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.
[00:00:18] Speaker B: Y' all ready?
[00:00:19] Speaker A: Let's go.
[00:00:24] Speaker B: Hey.
[00:00:24] Speaker A: Hey.
[00:00:24] Speaker B: Welcome back and welcome to another juicy topic, the origins of you. What did you learn before you learned to diet?
And this is where we are going to start exploring childhood wounds. And I'm going to share a little bit about my experience with them and how that has impacted not just our body image and food and our relationship with food. Because, yes, there are often a lot of things that we learned growing up about food, our weight, our worthiness as it relates to our weight and how we look.
But so much also impacts how we do relationships as adults. And a lot of times, because we are growing up in dysfunction around food, there's also dysfunction in other areas.
And so I don't think it's necessarily. If there was dysfunction with food, it means there had to have been a dysfunction with a relationship. But chances are that's one and the same.
Chances are there's a lot of crossover. And this is one of the things that I found in working with clients is everyone who came to work with me around emotional eating and weight loss all seem to have somebody really antagonistic or narcissistic in their life. And they also had childhood trauma. They had trauma within their adult life, but there was also trauma as a kid. I really believe that trauma gets passed down. There are generational cycles of trauma and abuse. And that's because we learn to create these patterns of perfectionism and people pleasing and feeling responsible for other people's emotions to. So much of this framework gets built as a kid. We go on to recreate it as adults. That's what we inevitably teach. That's what our kids inevitably learn. And so we see these cycles constantly being passed down generation to generation. I saw it with food, I saw it with body image and weight loss, and I've also seen it now within relationship dynamics.
This is what we want to explore because in order to really heal and heal while leaving, heal after a divorce and after leaving that toxic relationship, we need to really identify and address what are those core wounds that we experienced as a kid. What were we searching for and deeply wanting but never receiving?
And we need to learn how to meet those emotional needs now for ourselves.
We need to paint a clear picture. We want to accept what happened, what is.
And also, this is not just about throwing anybody under the bus. This is not about making somebody the villain or the problem.
But we need to start to recognize where it's appropriate to give responsibility, where it's appropriate to be able to identify, okay, this happened. This is why I now keep searching for a partner who does A, B and C. And it's really interesting too, because a lot of times we think we're looking for the opposite, or we think we've found the opposite, but it's actually more of the same. And so growing up, for me, growing up with a dad who was very rageful, hot and cold, walking on eggshells, but not fully recognizing that, but being really afraid emotionally, sometimes physically, but more so emotionally, that dynamic made me so afraid of anybody who was overly angry. That was a big red flag for me. But when somebody was love bombing, when they were so loving and so nice and so kind and so good to me to an extreme, but that I thought was normal, I thought was like, oh, I finally found my one. I finally found my prince Charming.
I thought it was the opposite. The issue was the intensity of the emotion. They ended up being one in the same. I just didn't see the rage and the anger and the harsh words and the silent treatment until after I was married. But I thought I found somebody who was the opposite. And then it turns out I married the same exact person.
So despite our best efforts, we can still fall into these patterns and these habits. And so I want to help you to decode and understand that. So if you find that you have been in multiple toxic relationships, if you have been in multiple abusive relationships, but the dysfunction, the abuse is slightly different, it just looks a little different, but a lot of the patterns are still the same.
This is where we have to go back to childhood. And that is going to be the key so that you don't continue to get into these toxic relationships. And this is the key to better identifying and understanding how to meet your own emotional needs, how to be a strong, healthy, emotionally safe and independent person who may want somebody to share their life with, but doesn't need somebody. And this is always that line that we straddle where it's like, how can I be more content and happy and satisfied with where I'm at right now while still wanting something more or something better or something different? So it's like, how can I love my body right now as it is while still wanting to lose weight? How can I love myself and this process of divorce while still knowing I want this to end like I do want to Be on the other side, even if I can't have it right now. Or for me, for a while, it was learning how can I have fun and enjoy my life and feel safe physically, financially, emotionally as a single woman? How can I create that safety while being single and knowing in the future, I want a partner, I want a spouse. I want a healthy marriage. I want a healthy dynamic.
It's a learning to love what is now, learning to be happy, content, at peace with what is now, while also on the road and pursuing more. And it sounds contradictory, and I would say this is probably one of the more challenging things we will ever do as humans, because they feel like these two things contradict one another.
But learning how they go together, learning how to do them simultaneously, that will bring you so much happiness and so much freedom, because that's how we actually start to enjoy the journey. That's how we enjoy the process. That's how no matter how your divorce is going right now, you can still love your life. You can still stop emotionally eating. You don't have to wait for the divorce to be over. You don't have to wait for these things to finally end or to get to a certain place.
That is the lie that we keep following. That's the toxic pattern that we have believed for so long.
