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, today we are diving into the fourth wound of the core. Four wounds of narcissistic abuse and really of any trauma. But this is the wound of feeling unsafe.
And as humans, our brains are wired for safety because your habit brain has decided, and the way that it's primed is that safe equals I'm going to stay alive. So anything that feels unsafe, it has this unconscious thought of we might die. We can't do that.
And so anytime you've been through trauma, especially childhood trauma, that desire for safety intensifies.
And so the wound here is feeling unsafe. It's a powerlessness to feel safe. And often we feel very vulnerable. We are exposed.
And so because of the abuse, our brains are so wired to seek safety above all else, above any goals, above any success, because that core wound, it's like it's trying to meet an emotional need. And that is what's going to create safety, especially when we have a traumatic childhood, when we have toxic relationships early on, is that safety is not within your control, and you rely on somebody else to create that sense of safety, right? So as kids, our parents are often we look to our parents or some kind of caregiver to create safety for us. We can't create it, but we rely on somebody else to. And when that other person now is very volatile, right? When we are relying on an unstable person to create a sense of safety, it doesn't go over very well. And it creates this sense of helplessness or powerlessness.
And this is why we can often seek control. We are trying to control people, control situations, because we are trying to create a sense of safety for ourselves.
And this is what people pleasing is. It's a false sense of control. We are trying to please and placate and essentially control somebody else's emotions and therefore their actions so that we can feel safe. That's all that it is. We don't typically see it as control, but that's really what's at play, is I want you to be happy. I want everything to be in its place. And the kids are behaving, and everyone is happy and smiling because we need to keep this one person happy so that they don't explode, because when they explode, it wrecks my nervous system.
And now I need them to feel better. I need them to stop or to do something, to show up in a certain way so that I can feel safe and secure.
That's how we get stuck in these loops. Typically, it's like trying to control one another, right? You have an abusive person who's often trying to control you.
You in turn are trying to control them in response with your people pleasing. We don't often see it that way, but that's actually what's happening. We are trying to control their emotions. We just in our head have like logic and justified it in a way where we are trying to make them happy, we're trying to keep them at peace, at ease. We are trying to keep them from exploding. But at the end of the day, we feel responsible for managing their emotions, for managing their actions.
And then because I am responsible for causing them, I now am responsible for fixing them. So we get stuck in these loops and ultimately we are relying again, we're relying on somebody who is very unstable to create our own sense of safety. That's the problem, that's the challenge here, is we are relying on something else or someone else to create that. Because we weren't given that as a kid. It's why it's so easy to get into these relationships as an adult. Because we've learned how to operate in this system. It's familiar, it doesn't make any sense because typically when you have a traumatic childhood, you grow up and you think, I want to create nothing like that. I want to create the complete opposite. But you will always recreate that until you learn to do the opposite. You have to be taught and trained. You have to learn how to create something different. Otherwise you will always keep recreating that pattern.
And so we don't need to fight it, we don't need to resist it, we don't need to go into shame about it. But we want to understand how our brain is so wired to help you to create this sense of safety. This is why I talk often about creating safety and weight loss. It has to be your process, has to feel safe. You need to feel safe and secure around food. There can't be food scarcity, which goes against most diets and what most diets will tell you to do.
But it also has to be safe to lose the weight. Being thinner has to. There has to be safety there. And often our brains see it as there is a downside of losing weight.
And that's what we get to go to work and explore what's the problem, what is the downside?
Who is going to be hurt by this?
Because this is often what creates our success intolerance, where success isn't safe.
So we can't pursue success. We can't pursue weight loss success because it's not safe.
And so we want to notice when things feel too good to be true.
Right when you are waiting for the other shoe to drop.
And often this is a sign. And this shows, like, how out of control we feel, how powerless we feel, because it's, I can't control this. This is too good to be true. I couldn't create this. But I also know it's not gonna last.
Something bad is going to happen.
Some good might come, but it's not gonna stay.
And so in the past, you may have been punished for succeeding and doing well. And I put punished in my notes in quotes, because punishment can look like a variety of things. So, number one, your. The punishment might have been that maybe your success was minimized or invalidated.
It's like the. Yeah, but.
Yeah, but there's these, like, excuses and justifications, and people take that success and they try to smush it down and make it not a good thing.
