Karen's Blogs

Blogs are brief, to-the-point, conversational, and packed with information, strategies, and tips to turn troubled eaters into “normal” eaters and to help you enjoy a happier, healthier life. Sign up by clicking "Subscribe" below and they’ll arrive in your inbox. 

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Karen's Blogs

How Embitterment Will Ruin Your Life

How-Embitterment-Will-Ruin-Your-Life
One of my clients mentioned how resentful his wife always seems to feel, as if life had dealt her a terrible hand and that was that. The word “bitter” came to mind when I thought of her and I realized what a powerful but rarely talked about emotion it is. When food tastes bitter, we scrunch up our faces in distaste and think “phooey” or “yuck,” as if we need to expel even the thought of something so awful. Think for a minute about what it would feel like to carry that kind of bitterness around with you wherever you go. My client’s wife’s did have an awful childhood. Dad was demanding, controlling and abusive, while Mom was passive and made excuses for his bad behavior. Nothing she did was ever right enough or good enough for Dad and he clearly favored his son over his daughter. Since she was smart...
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Emotional Management and Self-Regulation

Stop Emotional Flooding to Avoid Dysregulated Eating

Stop-Emotional-Flooding-to-Avoid-Dysregulated-Eating
Back in the days when I was a world-class emotional eater, I was also highly reactive to my feelings. I was easily hurt, took things more personally, and wanted to lash out at others to defend myself. I still can be more reactive than I’d like to be (sigh), but I’ve learned to manage my feelings better and express them differently or even not at all. The psychological term for what happens when we’re over-reactive is emotional flooding which happens when an emotion builds up and takes over your brain. You’ve all experienced flooding—when something happens and you’re infused with an emotion while the the rest of the world falls away. It’s as if you’re seized by the feeling which is why the reaction is also called being hijacked by your amygdala.  Here's an example. You’re in a rush and have been waiting several minutes for a parking space at the...
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Emotional Management and Self-Regulation

Pleasure Minus Pressure

Pleasure-Minus-Pressure
Once more a similar issue keeps cropping up in sessions, which got me thinking about a sticking point in growing and healing. This time it was how little pleasure many dysregulated eaters have in their lives, while exhibiting a seemingly infinite capacity for pressuring themselves. Here’s what I mean. We all have activities or chores we’d like to get done today, tomorrow or this week. We have formal and informal deadlines and requests and demands that others rightfully make of us. Mostly, if we want to get paid, work is required. If we have children, they come with the need to be taken care of. It’s natural to feel mild pressure about getting things done. Pressure gets us up and moving. However, if we never stop feeling pressure—because there will always be more to do—it will drive us mad. Those relentless “gotta do, gotta do” thoughts can ruin our lives if...
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Life Skills and Self-Care

Why It’s Hard to Reject Unhealthy People

Why-Its-Hard-to-Reject-Unhealthy-People
One recurrent issue with clients is helping them in choosing intimates who are more emotionally evolved than they are so they can grow into better versions of themselves. For example, Jarelle works hard in recovery from alcohol, drug abuse and to overcome a childhood of sexual and emotional abuse. He’s thoughtful, insightful, a college graduate, and wants badly to have a happy life though he feels hindered by PTSD and depression. His major problem is choosing people who wind up hurting him and then feeling victimized by them. Freud called this the repetition compulsion: people try to master past traumas by recreating a painful childhood relationship in the present in order to orchestrate a better outcome—which does not happen. Instead, Jarelle picks people similar to his parents, an act we call self-sabotage.    Part of the problem is that Jarelle’s parents (nearly his entire family) weren’t very kind and caring about...
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Family Relationships, Love and Friendship

What Are We Looking for When We Fight with Others?

What-Are-We-Looking-for-When-We-Fight-with-Others
Many of my clients seem to argue alot.  A husband and wife bicker about almost everything, a divorced client and his former wife go at it over raising their daughters, and a mother and daughter are constantly at each others’ throats even as they swear they want to get along better. I’d attribute their behaviors to the COVID pandemic, but their battles started long before then and are still going strong.  At any rate, this got me thinking about why we argue (and that “we” includes me). It takes so much energy and effort, causes such grief, and often doesn’t get us anywhere. Why do we do it and what do we hope to accomplish when we get into verbal fisticuffs? We want what we want or for things to be a certain way: the toilet seat up or down, a vacation always by the shore and never in the mountains,...
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Emotional Management and Self-Regulation

