Episode Transcript
[00:00:02] 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] Hey. Hey. Welcome back.
[00:00:26] All right, so this week we are diving into this series around healing from narcissistic abuse, because narcissistic relationships go hand in hand with also experiencing emotional eating and being an emotional eater. And this episode is going to be really more of an overview and kind of an intro to the series. And then the next four episodes coming out this week are really focused on, here are the four core wounds of narcissistic abuse and here's how it's showing up in your emotional eating and or weight loss journey. Here's how it's impacting you. Because what I have realized and what I saw back at the end of mid to late 2023, I realized and I was noticing every single one of my clients who was coming to me for weight loss and emotional eating also had some kind of dysfunctional, toxic person in their life. They were either experiencing narcissistic relationships or they had in the past or they grew up with it and, or there was some kind of trauma. And if there was trauma and at the hands, especially of a caregiver, it's an emotionally abusive and emotionally immature relationship on top of any physical and sexual abuse.
[00:01:40] So I'm noticing that while my marketing is really geared towards weight loss, emotional eating, the people coming into me and drawn in that I am naturally attracting also all have some kind of dysfunctional relationship. And so this is what first got me thinking. I'm like, okay, there's a connection, there's a tie. But I couldn't quite figure it all out yet. And so I did my first workshop around Hungry for Love and I did it as a three part series talking about emotional eating, emotional abuse, and codependency. Or really this feeling of I'm not enough is how I'd explained codependency, I'm not enough. And really I think of shame now as I'm not enough and codependency as I'm going to turn to something or someone to meet my emotional needs. So it's still very interconnected. It's still the same Venn diagram. I would just explain it a little bit differently now with what I know and what I've researched and learned and experienced. But there was, so there was a one workshop and then in 2024. So all of last year, I put it to the side like it was there. It would get woven into things. But I really wasn't talking about this connection.
[00:02:47] And I didn't fully know how they were connected. But this year, I really felt called to bring these two pieces together, and they felt separate. But also I knew that there was a connection. I knew that there was this missing link connecting these two things together. And that was what was creating so much of the stress and the drama and the heartache and all of the challenges around losing weight and the challenges getting started. The challenges in the roadblocks where somebody could be doing really good for a few weeks and then slam on the brakes and then they're all out. And noticing that one part of it is having a human brain and this human experience, but two, also recognizing the impact of trauma on our brain and on our ability to think and do different things.
[00:03:35] In February, I rebranded the podcast, right? It's now Hungry for Love. As the podcast, that is really what I'm very focused on, because it is not just about creating the body you crave, right? So much more about understanding these nuances because we are hungry for love. We are hungry for our own love and praise and validation. But so often we are still hungry for a parent's love, for a former boyfriend or girlfriend's love, for someone else to love us the way we truly want. This is such a core human desire as well. And when we've been through these narcissistic relationships, we keep looking to other people to meet that need and unfortunately, often keep attracting those types of people until we do the internal healing work to understand what emotions they were meeting in our lives.
[00:04:25] I rebranded the podcast, started talking about this more, and I was working with my business coach at the time, and she had asked me exactly, like, very point blank, okay, how? Tell me, how are they connected? And I was like, I don't know exactly, but they are, right? I know they're connected, but I don't exactly know how. And for most people in the sales, marketing world, in the coaching world, they say focus on one result, one outcome, focus on one thing. And so you have relationships over here in one corner and dysfunction, toxic, whatever. You have to do different types of relationships and relationship coaching. And then in the. In a completely separate vein, on the complete, completely separate channel, you then have weight loss, emotional eating, things like that.
[00:05:06] I really struggled. I really wrestled with this for the last couple of months of, like, really trying to figure out and articulate how these two things are Connected because back in February, I couldn't fully explain it. I was like, I don't really know, but I know that they are.
[00:05:21] Like, I know that they are. And her advice, while really well meaning, was to pick one or the other, was to really just focus on weight loss, focus on emotional eating, pick one of the two, focus on one end result, have that be it and not touch relationships with a ten foot pole. And while I appreciated that, I also knew that that's not right. That's not the way that I want to go. There is this connection. And I felt like I also maybe just needed to flounder my way through it. I just needed to stumble my way through this experience of figuring out how are they actually connected.