So there was one time when my ex had said, yeah, sure, you made some money, but you're only breaking even, so you're basically wasting your time.
Or, oh, you made some money, but look how much you spent. So even though that you made more, you really, you spent too much. And so this success doesn't count.
It's constantly invalidating your success.
And so while we don't think of it logically, it doesn't come off typically as punishment. Like, I didn't see it in that moment as punishment, but that's essentially what was happening. It was like I created some success for myself that threatened my ex's sense of safety.
So again, just like we talked about yesterday with shame and how it's this shame avoidance cycle, there's also a safety aspect and like a safety cycle we get into. And so he was invalidating and minimizing my success because my success threatened him. It threatened his safety.
So we want to look at when your success was minimized in the past, when it was invalidated, when there was some kind of reason as to why it didn't count.
Doubting or questioning whether you can continue or keep it up.
Rude looks or withdrawing praise or withdrawing affection. It would be like if you get a raise or you get a promotion at work or something good happens to you. And then there is this negative response from somebody Else it'd be like if you had a parent where you came home and you brought home an A and they looked down on you and they were like, oh, someone's a smarty pants. Or maybe you change your eating habits and they're like, oh, you think you're too good to eat what we eat and you're just trying to make healthier choices.
But there was punishment because part of the dynamic was taken away. Like this praise or affection or the tone, the attitude that you got. It doesn't make sense to us, but we learn this isn't safe. It's not safe to eat healthier. It's not safe to lose the weight.
He may have gotten snarky comments or passive aggressive comments.
Especially when it's weight loss and you have a spouse or a significant other, they might have a fear of abandonment. And so they are constantly scanning and looking for, how is this person going to cheat on me? When are they going to leave? So that's their fear, but they project it onto you and now they're accusing you of, oh, you just want to lose weight because you want attention. You just want to lose weight because you want to have other options. You just want to lose weight so that you can leave me. Or maybe they do just accuse you of cheating on them, even though there's no, no evidence, even though that's not why you want to lose weight at all. But it gets projected onto you and then you feel misunderstood and you're like, no, no, no, I don't want that. But then it seems like the only other alternative is, I guess I can't lose weight.
Especially if you need this person to feel safe, if you need this person to meet your emotional needs.
Now we are prioritizing our emotional needs, our sense of safety, about above our goals, above our weight loss success.
And it might be that you're allowed to succeed in some areas, but not in all.
So maybe you can succeed with your career or with making money, but you're punished. Or some of these negative things happen. If you were to lose weight. And so sometimes you succeed and it goes well and things are fine, but other times you succeed and it does not go well.
So this is what happens when it's like, we can succeed in maybe one area, but not all. Or maybe it's sometimes you were praised when you lost weight, but sometimes you weren't. Sometimes there were condescending remarks or you were mocked, and it's this intermittent reinforcement of either something good or something bad is gonna happen based on you succeeding. You Winning, you, going after a goal.
But when it's intermittent praise, when it's intermittent punishment, now we're going to fear the bad thing, so we are going to fear the success.
It's not going to be safe because sometimes bad things happen.
When you have not put all of these pieces together, you feel like it's you. You're the problem. You're self sabotaging that you are creating all the shame. And you pull back and you withdraw, you withhold. You don't set goals, you don't go after goals, you don't try new things, or maybe you try a little bit, but not fully. And so often, especially with weight loss, we just are not aware of the psychological and emotional aspects that impact our ability to lose weight, to maintain a consistent healthy eating pattern. And so many of the diets out there are toxic. They teach us to create toxic relationships with food.
And it's mind blowing, right? Like, I remember I found this girl on Instagram and she was making these funny posts about dating and these funny reels, and it was about silent words. When talking with men on dating apps, she had said something like, when a man says, I'm not interested in a girlfriend right now, or I'm not interested in a long term committed relationship right now, she was like, there's a silent part. The silent part is with you at the end. And so it was just. It was really clever and really funny. So I followed her and I was watching this workshop of hers and she was teaching women to have toxic traits. She was teaching them that if he does something that you don't like, you block him for three days, period. That's it. And I was like, what?
So that was a very quick unsubscribe.
