Episode Transcript
[00:00:02] Speaker A: Ready to lose 40 plus pounds without giving up happy hours, weekend brunches or date nights. Then it's time to uncover the hidden link between binge eating and toxic relationships. And finally break free from both. Welcome to the Hungry for Love podcast with Jillian Scott. Y' all ready? Let's go.
[00:00:24] Speaker B: Hey. Hey. Welcome back.
All right, we are diving into such a juicy topic today and it's around this concept of disappointment. And it's not just disappointing ourselves. We have a really extreme aversion to feeling disappointment ourselves for sure, but we also hate to disappoint others. And as I've been working with clients and talking about this more, especially over the holiday season and what was coming up, I was noticing how often this came up and often it was with clients who are also would identify as recovering people pleasers where that people pleasing habit is really strong. And so that's what I've started to recognize because I also felt this. I was a very heavy people pleaser, very much on the recovering side. But it still comes up from time to time and I'm learning how to catch it more at different in different ways, catching it faster.
And I'm also learning how to really opened myself up to the willingness to feel disappointed. And I recognized this with my business coach when I first started working with her. It was the beginning of 2022 and I realized how I was holding myself back and I didn't want to set goals and I was scared to go after what I wanted because I was ultimately afraid of being disappointed. And it was so funny because it seemed like such a low level emotion. It seemed like it wasn't that big of a deal. Right? Like when we think about what disappointment feels like in our bodies, it's not big and heavy and weighty. It's not anxiety or depression or deep loneliness or it just doesn't feel like that big of a deal.
But what I found for me is that it creates this ripple effect to where it's I feel disappointed. And then comes the cascade of emotions of self doubt, shame, guilt, inadequacy, just a variety of other emotions. And it's the gateway emotion to feeling all of these other terrible emotions. I think that's part of why disappointment feels so bad and why we can have such an aversion to it. I'd argue that no one likes to feel disappointed, right? Just in general, nobody likes that. But when we've gone through emotional abuse, that fear and the desire to avoid it and avoid it at all costs is even stronger. And this doesn't just Impact goal setting. It doesn't just impact things around the New Year's, it impacts us in really being able to identify what it is we want and giving ourselves the permission to go after it.
And also the permission to fail, the permission to not get it right the first time around, the permission to have it take longer than we expect and to keep going, to keep that belief, to keep trying, to keep getting right back up. And this is one of the things that really, when we look at those core four wounds of narcissistic abuse, the self doubt really creeps in when we continue to be disappointed in ourselves and not following through.
So one of the biggest things that I would say clients deal with is the trauma of having somebody be disappointed in you, especially as a kid. And it was often said in a very manipulative way, I'm disappointed in you. I'm very disappointed that you didn't get an A. I'm very disappointed that you lost the game. And often it came from somebody that we loved or we respected.
So you learned that the only way that you could have value as a person was by pleasing others and essentially by preventing them from experiencing a negative emotion. Because even this idea of I'm very disappointed in you, it's like they're making this negative emotion and this negative experience your fault. So even their emotion of disappointment now is your fault and therefore you need to fix it. Because at the end of the day it's okay if they want to feel disappointed, that is not a problem. And they may very well have been disappointed if you fail the test or failed a project.
But that is for them to own, that comes from their own thought, that is their responsibility and it is not to be used. I think this is where the manipulation and the COVID and emotional abuse often happens is in the subtle underlying aspect of what happens. It's a subtle way of putting someone down, of evoking shame, evoking guilt.
Now whether it's overt or more covert, sometimes it's more of a subtle, you need to fix this. I'm experiencing this disappointment in you and it's your fault and therefore you need to fix it.
And so you have to prove yourself, you have to overcorrect, you have to in some way earn back and achieve their love, their approval. And that really leaves us with this learned pattern of behavior, of this is why I'm striving for love, this is why I'm striving to feel good enough.
And this is why I felt like I was constantly in this never ending cycle of Never feeling good enough. And that's how I feel. Like I spent so much of my life and I didn't recognize, I didn't realize that was from narcissistic and emotional abuse. I just thought it was diet trauma. I didn't even know where it came from other than it just. It was right. I didn't even know what caused it necessarily, other than just my thoughts, my behaviors, my beliefs as a kid. And really starting to piece all of this together made me realize how much I was constantly trying to prove and earn and justify my place in this world.
One of the challenges here is then, especially when it happens to us in childhood, now we take on this belief of I disappointed them and it evokes a lot of guilt in ourselves, sometimes shame. And because I want to avoid feeling guilty, I now over function trying to avoid somebody else from feeling disappointed, right? So it's I want to avoid feeling guilty. So now I'm going to do everything I can. I'm going to take any means possible to make sure that you don't feel disappointed, especially disappointed in me. By ensuring that others are not disappointed in us, we are over functioning. We are pleasing, appeasing and sometimes even to the point that we are abandoning ourselves. We are abandoning our desires, our wants, who we are, we are stuffing ourselves down, we are putting ourselves in a box, trying not to be too much.