[00:05:55] And that has been part of the journey. And so what I'm doing with this series is breaking down some of the areas and some of the ways that I have seen our relationships, and especially our traumatic and dysfunctional relationships impact things like weight loss and emotional eating. And really it could go to any goal. But I'm going to focus more so on those goals and really taking this episode now as a high level to explain what I'm noticing and a little bit deeper of why it's leaked. And if we just look at like an emotional stand standpoint, a narcissistic relationship, people are caught up in the abuse cycle. And really this is just the shame avoidance cycle is like another way that I've thought about it. I think I'll do, I don't know if I'll do a separate podcast just on that or maybe like a video where I can draw it out because I think visually it helps to see, right. You've got the narcissistic person whose shame gets triggered and activated. They don't like it and so they respond with behaviors and words that put them more in that narcissistic category.
[00:06:56] Controlling, demeaning words, manipulative, like they are just trying to find safety for themselves. But it gets put out on you. And so now you listening, you feel attacked and then your shame gets activated. So their shame button gets activated and then they lash out with these narcissistic tendencies and characteristics and then your shame gets activated and now you go into pleaser mode. Fixer going to be a perfectionist. I'm going to smooth things over. Right. It's like we fall into that pattern and it's some kind of Let me fix this. Sometimes there's a little fight, but usually there's not much, if any at all. It's very much try to Fix, try to appease and then run away.
[00:07:38] And we get stuck in the cycle and it's kind of I try and fix and appease to get us back to when things were good, to get us back before this outburst, before they were angry, before they were yelling, before they gave me the silent treatment, before this, this trigger event happened. And we stay stuck on this merry go round from hell, right? But both people are being activated and driven by their avoidance of shame. It's a huge one. Now, there could be a variety of other emotions mixed in, but that is the core of it.
[00:08:08] We don't know how to handle our own shame, and neither do they.
[00:08:12] They are incapable and unwilling of being able to look at and address their own shame, which is part of why they can't see it in themselves. They don't have the ability, the willingness, the desire to be self reflective and see their own shadow sides, to see their own dark sides and to be able to fix it because it activates so much shame.
[00:08:34] When we can understand it from this standpoint that this whole cycle is avoiding an emotion, it's avoiding something.
[00:08:42] And typically in narcissistic relationships and in these dynamics, we learn and are taught that certain emotions are not okay, certain emotions are bad, certain emotions are not safe. And it might not be that stress, for example, it might not be that stress is always bad, but sometimes it is. And so you almost never know when an emotion might be bad. You might have learned you can't be angry, you're not supposed to. You're not allowed, especially as a woman, you're not allowed to be angry. For men, they might learn I'm not allowed to cry. We grow up with so many different things, and typically it's parents who are emotionally immature, who are emotionally shut down. They can't handle their emotions. They don't know how to regulate their own nervous system. They can't help you manage your own emotions. Now as a child, they can't help you regulate your nervous system. And all they know how to do is to shut it down. Because if they can just shut down your emotions, if they can shut down your nervous system, then they can get back to a state of being regulated.
[00:09:40] That's all that's happening.
[00:09:42] But it creates these intergenerational patterns of trauma and dysfunction.
[00:09:48] When we look at this from just this emotional standpoint of certain emotions are not okay, I'm not supposed to feel, I shouldn't be too greedy, I'm not supposed to be selfish, I'm not supposed to be angry, I'm not supposed to be stressed. And it might even come with extra shame around it. So it's not only are you not supposed to be stressed, it's shame on you. How dare you. You should be grateful for what you have. You've only been with your child for half the day. They were in daycare half the day. How dare you be stressed. You should want to love and soak up every single moment of them.
[00:10:22] It's this minimizing of your emotions, this gaslighting, telling you that your emotions are not real, they are not okay.