So let's talk about childhood. I'm going to share a little bit more of how I grew up, what I made things mean, so that you have an idea, too, of where I'm coming from and how I've been able to look back and kind of piece things together and tell myself a new story.
So my mom got pregnant with me when she was 19.
She had me just before she turned 20.
And my biological dad was not in the picture. So bio dad, he is not around. I know him now. He's been in my life since I was like, 28. But growing up, it was my mom and I had her maiden name as my last name. Then she remarried when I was 2, and then she ended up having two more kids with my stepdad. But I grew up until I was 12. I was not officially adopted, so I always had a different last name. I never quite felt like I fit in.
And my entire life, I just. I always hated my stepdad. And I never quite understood, like, it never quite made sense because there was never an incident. There was never a thing. There was never something in particular where it was like, that was the turning point. I just remember never liking him. And what I can see now is that he was never emotionally safe. That's why he was very emotionally volatile. He was a six year old child running around in a grown man's body. And I'd argue that's still a lot of how he operates. He has a little more self control these days. But to be honest, I don't talk to him anymore because that is not the type of person that I want in my life. I don't like how he treated me growing up. I don't like how he treated my sisters, how he treated my mom. I don't like how he treated my mom in their divorce last year. So looking now from this place of I am going to choose who I want in my life and he is not the type of person that I want.
But as a kid without a bio dad, my story around bio dad was he wants nothing to do with me.
And there was so much shame in that. There was so much heartache, there was so much pain.
And that pain got masked as anger.
And that anger came out on my middle sister and it was anger because of the injustice and the frustration and feeling unloved with my stepdad, but also this anger of feeling abandoned and unwanted. And so there were other stories around, well, I guess I must be too much and I must also not be enough.
If I was good enough in some way, maybe he would have stuck around. But there was this. I must be so terrible that he wants nothing to do with me. That was a really hard, painful story to carry as a young kid.
But that was my story up until my mid-20s. I remember telling a guy on a date one time, I want to be so successful and then I want nothing to do with my dad. I'm going to make him see what he's missing out on.
Even as a young adult, there was still so much hurt, so much pain buried underneath the anger.
I could not see it at the time. And I had a man who now wasn't in my life. Then I had an emotionally abusive man for my stepdad. And that also was tricky and hard because it's like, well, I hate him, but he's the only dad I've got. I hate him, but I'm supposed to love him because that's what the Bible tells me. I hate him. And yet he's the only one here.
At least he's here. At least he doesn't hit me. It's in my childhood that I learned to please.
I also learned to minimize and excuse and justify bad behavior because part of that was it's what my mom did.
Part of it is that's How I learned to stay safe. It's how I learned to survive. There was one time when I was 14 and my dad had lost his job. My mom lost her job shortly after. They're both out of work now we have family visiting us. It's over the summer, and I'm with my cousin. And there I said something like, yeah, okay, dad. And I rolled my eyes at him. Just being a little snarky teen, like, didn't really mean anything. Super insulting. Was not trying to piss him off, but just trying to be kind of funny and maybe even a little bit showing off for my cousin. I don't know. I don't know exactly what prompted it, other than just being a teenager.
Well, that was the straw that broke the camel's back. And his arm reached out and he grabbed me by the throat. And he just stood there, hands around my throat, and I just looked at him, and he looked at me for, I don't know, three or four seconds maybe. And then he pulled his hand away and he walked away.
My cousin said something like, oh, my gosh, what just happened? Does that happen often?
And I was like, no, no, that doesn't. But I didn't tell my mom. I didn't tell her for years. I eventually did, but I didn't tell her for years because my thought was, well, he didn't actually hurt me. He didn't squeeze my throat. I could still breathe. I learned to minimize and excuse and justify and push it away. He must have been having a really bad day. I guess he was really stressed growing up. It almost felt like he constantly put my mom in the position of picking him or the kids. And in particular, I felt it a lot around him versus me. And anytime it seemed like my mom was taking my side or she was standing up for me, in his mind, she was taking the kid's side. She was taking my side and not his. And that was such an affront, even though he could have been in the wrong. I don't remember all of the details, but I do remember them fighting about money a lot. I remember them fighting about us girls a lot. And I remember thinking, like, he already doesn't like me. If I tell my mom, it would just make things worse.
What do I expect to happen, you know? It was like I had already gotten to the point where I didn't understand why they were still married. I wished and I prayed at times that they got divorced. And then I would pray for forgiveness for asking that my parents got divorced because what a terrible kid I am to want that when other kids were going through that and dealing with that and they didn't, who am I to be wishing and praying for this? When my cousin's dad had just passed unexpectedly a couple months earlier?
There was a lot of shame. There was so much shame.
And it's unfortunate. I can see a few times in a few moments in my life where I look back and I think I shouldn't say anything because I didn't want to get in trouble. I didn't want things to come back on me. I didn't want to feel any more shame or like I did something wrong.