But until we have this clear awareness of what's happening and what's going on, we just think that it's us, that I'm the problem. Oh, where I was going with that, though, I am a little bit all over the place, I feel like. But where I was going with that was like, she is teaching people in the dating world to create toxic relationships with men with probably good, healthy men.
And I feel like most diet programs are teaching us to create toxic relationships with food and with body, and it only intensifies what we've already grown up with.
So this is good to recognize and good to see how so often we can hold ourselves back because success doesn't feel safe because our brains are so wired for. I want to create safety. I need to get these emotional needs met, even if it's at my physical health expense.
And so often what we subconsciously learn is that success equals bad things happen or bad things are going to happen.
And this will always hold you back until you figure out what those quote, bad things are.
And what I'm really beginning to realize too, and to notice is that this is after the divorce is final, after the breakup, after moving out of your parents house, maybe after your parent has passed away. It's been years, decades since you've been in this toxic relationship with somebody, since you've experienced the trauma, and yet it still has such a deep, profound effect.
Especially when you grow up with a toxic parent or multiple and then you are in relationships with toxic people as adults.
You could have had your last relationship 10 or 15 years ago.
You could be out of that toxic dynamic for well over a decade. And yet this trauma has rewired your brain. It is still impacting you and how you're showing up.
This is what we need to understand is that it's not just for people who have recently been divorced or who have recently gotten out of a toxic relationship.
This needs to be addressed and we need to understand this sense of safety and what often can lead to a striving for control and people pleasing in order to control other people's emotions so that we can feel safe and so that we can have this really. It's a false sense of control. But we're just trying to feel like we have a sense of power, that we don't feel powerless, we don't feel helpless.
I think there were a lot of times in various relationships and growing up where I felt really powerless, not just being a kid and we don't have a lot of autonomy or the ability to make our own decisions. But I felt powerless to feel heard and understood and seen and validated.
And that is so frustrating, feeling really misunderstood.
And I remember trying to negotiate with my dad one time and this probably happened frequently, but my brain was always like, how can I make this happen? But he would just want to say no. And I would want to try to figure out, okay, what's the real problem? So that I can try and find a solution for it so that I can go maybe hang out with my friend tonight.
But it was just this constant no. And then we feel really powerless. It's like, let me come up with a creative solution, a creative idea.
I think that's a great skill to have that builds resiliency, that builds resourcefulness.
That is part of how I was able to create a very successful cake business in a Third world country.
It's that type of creative thinking and creative problem solving that we need to have.
But so often it gets shut down and then what success we do create, it gets minimized. Or maybe the, quote, punishment for losing weight in the past, maybe people said that you were too skinny, you were losing too much weight, now you didn't look good, now you lost too much. It was like there was some kind of negative consequence. And so often we learn, well, I'm damned if I do, damned if I don't. I can't win.
It's a lose, lose situation. And when we are in that, when that's what our brain has to offer us, right? It's like I stay at my current weight, I stay 50 pounds overweight, and I feel terrible about myself and I get criticism or I get looks or I lose the weight. I spend all of this time and effort and energy and heartache losing the weight just to still feel terrible about myself. Now with loose skin, but still to get demeaning comments and. Right. We get so wrapped up in what other people are saying about us and thinking about us because part of our emotional safety is wrapped up in them. And that's where we need to take it back.
We can stop trying to manage other people's emotions, manage their actions. We've got to let go of that. We let go of this pleaser habit and we look at where we do have control. And that's within yourself, your thoughts, your emotions, your actions. You can choose how you respond to things, how you respond to people, how you respond to different circumstances.
Right? That's where you have control.
But it feels unsafe, not pleasing somebody. And we feel it in our body. It's not just we have thoughts about it. It's like a physical sensation. I call it spiky anxiety.
It's like we know something bad is going to happen because we're saying no, because we're not doing what this person wants us to do. Because we're setting a boundary and we've got to hold space for how our nervous system is responding because it gets so quick to go into fight or flight, because that's what you've known.
We want to hold a lot of space, a lot of compassion. The antidote here to unsafety is creating your own sense of safety. And that means that you learn to meet your own emotional needs.
You look at what you can control and you look at what emotional needs outside of safety that you are seeking from somebody else. Because that's often what we're looking for. That's what helps to create the safety is like they are giving you love, praise, validation, attention.