[00:10:29] And we learn this often as kids, right? So either we have emotionally immature, emotionally abusive parents, we learn it there and it gets reinforced. Then as adults or as kids, sometimes we learn my sibling needs more help. My sibling is struggling mentally or maybe with school or physically with their health. And so it's like I have to be the easy kid. I can't make waves. I always have to be happy. I can't give my parents something more to think about or more to worry about. And so we have this idea about what is acceptable even if we weren't told. We have to be happy all the time. It's this subtle learning of oh, I need to be the good kid, I need to be the easy kid. I need to make sure that they don't have to worry about anyone else so that they can deal with the sibling because the sibling needs more resources. I need to make myself not a burden. I don't want to make my needs, my issues, my concerns, my emotions. Like that would be inconvenient for them. That would just add to their stress. It would add to them and either it's this thought of they don't have the capacity for that or, or just this kind of this people pleasing in terms of the over responsibility of how someone else is thinking and feeling.
[00:11:39] And sometimes I think people pleasing comes from a good place. Like we want people to be happy, we don't want people to feel stressed. But we learn that at such a young age and then it becomes this really deeply ingrained pattern to where we will go out of our way to inconvenience ourselves trying not to inconvenience others.
[00:11:59] And it all stems around emotions and typically it's negative emotions and how we are supposed to feel at any given time. And so when you learn that certain emotions are not okay, they're not safe, you shouldn't feel them, bad things happen when you feel them.
[00:12:16] Bad things happen when this comes out. So if you're angry with your parents, but you get shut down you get yelled at, you get hit. Things happen when you are angry. It's like you very quickly learn that was not safe. And it's not safe to be angry.
[00:12:32] So sometimes we're told, you can't be angry. What do you have to be angry about? I'm the one who's upset. You don't get to be angry.
[00:12:39] We might be told things like that, and then other times it's what we make it mean. It's that subconscious processing of it wasn't safe. It wasn't safe to show my anger. It wasn't safe to be stressed. It wasn't safe to have this human emotion. It wasn't safe to be a kid. It's like our parents were so dysregulated and didn't have any capability to regulate their own emotions, let alone ours. But yet, as a kid, we are expected to regulate our own emotions at such a young age without learning and without being shown how to do that. It's completely backwards. It's so stupid. It doesn't work.
[00:13:15] But because we don't know any better, we keep repeating the same patterns over and over again.
[00:13:21] And this is what's hard. And this is why I have become so passionate about this, is because I see myself now as I'm going to break cycles.
[00:13:29] Not just cycles of don't get pregnant before you're married, which I thought that was the only cycle I was trying to break, which I did. I was very proud of myself for that.
[00:13:38] But there are. There have been many other cycles that I've had to break.
[00:13:43] And that was one of the things fueling my desire to pursue divorce.
[00:13:49] It was not easy and it was not convenient, and it was very scary. But I also knew it was the right thing to do.
[00:13:57] Okay, so let's go back to the emotions and the emotional side of things. With narcissistic relationships with emotionally immature people, especially parents, we learn what emotions we can and can't have. We learn that certain emotions are not safe. They're not allowed. And our brain associates safety with keeping you alive.
[00:14:14] So it's. If it's safe, it'll keep me alive. If it's not safe, I might die. It is very extreme.
[00:14:23] And sometimes we can work through some of this, but sometimes when it is like a deep level, when it's this deep, when it's this constant, when it's something that we have been told and have learned for years and years, decades and decades, when it's something we learned at such a young age, your brain is just so hardwired to say, if this is not safe, I might die. We have to avoid that. Of course we have to avoid these negative emotions. Of course we have to avoid feeling stressed. Of course we have to just stuff it down.
[00:14:53] And what happens when we stuff it down?
[00:14:56] It comes out in other ways. Either we erupt and we're angry at little things, at things that don't matter out of the blue, or it seems not appropriate. Right? It's like we have this huge outburst for something that might be a small or minor inconvenience because we never learned how to deal with little smaller negative emotions and we just let everything pile up. But we also now need an outlet. And so when we keep stuffing emotions, we want to try to re regulate our state.
[00:15:30] So we're gonna look for something or someone to do that. We seek the someone and someone helping to re regulate our nervous system. When you stay in that narcissistic dynamic, it's I need to make this other person happy. I need to fix, I need to appease so that they can go back to the way things were, so that I can regulate my body.
[00:15:50] We're relying on them now. If we can't rely on them, if things aren't going back to normal, even if it's just like a short term thing, we're gonna now look for something else to help regulate our emotions, regulate our nervous system.
[00:16:05] And it becomes really easy to turn to food.