Ultimately we would rather abandon ourselves than risk somebody else abandoning us.
Really gets into this intertwined, such a subconscious pattern of behavior, right? Just like people pleasing and over functioning, this over responsibility of people's emotions, it is so deeply ingrained. This aspect around this avoidance of disappointment can also be so deeply ingrained like such a subconscious habit because it is a part of how we learned to try to please others, take responsibility for their emotions, potentially have to fix it if we got it wrong. And then we also have such an extreme aversion when it's in ourselves. Like when I'm now disappointed in myself when I have failed, when I see it that way, sometimes it's also if you, let's say you failed a test as a kid or you didn't score a goal, you lost a game, something like that happened, you likely already felt disappointed in yourself. You already were heartbroken and dissatisfied with the results of what happened.
But now to have somebody else that is blaming you, essentially it's not a productive use of a failure. This is why we can struggle with failure so much, is because we don't learn from it. Other people are disappointed in us. And so what we Learn is I just can't fail now I have to be perfect. It plays into this perfectionist fantasy of when I'm perfect, I can get it all right, then I can be good enough, then I'll be lovable, then people won't leave me.
These are all pieces of the same toxic puzzle of life that we grew up with. And we keep recreating them as we become adults, as we get into new relationships, new careers, new dynamics. And this is what we have to heal.
This is really important for us to see is that disappointment, like I was saying earlier, is like that disappointment can create a ripple effect of negative emotions in ourselves. So it's like the gateway emotion to shame, guilt, regret, self loathing, feeling inadequate because the disappointment in and of itself is really not that bad. It's not that big, it's not that heavy. It's not like anxiety or aching loneliness or sadness, right? It's like, it's just the domino, the initial domino though, that knocks over all of these other negative emotions that have us feeling bad about ourselves. And so what's wild is we look at something like disappointment and usually it's, it's we're disappointed. It's because we didn't hit a certain goal, we didn't achieve what we set out to. There's some kind of missed expectation. It often triggers self doubt, shame.
We are likely to abandon ourselves by trying to not disappoint other people.
And so it we look at like these core four wounds and it's like it triggers all of them. We have all of them come out. No wonder we don't want to feel disappointed and we don't want to disappoint others.
No wonder we take such responsibility for it. And we go far out of our way to make sure it doesn't happen. It's how all of these other emotions impact our nervous system. It's how we've experienced it, and it's how our brain is just trying to keep us safe and keep us alive.
And a lot of this too is what we make disappointment mean. What does that missed expectation mean about you? And so often, rather than seeing it as a way to learn from it, all we learn how to do is try to be perfect, to try not to fail, to try harder, to do more, to do better, to.
Sometimes we learn to lie, to cover things up, to not tell other people the whole truth, not because we're trying to be deceitful, but because we are trying to protect ourselves.
Doesn't justify it. But we have to be able to Understand the pattern and why it's coming out. It's no wonder that this has been such a theme for my life. It's no wonder this is such a theme for clients because it is so tied to emotional abuse, narcissistic abuse, and this habit of people pleasing.
These are the wounds. These are the aspects that we have to heal when it comes to ending emotional eating and breaking free from binge eating and healing from toxic relationships so that you can truly create the life and the body you crave. And I know it might sound a little counterintuitive, but when we work on allowing ourselves to feel disappointed, and we can allow that, we allow ourselves to dream bigger, to think bigger, to bet on ourselves, to go all in and to risk failure, to risk all of these, quote, negative consequences if we don't hit it. Because it's also learning how to have your own back, how to stop abandoning yourself when you fail, when you make a mistake, when you don't hit your goals as fast as you want. It's such a key part of any type of goal setting. I think this is why we don't tell people about goals. We have such a hard time writing things down. We don't want to make plans. We don't want to write down what we ate. We don't want to make a plan for what we want to eat for the day, because we don't want to be disappointed in ourselves if we don't follow through. And instead of letting it just be this negative emotion or this ripple of negative emotions that now we try to avoid, we really want to learn from it, which means we need compassion and we need curiosity and we need to better understand what's at play. It's wild just how this comes up. It came up in talking with my mom a few weeks ago.
She was thinking about where she wanted her next post to be and what position she was going to take next.