They help you to feel a certain way. And when you can learn how to do that, you've got to identify what those emotions are first. But then you learn how to give those to yourself.
You make yourself feel special, you make yourself feel wanted, you make yourself feel validated. You make yourself feel heard and seen.
That becomes your job, your primary responsibility. Because when you are taking care of your emotional needs and then you match and you pair up with somebody else who's taking care of their emotional needs. Now you two are whole individuals. You are a hundred percent whole coming together for a partnership. You don't complete one another. You don't need the other person. You are not looking for them to do something for you. You're not like, I'll give you 50% if you give me 50%. No, no, no. You both come in a hundred percent full, satisfied, fulfilled, complete.
You are your own individual beings. But now you can create a truly healthy partnership.
And when you are at this level where you have this awareness where you're meeting your own needs, you can walk away from the red flags faster.
You don't need to bury your head in the stand. You don't need to stay in denial.
You can walk away from those red flags and part of the process is noticing first to see them. It's like, I see it, but I don't walk away.
And then it becomes I see it and I can walk away and then it's I see it and I walk away faster.
And it's trusting those little nudges, your intuition, the little things. When I had a couple dates with a guy, I broke things off and it wasn't because he was this terrible, horrible person. It was like something just didn't quite feel right. I wasn't at a point where I was ready to date and something about him, I was just like, he's just not my person. This just is not the right fit. Great guy, but not the right fit.
And then a couple weeks later I learned, oh, actually not great guy, fairly toxic, very dysfunctional, very emotionally immature.
I'm pretty sure my 4 year old has more emotional intelligence and maturity than he has.
This is the thing though, trusting those nudges, learning to trust yourself, to create the safety for yourself, and holding space. When you can hold space for all of your emotions, you can hold space for other people's emotions and also know that their emotional outbursts may still spike things in your body. And that's okay. You learn how to manage your own body. You don't have to try to manage them and get them to calm down so that you can feel good, so that you can feel safe.
You create that safety in your own body.
This becomes the process. This is how you become narc repellent. That's what we want. I feel like for a long time I was a narc magnet and I have shifted and I am becoming a narc repellent.
This becomes your superpower, your ability to feel, your ability to meet your own needs, your ability to drop the rope and let go of control and needing to control other people.
And this gives you confidence to be able to advocate for your needs as well.
We dove into a lot of topics this week and I really wanted to host it as this podcast series. Because as I was doing the workshop in June and talking about trauma in the lens of weight loss and emotional eating and how this is such a big pillar, I also realized there needs to be more conversation around what is actually happening, how it's playing out, how we struggle with it.
And this is all part of it. The shame, the animate wounds, self doubt, unsafety, vulnerability, these are all core wounds that impact your ability to lose weight and keep it off, to be able to truly end the emotional eating.
This becomes your journey and we can connect those dots looking backwards and then we can see why we can find the meaning and the purpose and what we went through. If you'd like some help to lose weight, feel amazing in your body, have more energy to sleep better at night, feel more rested to have better looking skin. If you want to be able to lose 5, 8, 10 pounds this month, then I can help you.
The best next step is to schedule a free consultation and we'll talk more about where you are and where you want to be a year from now. What do you want your life to look like? Because the narcissistic wounds that we feel, these core four impact all levels of success, all areas of our life, not just weight loss.
And just creating the body isn't going to do a damn thing if you don't also have a life that you love.
So we'll start with the body and give yourself time and permission and space to focus on this and to heal.
Part of this, part of the work of losing weight is actually healing. I'll show you how to do that. Because there are no other diets, there are no other programs teaching you how to do that, how to bring these two things together, healing so that you can lose weight. Because part of this is We've got to heal our relationship with food, with body, internally, with ourselves just as much as we have to heal from trauma and abuse.
And I'll show you how.
All right y', all, I hope you have a fabulous week. Here's to creating the life and body you crave.
[00:23:43] Speaker A: If this episode resonated with you, it's time to break free from destructive cycles around food, alcohol and toxic relationships.
[00:23:50] Speaker B: Your next step?
[00:23:52] 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 BTC.
It's time to break the cycle.
[00:24:19] Speaker B: I'll show you.