[00:16:08] That's the crux of emotional eating. I eat to feed my emotions. I eat to self soothe. I eat to calm down. I eat to unwind and dist and relax.
[00:16:18] I eat to calm my nervous system. I eat to re regulate.
[00:16:22] This is how they are linked and connected because you were told and grew up and taught and it kept getting reinforced that certain emotions were bad. You're not allowed to feel them.
[00:16:33] You now try to stuff them down. You can't feel them, but you need an outlet.
[00:16:38] And anytime that emotion might come up or anytime there's a threat of that emotion coming up, we now have to protect ourselves from it. So it might be in the past you were lonely and you would eat to self soothe. You would eat to escape the loneliness. Now it's the threat of loneliness. You could have left the relationship, left the dynamic, but the habit, the pattern still remains because there hasn't been true healing yet.
[00:17:03] And this is where I come in, this is where I help you. But when you are preemptively eating now to avoid feeling lonely, it's up. I don't have plans on Thursday night. It's just gonna be me by myself. And that feels scary, that's unsafe, that's not good. And that would leave me open to feeling loneliness. I don't want to feel that. So now I'm gonna eat preemptively to try to stave off feeling lonely. It's like when we eat and we're not actually hungry, but we're afraid of being hungry, right? So I think I might be hungry later, and so I'm going to eat now. But we're not actually hungry. So we haven't even experienced this emotion because that emotion is not safe, because it was associated with a lot of pain, with a lot of heartache, with a lot of I'm not good enough. Often these negative emotions are associated with a lot of shame, which we can see when people talk about, you have no right to be angry. How dare you be stressed? You should be so grateful for what you have. How dare you want more? How dare you want to work outside the house or make more money or do something else other than raise your child.
[00:18:10] What's wrong with you? You should want to have eight kids. What's wrong with you that you don't want that? It pokes the shame.
[00:18:20] So we fall into this shame avoidance cycle and we can look at emotional eating then as similar as that shame avoidance cycle. Instead of trying to control and appease and fix and use somebody else to feel better, to re regulate your nervous system, we're now using food to do that.
[00:18:39] Food is gonna help you avoid the shame. It's all still gonna be there though.
[00:18:44] Like all the emotions are still there. The shame is still there, the self talk is still there. But all of that anger, all of the frustration, everything now just turns inward.
[00:18:53] I've also heard it explained as shame is anger turned inward.
[00:18:57] And I think there's some truth in that. I think shame is such a unique and complex topic and emotion like grief.
[00:19:05] It's almost like this chemical cocktail. But that's what we're doing and that's why these often are so linked. It's why we are so resistant to feeling our emotions, to feeling things in our life. And we quickly turn to food, or we turn to alcohol, or then we turn to a dating app or to another person or to shopping or to social media, right? It's not that these things are bad, it's what's the intention? Why are we doing this?
[00:19:31] And because we learned in the narcissistic dynamic, because we learned negative emotions in particular were bad and not allowed and you couldn't Feel them. Because our shame would get triggered. And in our brains we've learned that's bad, that's terrifying, this is horrible. Because that was often used as a way to control you. You had to get out of the shame, you had to get out of the negative self talk. You had to get out of the stress or the overwhelm or the anxiety or the fear or whatever it is that you were feeling because it was not safe mentally, maybe even emotionally. It's like you might not even know what it feels like in your body because you don't ever truly allow yourself to feel it. You just so quickly jump into, I'm gonna self soothe, I'm going to avoid it.
[00:20:16] And so we end up resisting all of these emotions, making them worse, making them stay longer, needing more coping mechanisms, staying stuck in these cycles over and over again.
[00:20:29] And this is where sometimes the emotional eating, emotional drinking might turn into the binging.
[00:20:34] It's this avoidance of negative emotions.
[00:20:38] So if we're taught this in relationships, it's no wonder we are looking for such a fast, quick, reliable, effective hit of dopamine.
[00:20:48] And food gives us that. And food is so easily available, it's so easily accessible.
[00:20:55] There are a lot of reasons as to why we can be emotionally eating.
[00:20:58] There can be food scarcity, there can be money scarcity, there can be trauma. There are a lot of different nuances as to this pattern, but when we can really break it down and understand, we can see now, oh, I learned certain emotions were bad, and so of course I had to turn to food to avoid it.