And she was like, I hate to disappoint him, but I don't think I want this one particular job. And I wrote back and I was like, he can feel disappointed. Your potential future boss. He can feel disappointed that you don't come and work for him because you're awesome. She's great at her job. Of course he's going to be disappointed. That's okay. It's not your fault. It is not her responsibility. She did not cause it. She does not need to fix it. It's okay to that he feels disappointed. And it's so interesting because when we experience disappointment as abuse survivors, we are used to it creating this ripple effect of negative emotions. And I think that's part of why we want to prevent other people from feeling that. It's like we want to prevent them from feeling the shame and the self loathing and the inadequacy and what they might then be projecting or thinking about us. If I'm causing it, there's so much that gets wrapped up. But this was just like it was such a natural thing for her to say I don't want to disappoint him, let him feel disappointed and let you choose the job that you want. That's what I was thinking then. That's really quite honestly what I told her with a few more words than that. But that was pretty much it. But this comes up for so many people. I had another client who was dragging out making decisions about Christmas and Christmas Eve and who she was going to visit and when because she didn't want to disappoint other people versus just saying this is what we want, this is what I want for this year. And recognizing that yeah, some people might be disappointed and that's okay. They are big girls, they are big boys, they can handle some disappointment and it's not your fault. You did not cause their emotion if anything too I think sometimes with that it's like they might just feel disappointed because they love you and they wanted to see you and they're sad that they don't get to. But it doesn't mean that you are a bad person that you've done anything wrong or somehow now they love you less because of this. And I think that's a big piece. Right? Is like often disappointment was tied to love. So if somebody was disappointed in you it meant that they loved you less. So you had to earn back that love. That's what keeps us trapped for so long. This was a few days before Christmas. I was out in California with my son and I took him out shopping and we went. We were out for about an hour and I was just feeling really irritated. I was just like there were tons of people, lots of traffic. I was feeling very irritated, probably a little overwhelmed. Patients are low, I'm PMSing just all the things. And so I messaged my cousin because we were supposed to go shopping later that evening and I was like look cuz I love you but I can't do this. Like I can't go out, I'm sorry, I can't do it. And there was this like I'm sorry, I get. I'm totally understand if you're Disappointed. I'm really sorry, but I am really looking forward to getting to see you tomorrow. Because this was before our family was celebrating an early Christmas, and there was this initial thing on my part of, oh, I hate to disappoint her, but I also knew I have got to listen to myself and what my capacity is, because if I went out and tried to keep shopping, like, I might stab somebody, it would not be pretty. And she was totally fine with it. She was like, I'm sad we won't get to hang out, but we'll hang out again later in the week. It was one of those things where it really was not a huge deal, but I didn't want to feel like I was letting her down. And there was a part of me that did want to see her. I just didn't want to see her with the thousands of other people who were shopping.
This is where we start to recognize what is it that we truly want. The way that we give ourselves permission to disappoint other people is by recognizing, I would rather disappoint somebody else than disappoint myself by not going after a goal. And I think this probably plays into some of the abuse we've experienced, is people have told you that you were selfish because you would rather disappoint someone else than disappoint yourself. Whether it was subtle and covert or it was more overt, it was, you should have done this. You should have prioritized. You should have abandoned yourself. You should have disappointed yourself, your dreams, your goals, what you want, and go after this over here. What's palatable, what's acceptable, what's deemed okay and appropriate for this group or this person.
It's stuff like that that keeps all of this intertwined, that keeps it really this messy ball of yarn.
This is what we get to work on. This is how we start to work through it, is to recognize and to own. I would rather be building my own dreams than somebody else's. I want to build my own dream life than somebody else's. I want to be my own dream girl than somebody else's dream girl. This is what it comes back to. And for so long, we were told that was selfish, and we were called selfish. And often we were told this by selfish, narcissistic people in our lives. Like, what gets me is that some of the most selfish people are the ones who are telling me that I was selfish. Are you kidding me? It blows my mind. But I took that on and I took it on, and that was bad. I shouldn't be selfish, I should want these other things. I should prioritize other people's needs.
But let's make 2026 the year that you stop abandoning yourself. The year that you lean into the willingness to let other people feel disappointed because you are choosing to not disappoint yourself anymore. You are choosing to go after your dreams, your vision, your desire. It's time that we reclaim that. And that is what this Future Vision workshop is all about. It's what the reclamation is all about is reclaiming who you are. Reclaim your body, your confidence, your sense of self worth and how and where that is derived from, which is innate. Like it is an innate worthiness that you have. And for so many of us it just feels so foreign. It's like logically in our head we're like, okay, yes, but it also doesn't feel true. It's like we don't feel it in our bodies. But you are 100% in control of your life. And it's time that we stop letting life happen to us. We stop living in somebody else's vision for our lives and what they think is okay and acceptable and palatable. And we become the woman who decides she's going to break patterns. You're going to reclaim the woman that you've always been, the woman you were meant to be, the woman who is inside of you. And now we just get to let her out. We get to let her shine through.