And yet coming forward and saying something probably would have prevented more bad things from happening from that abuse coming out on my sisters because they both experienced physical and really extreme emotional altercations with him growing up, I can't say that things would have changed or that it would have protected them necessarily in any way. But I held that in. I learned to minimize it, which is why I minimized so much in my marriage.
There was also this thought of, in a good Christian marriage, you don't talk bad about your spouse, you don't gossip. It was almost like you can never say anything bad about him, but that means you can't get help and support. And the times when I would go to talk to a pastor or a pastor's wife or I did see a therapist at one point, but we didn't really talk about the true dysfunction of the marriage. But when I would go and talk, I would get sympathy. I would get, I'm really sorry, I can pray for you. But I was talking to people who did not know how to handle what I was dealing with.
Now it's okay, they just weren't trained in that. But I spent so many years, well, I must be the problem. I'm taking the blame. Even though it didn't feel right, it was like it was what I knew.
These are where our wounds creep up. This is where we learn these patterns. I learned how to be responsible for others emotions.
I learned how to be responsible for their actions of like, well, I must have done something to trigger that. So it's my fault.
I learned that I needed to fix it, but I never wanted to fix it with my dad. I never wanted reconciliation. And I think that's part of why it was a little bit easier to walk away. Because there were rarely ever apologies, there was rarely ever anything positive that came from it. And even now I'm not looking for anything from him. I'm moving forward and I've decided that's Just not the type of person that I want in my life. It's not the type of person I want in my son's life.
And there's a level of, I'm gonna do whatever I can to protect my son in the best ways I can. And how I know how. Now one of that is I look back and I wish I had somebody to protect me as a kid, and I didn't.
So now adult Jillian is going to protect me. I am going to protect me from the people that I don't want in my life and that aren't safe. I am going to protect my son from the people that are not safe.
And I don't need anybody's permission. I don't need anybody else to like it.
These wounds definitely set the stage for unhealthy adult relationships, unhealthy romantic relationships in the future where there was quite a bit of codependency, where I felt responsible for their emotions. I was also making them responsible for mine. And to feel loved and worthy. And I really struggled with feeling good enough. I would say that was a common theme of, like, I don't feel good enough.
And I think another word we might use is worthy.
To me, it was never in my head as, like, I don't feel worthy. It's I don't feel good enough.
And then that would come out in different ways of like, I don't feel smart enough or thin enough or pretty enough or fast enough or some version of enough.
I have to show that I'm doing enough and I'm performing enough and I'm pleasing enough and I'm, you know, and I've got the right emotions enough.
Because that was the other thing, is learning that certain emotions were punished. Certain emotions came with consequences.
So I learned to stuff them down. I learned to eat over them. I learned that food doesn't just help me avoid the negative and the pain. It helps bring pleasure and bring joy.
I grew up with some core wounds around shame and self doubt and abandonment and feeling helpless, feeling powerless. And I would say three of the kind of core emotional wounds from childhood were that I wanted to feel loved, special, and chosen.
Then those were the emotions that I put. And I kept looking for affirmation from men. Then growing up, it was like, can I get their attention and can they do or say something that helps me to feel special?
Chosen, wanted, because that meant I was loved. That meant I would be safe.
It became this toxic cycle too, of, I'm special because I'm chosen, and I'm chosen because I'M special.
And so now my worth and me feeling good enough is not just dependent on my size, shape, or weight. Then it also became attached to who I was dating or who I was married to.
And this was one of the things that I woke up to towards the end of my marriage was so much of my worthiness and me feeling good enough and somehow better was who I was married to, was that he chose me, that I was special enough for him to choose me. Even though there were so many times in our marriage where I felt like he didn't even like me. It felt so confusing. I think confusing is just the best way to describe a toxic or dysfunctional relationship of, like, this doesn't make any sense. He says one thing, then does another.
He says one thing, then the complete opposite the next day or the next week.
But it's this intermittent love and intermittent positive reinforcement that we get in childhood that sets the stage and primes us for this type of relationship and dynamic as an adult.
This is exactly why, because I didn't feel special or chosen or wanted as a kid, of course I put those emotional needs on a man.
Like, of course I did.
I had some really deep father wounds because I also felt like I wasn't chosen with my mom. I felt like I was this buy one, get one free deal where you don't actually want the extra one. You're like, no, no, no, I just want the one. I don't want that bonus one.
I felt like my dad was choosing my mom and I was just this side burden, this extra little thing that came along with her of like, ugh, fine, I guess I'll take that one.
