Emotional Hunger

Let’s talk about food, not the assortment of items you place in your grocery cart or the plethora of options a menus might display but rather the soul food of connection we crave as humans. Emotional hunger is real and it can get neglected if we focus solely on physical nourishment. Care must be holistic in nature, considering one’s entire personhood. Interpersonal relationships are powerful having the capacity to heal, mend and tend to broken places within. Or in contrast relationships that are dysfunctional have the capacity to crush and shut down the tender places of the heart. I believe we all deeply long to be seen and heard, when we feel this resonant connection it allows for attachment to form. When I think of attachment trauma I’m aware of how we self protect from emotional injury through defense structures like avoidance, stonewalling, even people-pleasing to the point of losing contact with one’s own voice. I work with a wide range of disordered eating tendencies in my private practice, one trend I notice is a person’s relationship to food is often communicating an unmet need of sorts or soothing a wound. I’d like to offer some new ways of thinking of our inner terrain to better notice how that might play out in relationship to self and others. 

Since we are wired for connection, I believe it is through relationship and forming healthy secure attachments that can heal some of the deep, unseen places within the human heart. Rigidity is often formed when there is fear of psychological re-injury or fear of abandonment. Reparenting your heart takes time and often people search for soothing pain through codependent relational dynamics or substance addiction as a way of numbing. In new romantic connections that infatuation can get inflated creating a faulty narcissistic structure that will collapse when that person becomes more real, has their failings too and needs more in return. We’re all in need of some good re-parenting, but we’ve internalized various narratives of neglect or harm, coping strategies and that plays our in our closest interpersonal relationships. Performance anxieties creep in as a way of navigating the environments we have been shaped by, engaging those stories more thoroughly is a way towards repatterning. Trauma teaches us to resent our own need and even silence it by numbing out, this forms a breeding ground ripe for addiction and reinforcing core beliefs. 

Reintegration is the road to recovery, gathering those scattered and split psychological parts that need nourishment happens through being curious with those places we are less fond of. I like to picture a long table with room for all the parts of our selves, all the scruffy parts, the rowdy parts, the well behaved and the rebel parts. All the parts crave and deeply long for love, I think we’re afraid of needing too much and there not being enough when desire is voiced. Naming need is one of the more vulnerable things we can do in this life, because it’s inviting the other to step closer to those fearful more unsteady parts. I think of orphan Oliver, getting the short string and asking for “more” in doing so being exposed to more cruelty and reprimand. We’re conditioned socially to think that asking for more is asking too much or even selfish, but in reality it can be the beginning stages of an invitation to shift into a new paradigm. Desiring more prepares room and breaks ground for a build out for possibility to occur. When we’re living from a mode of survival we cannot imagine beyond the present tense and oftentimes just take what we can get vs. leaning into what’s not yet been built. We must have the audacity to grow an imagination for goodness and from that place manifest something worth standing in awe of.