It's not just about trying to hustle for worthiness or lose weight. To feel good enough about ourselves. We have to rebuild the woman underneath the habits and the patterns. That is what this is all about is like we have to change our self concept. If you want to achieve any goal and have it last, have it stick, have it maintain. If you want to truly transform your life, this is what we have to do is really transform how we think about ourselves. All of these different aspects around over functioning and people pleasing and the fear of disappointment, all of these play a role. This is not just about weight loss. This is a self worth and body reinvention. You are just becoming more of you. Not necessarily a better you, but becoming more of the authentic you, becoming more of the woman you've always been inside.
We just get to activate her. We get to turn her on, turn her up. And I'm going to help you to see the pattern, break the cycle and reclaim that future vision that you have for your life.
So we are doing this Future Vision Workshop From Survival to desire on Saturday, January 3rd. So if you are listening in real time. There's still opportunities to get signed up. Join me for that live and I will send out a replay afterwards. And if you are interested in learning more about what it looks like to truly take back these aspects, to take back your emotional capacity and your emotional stability and awareness, and to reclaim your identity and who you are so that you can create the life and the body you crave, so that you can break free from toxic cycles and toxic patterns with food or alcohol and relationships. I would love to help. There are a couple different ways to work with me and I would love to share more about that. I'll drop a link where you can also schedule a call. But if you are curious and want to learn more, this future Vision workshop is your first step. We are going to map out and create your one year and three year future vision and really give yourself permission to identify what it is that you truly want. Because so many people that I talk to, they just don't know. They don't have that clear vision. They're unsure, they're uncertain. And that's okay. But a lot of times that's a trauma response. We've learned to stuff down the wants. We've learned to stop wanting because it wasn't safe. And so now we are going to create safety around wanting, safety around desire, and create safety around failure. To create safety around missed expectations or unexpected obstacles that come up and how we handle that. This is what it's all about. We are going to change how we show up in this world in such a powerful way. No more stuffing yourself down. No more trying to fit into a box. No more dimming your light and playing small so that other people get to feel better about themselves. That is a thing of the past. We are now moving forward with more love and compassion for who we truly are and letting that shine through.
And I'm doing the same exact thing. This is my work too. I'm just doing it at deeper and deeper levels. But I'm going to keep doing this year after year. And so I'm going to walk you through my one year three and then I'm going to do a five year future vision. And the way I like to do it is I have my one year and then it's what looks different at year three, what looks different from year three to year five. And so sometimes there aren't significant differences, there aren't significant changes, but it's really, this is what I want, this is what I'm envisioning, this is what I am claiming for myself and I'm also going to tell you a really fun manifesting story because I think that word gets a lot of like, it can be kind of like, woo, woo. And we, at least in the past, I have had some, like, doubts and skepticism about it of like, oh, so you just want to sit on the couch and think happy thoughts and now you've lost weight, like, go for it, okay? And that's not what it is. But part of manifestation is really, it's choosing to think on purpose so that you can create what it is that you want.
This is already part of what I teach in terms of you have to believe before you create the outcome. And that's the hardest part, is believing before you have evidence, believing that it's going to happen, believing in the inevitability of it, even without any proof. It's so hard. It goes against. It butts up against all of our trauma, all of the abuse we've faced, and just the way that our human brain is wired. It is so hard, it is so difficult. But when you have a coach, when you have a community, when you have people around you doing the same things, learning how to do this too, I promise you learn this skill, you will become unstoppable.
Make sure you join me Saturday for this workshop. And if you'd like to learn more about working together, schedule a free consultation. And let's talk more about what this looks like for you. All right, y', all, I hope you have a fabulous day. Happy New Year. I probably should have started with that, but Happy new year. Happy 2026. I am so excited for this year. And a little permission here of just deciding what you want doesn't mean you have to start implementing a plan right away.
It doesn't mean we have to go balls to the wall right on the first or the second. We are not losing any time. This is really just to give us clarity as to what is the target that we are aiming for so we are not aimlessly milling about, right? It's like it's giving us purpose. And we are intentionally designing a life on purpose so that we can create the life that we truly want, the life that we truly crave.
You can have that too, along with the body.
So with that, here's to creating the life and body you crave.
[00:23:14] Speaker A: If this episode resonated with you, it's time to break free from destructive cycles around food, alcohol, and toxic relationships. Your next step, book your free break the cycle call where you'll finally see why your binge eating and relationship patterns are so deeply connected and how to break free from both for good.
You'll walk away with fierce clarity and a game plan to step into a life full of fun, adventure and self love. Grab your spot now at www.bodyyoucrave.com BTC.
It's time to break the cycle.
[00:23:50] Speaker B: I'll show you.
