THE HIDDEN THREAD
I don't remember what was causing the tension to swirl through our house like the winds of autumn, sending emotional debris spinning through the air with such intensity that it seemed to smack up against me. What I do remember was what I felt like: confused and unsafe, as if the stories I could sense on the outside somehow got inside of me. I was helplessly floating in the chaos that surrounded and penetrated me. I was only four years old, but I remember the experience vividly.
I had to have relief. Make it stop! I had to close myself off, ground myself in my body, in Colette. I knew just what to do. I picked up a cooking spoon that had sticky raw cake dough on it, and as soon as I put it in my mouth, I felt calm. Now, that feeling didn't last, but it was very powerful. I had already discovered the connection between food and self-soothing. The fear melted away as the gooey, sweet mess on that spoon dissolved in my mouth and slid down my throat. I was "home," in a safe place where that icky feeling of something being very wrong couldn't get inside me again. That sense of physicality as the cake dough entered my body gave me a sense of substance. It made me feel whole, and secure.
It would be years before I understood this experience or its significance, but when I finally did, everything changed. I realized that the missing piece in the puzzle of my baffling relationship to food, eating, and weight was empathy. I was a person who felt too much, and I was using food to detour away from the awful feeling of not knowing where I ended and others began.
Food sealed my porous boundaries where other people's energy invaded me, and it allowed me to feel present in myself. I needed that quiet and calm, but I had to find a better way to achieve it. This revelation ended an exhausting war with food and my weight and began a new chapter for me. While I'm not a size 2, and I can't claim to have the figure of a 20-year-old high-fashion model, most of the time I'm at peace with my body and myself. That alone is an incredible feat, given how much I have struggled with all of this over the years.
It was this missing piece of feeling too much that allowed me to stop beating myself up(which, as it turns out, is counterproductive when trying to lose weight, as you'll learn later in this book). Once I did that, I started to better understand the many influences on those formerly dysfunctional relationships between myself, food, and my body. I was able to address those influences, too--but it all began with understanding why I was feeling too muchand why fear and frustration were making me fat.
POROUS BOUNDARIES
A person who feels too much often senses the need to eat because her experience of the world is too much for her. It's not that she simply loves the taste, texture, smell, and sight of food, which provides a sensory experience. It's not that she's experiencing hunger pangs, or even that she's addicted to food, although that may be. Diets don't work for her because they don't address her powerful need to feel grounded in herself,separated from the confusing, distressing emotional turbulence around her. Food serves that purpose. The stress of remaining in the moment, without knowing what you are sensing and how to be separate from it, is deeply discombobulating for someone who feels too much. The pain and discomfort are intolerable, and you will do anything to escape.
If you're highly sensitive and empathetic, that has a profound influence on your weight, as well as your thought processes and your moods, which affect your eating habits and your relationships with others. I'm sure you know all about emotional eating, but you've probably never considered what empathetic eating is, too. There is a subtle yet profound difference between the two. An example of emotional eating would be feeling so uncomfortable after a conflict with a coworker that you reach for the stash of mini candy bars you keep in your desk drawer to calm your anger and embarrassment.
However, let's say that it's not you who was in conflict with someone at work but two people in another department. You walk into the meeting room where they just had a heated argument andyou feel the tension in the air. You're unsettled and uncomfortable and have no clue why. As other coworkers file into the meeting room, you have a compelling urge to sneak back to your office and grab some candy bars. You start feeling defensive and on alert, and you can't understand why. All you know is that you want those mini chocolates right now. That's empathetic eating.
Emotional eating and empathetic eating often occur at the same time. Let's say you're about to leave for work and you're feeling particularly vulnerable because you woke up, weighed yourself, and were embarrassed and ashamed by the number on the scale. You drive to work and feel frustrated, anxious, and angry that other cars aren't allowing you to merge. Then you walk into the meeting room where tension hangs in the air and you suddenly realize there's a ball of confusing emotions rolling around inside you and you have no idea how to sort it out. Visions of doughnuts dance in your head. Your emotions are difficult enough to deal with, but now you've taken on the emotions of others and added them to the mix. You've done this because you're highly sensitive and empathetic, and other people's emotions flood into you through your porous boundaries.
You probably don't realize when you're taking on someone else's emotions that you're experiencing feelings that aren't yours. Thoughts don't enter your mind when you're deeply upset and feeling ungrounded. You just feel discombobulated, or upset. You can't put your finger on what you're really feeling. You don't say, "Hey there, self. Bob's anger has entered you and you're tuned in to him!" All you know is that you have to have that salty, sugary, fatty treat now.
I know what this is like because I have felt this way with disturbing regularity: filled with confusing emotions that were upsetting me. I didn't recognize that many of those feelings weren't even mine. Why did it take me so long to figure this out? Why don't diet books or courses teach us about how taking on other people's "stuff" affects us? In our culture, we don't talk much about empathy, so when you're sitting there feeling guilty for downing a huge portion of junk food, you're not likely to think about this whole "empathy" and "sensitivity" thing. But ah, if you did, what you would learn!
WHAT IT'S LIKE TO BE DEEPLY EMPATHETIC
Empathy is much underrated. From childhood, we learn that brute strength, toughness, and smarts are what we need to succeed and be happy in life. We rarely celebrate sensitivity, or the beauty of caring deeply. Too often, sensitivity is seen as a weakness, something to be ashamed of (and more so for men than for women, which is why sensitive men have it especially rough).
But being empathetic--feeling others' emotions as your own--can give you a deeper understanding of others and greater compassion. If you're highly sensitive and empathetic, your friends probably would say you're the one person they can always count on to know they're sad when they're pretending everything is okay. You can probably sense feelings others don't pick up on. That sensitivity enables you to "read" situations very well and respond accordingly. Your actions and decisions take into account the hidden reality of people's emotions. You might find that people seem instinctively drawn to you, and random strangers may even tell you their troubles. I have a friend who is hopeless at directions, but whenever she's in New York, strangers push their way through crowds to ask her to point them to Broadway. She just gives off an approachable and kind energy-and then she has to admit that she has no idea whether she and the stranger are facing north, south, east or west.
edition.