Numerous people who struggle with Binge Eating
concur that their condition is primarily emotional.
Specifically, it is the unresolved emotional
conflicts that hold the habit solidly in place.
Resolution of these conflicts requires the
development and maintenance of emotional
intelligence.
The concept of emotional
intelligence is becoming widely embraced in the psychological community. It
is now realized that reason alone is insufficient for carrying forward
positive behaviour.
Achieving what we want in life
requires the support of our feelings. What we think and what we feel has to
be aligned and point in the same direction. This alignment can be restored
with specialized techniques of Emotional Coaching.
To the degree that we loose
this alignment, we resort to coping behaviours of all kinds, including binge
eating. Without intervention, the split between our thoughts and feelings
will continue to grow and our reliance on coping behaviours will continue to
increase.
The first step in the process
of resolving our emotion conflicts is realizing that outright suppression of
emotions does not work. In fact over the long term, this strategy is very
destructive. With careful review of our emotions we can confirm for
ourselves that our unhappiness grew in proportion to our emotional
suppression.
Our engrained cultural belief
that emotions don't matter, that they don't provide any useful information
is at the bottom of our inherited training patterns. For most of our lives
we were led to believe that we aren't supposed to talk about our feelings,
that we are supposed to put the needs of others first and that showing our
unhappiness is a sign of weakness.
Basically, we were told to
hide from the truth of our feelings. And now those feelings overwhelm our
reason and we don't know what to do, except to engage in coping behaviours such
as binge eating.
While binge eating manages to
temporarily numb our feelings, the pain of unresolved emotional conflicts
continues to grow. And we enter the vicious circle of more binge eating and
more emotional pain, in spite of our efforts to push it aside.
Destructive as it is, binge
eating is often the first step in the cycle of self destructive behaviours.
What's next for you: alcohol, pain killers, illegal drugs? Look at your
emotional state for yourself. You should be able to see that unless you take
the necessary steps toward resolving your internal emotional conflicts, you
are on your way toward increasingly miserable existence.
Emotional Coaching can help you to
reverse the emotional nose dive that you are in. It will help you to develop
your emotional intelligence by enabling you to gain insight from the
presently unresolved emotional conflicts.
Continued coaching will
strengthen your emotional intelligence, giving you a new context of
emotional awareness that will enable you to face new challenges in your life
without the negative emotional consequences that you experienced in the
past.
