How we use 'comfort food' to avoid feeling the pain of past emotional trauma

When it comes to trying to adopt a more healthy lifestyle, there are a number of things we are well aware that we could and should do. We are told about these over and over again by personal trainers, health coaches and the more enlightened doctors. These ‘Seeds of Wellness’ include eating less and/or better food, drinking less alcohol, stopping smoking, getting enough exercise (of the right type), and so on.

Sometimes we listen to this advice and even manage to implement some of it, at least some of the time. But there is often a massive roadblock that lives deep inside us, and that very often we either are completely unaware of or won't admit to ourselves.

Many of us, unfortunately, have deep emotional wounds or blocks in our psyche. When these rear their ugly head, and we start feeling bad inside as a result, we turn to comfort food, drink or other addictions to help us deal with them.

Has any of the following ever happened to you? Or perhaps a better question might be, how often do they happen to you?

You had a stressful day at work; you're sitting on your sofa at home in the evening, and you find yourself reaching for a glass of wine or some unhealthy snack or other, in front of some brainless TV show, to 'wind down’. If you interrogate yourself at all about what you're doing, you tell yourself that it's not a problem and you deserve something nice after the day that you had. So you eat and drink, and for a little while at least you feel a little bit better; whatever it was that you were feeling bad about disappears for a moment. What's the harm in that?

Or how about this: you like playing video games. Indeed, you like them precisely because while you are playing them you escape from reality. You are so focused on playing a character, on solving puzzles and winning battles in the fantasy world you are inhabiting that all of the worries and the pain of the real world disappear for a while. Or more accurately for the tens or even hundreds of hours you regularly spend in total on each game. For a little while at least you feel a little bit better. What's the harm in that?

How about spending hours scrolling through - and getting emotionally invested in - social media feeds instead of interacting with the real people who are or could be in your life. Or regularly watching hours and hours worth of YouTube videos instead of attending to your growing To-Do list? Or what about putting everything you have into your job, to the detriment of your home life and your family?

Do any of the above examples - or anything similar (for example, feeling the urge to go on frequent shopping sprees for things you don't need) - resonate with you?

Well, they were all examples from my own life, all 'comforting' things that I did unconsciously for decades. Things that only now do I know were avoidance behaviours, all developed to numb the voice in my head and the pain in my heart that just wouldn't go away. I wasn't ever actually hungry when I drank that wine or ate those snacks; I just needed the dopamine rush that the alcohol and sugar gave me. I couldn't face or even admit to major issues that I had in my life, so I hid away from everything in virtual worlds.

For a while - nearly two decades in fact - this strategy worked. But in the end, you can't run away from your true self forever. As I found out, if you try, you're right on track for a breakdown or a ‘midlife unravelling’, as beautifully expressed in a blog post by Brené Brown.

It took a mid-life crisis, a painful divorce - including my two children moving to another country - and being made redundant, all within a 3-year period, for me to figure out the signs of dependence on 'comfort food', and how to begin to face up to it. And by 'food' I'm including anything we take in or do that helps us to temporarily fill the emotional black hole we often feel inside us.

We are biologically programmed to avoid pain, which when considering physical trauma that could be the result of external factors makes complete sense. However, the very same avoidance mechanisms kick in when we suffer emotional trauma in our internal world. We will often do anything - however unproductive or downright unhealthy - not to feel those bad feelings.

So what can be done about this? Well, the first thing is to develop the self-awareness that these avoidance behaviours are taking place, to become conscious of whenever the urge comes up to drink alcohol, eat a sugary snack, or escape reality in a video game or TV show. Next is to go deep, perhaps using meditation practices, and try to figure out what emotion it is that you are wanting not to feel or distract yourself from. Thirdly, work out why those feelings are coming up, what emotional trauma planted them there in the first place.

This inner work is hard, but completely necessary if the overall goal is to achieve vibrant health. You can eat super clean food and exercise every day, but if you have open, bleeding emotional wounds in your soul then it is impossible to be well.

If anything in this article resonated with you, then start your own inner journey. You will be grateful that you did.