[00:21:18] This is what it's all about. Part of it is understanding the pattern of emotional eating.
[00:21:23] Part of it is healing from the narcissistic abuse. It's rewiring your brain, thinking new things on purpose.
[00:21:31] And it takes some practice.
[00:21:33] And that's okay because this didn't happen overnight. We have spent years, most likely decades, in these dynamics. And this is where typically the narcissistic people will want to say things like, but it wasn't all that bad. We still had some good times.
[00:21:47] Yeah, there were some good times. And that's what kept you stuck for so long. That's what kept you trying to get back to all that time.
[00:21:54] That's what kept you in that pleaser mode, in that perfectionist mode, trying to manage things so that people stayed fine, so that the good times stuck around, but they never did.
[00:22:05] This becomes the foundation. Of course I'm emotionally eating right. Have so much love and compassion for yourself. Of course I'm emotionally eating Because I learned that I negative emotions weren't safe, they weren't allowed.
[00:22:19] And we see that so clearly in these dysfunctional relationships, in the way that we grow up with emotionally immature parents and then being married to emotionally immature people. And when we grow up with emotionally immature parents, we ourselves are often emotionally immature.
[00:22:35] And that's why we work and we fit to some extent with other emotionally immature people.
[00:22:41] And when you start to mature and you start to level up, it's like you outgrow that person, that dynamic, that way of doing things.
[00:22:50] But just leaving that one person does not change the neural pathways in your brain. It doesn't automatically change the unsafety you feel around certain emotions.
[00:23:00] It doesn't change the automatic coping mechanisms where you find value and meaning and worth. We've got more work to do.
[00:23:08] And this is how I help people.
[00:23:10] And this is what I've been doing with clients. Now, really going deeper into this of, yes, weight loss is great, but you will just gain it back if you don't also address the emotional side of things. If you don't heal the trauma.
[00:23:24] This is why it might feel hard to get started. It's why it's so easy to slam on the brakes. It's why you can keep things up for a couple days, maybe a couple of weeks, and then you pull back.
[00:23:36] This is what plays into it. And so the rest of this week I'm going to explore and we're going to dive into these four core wounds, call them the core four. That's what we're going to look at because that's what we really need to heal.
[00:23:49] It's not about having a new set of food rules or an exercise plan or a new cookbook. It's not about meal prepping on Sundays or there are tactical things, and there's tactical advice and things that I work with clients around to make showing up and taking the action easier.
[00:24:04] But that's about 20%.
[00:24:06] It is 20% tactics and it is 80% mindset. And when your mindset is so impacted by trauma, we've got to heal the trauma if we truly want to change the mindset.
[00:24:20] If this is the type of work that you want to do, I would love to help.
[00:24:24] Your next best step is to schedule a free consultation where we'll talk more about how you grew up, the types of relationships you've been in, how you've been around food and body image, how that has impacted yourself and your self worth, whether you've lost weight or you're in the process of it, how we can still have this distorted view of ourselves and our bodies and how to truly heal it.
[00:24:48] Because I want to help you create a life that's so good it blows your mind.
[00:24:53] A life that is so amazing it lights you up and you are excited to get out of bed on Monday morning.
[00:25:01] I want you to have the life and the body you crave, but you don't eat in a vacuum. So we gotta address all of this life stuff. If you want to create true, lasting change.
[00:25:14] You can schedule your free call at www.bodyucrave.com schedule find a day and time that works for you and let's talk. And I guarantee you are going to walk away with so much awareness around what the cycles are, what's playing out and where to break them and what needs to happen in order to do that.
[00:25:34] All right. I hope you'll have a fabulous day. I will be back tomorrow with the first installment of Healing From Narcissistic Abuse. You can look for one podcast every day for the rest of this week. Questions, Comments, Fears, Regrets? Schedule a call and let's chat. Here's to creating the life and body and relationships you crave.
[00:26:00] If this episode resonated with you, it's time to break free from destructive cycles around food, alcohol and toxic relationships. Your next step?
[00:26:09] 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.
[00:26:20] 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.
[00:26:35] It's time to break the cycle. I'll show you how.