I never felt truly wanted, truly valued, and I don't believe it was just because I wasn't his biological kid. I think it was more to do with his antagonistic and narcissistic personality. One thing I realized now as an adult is that my sisters also experienced a lot of that growing up. But for me, it made more sense of, like, well, I'm not his biological kid, so maybe that's why he doesn't like me, because I didn't like him. But he also didn't like me. Like, it was this cycle.
So as an adult now, if I want to heal, if I want to stop dating toxic men, I have to heal these wounds first. I have to identify those core wounds of what is it that I was looking for a man to make me feel?
What were the core wounds from childhood that I wanted that I didn't get?
How did I want to Feel what was it that I deeply wanted but didn't get as a kid?
And from there I can look at, how can I make myself feel that now?
How do I meet those emotional needs in myself?
This is where I think so many of us can wake up to our own lack of self love, lack of self worth, and truly building that from the ground up. Not based on the size of our house or how fancy our car is, or the size of our bank account, or our bodies, how pretty we look one day, right? It's like really taking this self love, self worth piece and detaching it from anything that we could ever earn or achieve or create or change.
But that's hard when you have grown up with and then spent years, decades with somebody where you had to earn love, earn praise, earn validation. You had to prove yourself good enough.
And we can spend so much time trying to prove to somebody that we're good enough when they are committed to never seeing it. We try so hard to communicate better and to feel understood and try to convey how we're feeling and thinking and like what's actually happening for us. But the person you're talking to is committed to misunderstanding you.
That's when it feels like you're talking to a brick wall. That's when it feels so frustrating.
And this is why sometimes we have to leave.
We can leave our family of origin, we can leave the marriage, we can leave the dating relationship, but we also have to divorce the internal dysfunction that we have within us. We have to divorce the emotional patterns and habits that kept us stuck in those situations, that kept pulling us back into those dynamics.
There are patterns within us that we have to heal, that we have to unwind, that we have to break.
Because it's like this hook gets put in you as a kid, right? If you imagine fishing, it's like there's a hook that gets put in with that narcissistic or antagonistic or a parent who's an addict. And now there's a big hole. And it's really easy for future people to hook you because of that gaping hole that never healed from childhood.
And now you're on the line. And this is why we fall for the love bombing. It's why we stay in the trauma bond and the abuse cycle for so long. Because every now and then they reel us back in. And we have to learn how to take that hook out of our mouths, how to truly unhook from it. But we need to unhook from the emotions.
That's really what we're Doing. It's not about a legal divorce. It's unhooking from the emotional pull and the emotional needs that they were meeting for us. And when you learn how to meet those for yourself, you learn how to heal that wound. You heal that hole.
This is the process. This. This is what I help clients with, whether it's with food or alcohol or with that toxic relationship and truly healing and being able to move forward, this becomes our work. A big piece of this is really healing the patterns and the trauma from childhood.
So if you are wrestling with this question of should I stay or should I go? Is it time to leave? If you're wrestling with how to stop attracting toxic partners, how to start dating healthy men, being attracted to healthier men and attracting them and calling them in, this becomes our work. We've got to heal these holes, these wounds, because it's this underlying pain that is often driving us to reach for food or to reach for alcohol. It's one in the same.
If you want some help, your next best step is to come work with me.
You've got options to work with me for three or six months, or we can do a year. But this is really designed to help you actually move forward. We have to look backwards to process the pain so that we can let it go, so that we stop carrying around this heavy backpack full of trauma and pain and heartache and suffering.
But we also want to do it in a way where we can move forward, where there's growth and there's healing, where we can spot the old patterns. We spot the old people pleasing the old perfectionism, the old responsibility. We stop bending and pretzeling ourselves to make others happy and to accommodate them and their schedules. We start to catch these habits sooner.
This is how you break free.
This is how you create the life that you crave.
This is how you use that breakup or that divorce to fuel you to be the best thing. It becomes the catalyst for a life so good it blows your mind.
This is how I'm going to help you. So. So if that's the type of result you want, if that's the type of life you want, if you want your divorce to be what sets you up for success, if you want your divorce to be the spark that truly lights you on fire and brings out all of your best parts, we got some work to do, babe. Your next best step is to schedule a free consultation, and we'll talk through more about where you are now and where you want to be in the next six to 12 months, because we need to have that future vision of what you're working towards.
So whether it's wrestling with this question of should I stay or should I go or how do I remember or figure out who I am, I seem to have lost myself. Like I don't even know who I am, what I like, what I want anymore. Or maybe it's rebuilding your life after that divorce, after that toxic breakup. I can help. All right, y' all have a fabulous week. Here's to creating the life and body you crave.
If this episode resonated with you, it's
[00:25:05] Speaker A: time to break free from destructive cycles around food, alcohol and toxic relationships.
[00:25:11] Speaker B: Your next step?
[00:25:12] Speaker A: 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 VTC.
It's time to break the cycle.
[00:25:40] Speaker B: I'll show you how.