I Promise I’ll Stop

I-Promise-Ill-Stop
I was reading an “advice” column letter from a woman saying that her actively alcoholic boyfriend “promised to stop drinking.” I sighed when I read his words, thinking about all the times they were my words about food and all the times I’d heard clients make the same promise. Famous last words or maybe we should call them famous lost words, because somehow their meaning and importance gets lost in the shuffle of life. Let’s take a closer look, or as they say these days, a deeper dive into the meaning of this promise and what prompts us to say it. I know what I was feeling when I swore to myself that I would stop noshing and overeating, turning to food when I was upset or bored, and living my life for my next meal. I was beyond frustrated with my terrible relationship with food. I was exasperated, in dire...
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Life Skills and Self-Care

The Necessity of Connecting to Self

The-Necessity-of-Connecting-to-Self
I’ve had several recent discussions with clients about their male partners who are emotionally walled off, though women too are often disconnected from their feelings. This very human problem learned in childhood has sad ramifications in adulthood. One problem, as many of you know all too well, is that you’re disconnected from both emotions and appetite. You recognize you want food even when you’re not hungry but not what you’re feeling underneath, usually some sort of discomfort you’d prefer not to experience. Distancing from your emotions is bound to mean trouble because what is the function of emotions if not to move you toward happiness and away from pain.  One of my clients frequently laments, “But I don’t want to be uncomfortable.” As if she has a choice. What she means is that she doesn’t want to feel certain feelings because they make her feel badly, in her case, leaving her...
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Emotional Management and Self-Regulation

How to Know You’re Stressed

How-to-Know-Youre-Stressed
Not a week goes by when a client doesn’t tell me a story about their overeating without adding, “I was stressed, and I didn’t even know it.” This is a common problem for many of us in this culture, being out of touch with feeling stressed and only finding out we were after the fact, often when we’ve eaten to try to reduce it. The problem is two-fold, being poorly connected to ourselves emotionally and physically and not respecting the signals we send ourselves when we’re stressed. A client and I were talking about this very issue. She’s a busy mother with a part-time job she does at home and raising two children pretty much alone because her husband travels so much. While we were discussing the difference between being busy (which she enjoys) and stressed (which she, of course, doesn’t), I started thinking about how any of us can recognize...
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Emotional Management and Self-Regulation

Book Review – Let Go of Emotional Overeating and Love Your Food

Let-Go-of-Emotional-Overeating-and-Love-Your-Food-Arlene-Englander-MA-LCS_20220919-192200_1
I’m always interested in reading a book by a seasoned psychotherapist who, like me, has also recovered from emotional overeating. It’s the perfect combination to educate and counsel people who want to manage both their emotions and relationship with food. In Let Go of Emotional Overeating and Love Your Food, Arlene Englander, MA, LCSW, offers a 5-point plan that, when diligently and joyfully followed, will change your relationship with food. She describes emotional eating as “eating neither to satisfy hunger nor for enjoyment, but in a desperate attempt to distract oneself from painful thoughts and feelings.” In short, when we emotionally overeat, we not only abuse food but also mistreat ourselves. To help readers understand and identify with what she says, she shares experiences from her own emotional eating days and uses case examples from her clinical practice.  Her major focus is to teach readers how to connect with themselves and...
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Book Reviews

How Co-dependence Wrecks Your Life

How-Co-dependence-Wrecks-Your-Life
Care to guess what percentage of my current clients are co-dependent? A whopping 76%. I made this count after reading an article (written for clinicians) on the subject: “The Neuroscience of Codependency for Client Understanding and Treatment.”  Due to learning maladaptive patterns in childhood, you are co-dependent if you: are overly selfless and trusting, repeatedly put others’ needs first at your expense, over-empathize and over-identify, often are taken advantage of and victimized, and surround yourself with your opposite type—narcissist or sociopath. The article’s author, Mary Joye, maintains that, “Abandonment, abuse, neglect, parental addiction, death of a parent or any childhood trauma can result in a lifetime of grasping for love like a frantic infant or to become submissive to a narcissistic or demanding partner.” Sound familiar?  Joye explains the neurobiology of co-dependence, that is, how it affects people emotionally, cognitively and physically from infancy on: “If a child does not experience...
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Family Relationships, Love and Friendship
       
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