How To Deal With Shame Around Your Bingeing

Shame is EVERYWHERE when it comes to binge-eating.

We’re ashamed of what we do to our bodies.

We’re ashamed of our lack of self-control.

We’re ashamed of how much we can stuff into our body (“how unladylike!!”).

We’re ashamed of the way we look in the mirror so we grab our fat and beat ourselves down.

We’re ashamed of the ways we try to ‘fix’ our bingeing, like using laxatives, going on extreme diets, and having to track every single thing we put into our bodies.

We’re ashamed of the quality of food we binge on, knowing full well how damaging it can be for us.

SO WHAT DO WE DO?

We hide our binges, retreating to our rooms eating silently or over the noise of a Netflix episode. We hide our empty food packets, secretly smuggling them out of our rooms and into bins pushing them to the bottom so no one sees. We hide the deep internal struggle we’re going through.

But all of this secrecy and shame drags you down. Shame thrives in secrecy. It gains more power over you.

In this post, we want to learn how to learn to have a conversation with ourselves around the shame. To be open and honest about it. Even to others as well. Opening up the shame instead of stuffing it all away, keeping you in a negative space.

We’re going to slow down and actually take a look at our shame instead of suppressing.

SHAME

I want you to feel what shame feels like in your body. It's that heaviness, that weight, that feeling of not wanting to show yourself to the world. We, as humans, carry a lot of shame and so much of that shame can be healed through communication, through loving acknowledgement. Shame is essentially a wound in our system, and when we think about that feeling of shame, it literally feels like that in our body. What heals shame more than anything else is speaking it, admitting it, bringing it out of your body.

Shame, like any other emotion, it is energy that needs to be circulated, released, transformed into something else. When we have so much shame on ourselves from the way that we treat our bodies, how we use food as a drug, maybe we feel inherently just not good enough, like we are not worthy. It can build these circles of shame in our system which are just trapped energy throughout our body.

Guilt is “I did something bad.” Shame is “I am bad.” At some level you feel like you are a bad person. And this belief, this overarching feeling can feel extremely heavy, especially in the realm of food and body. 

FEELING SHAME IN THE BODY

We want to look at feeling into the contraction that is shame. Where do you feel it in your body? Where do you feel it in your body and how can you lean into that feeling of shame and learn to love it? Like any emotion in the system, like any energetic wound in our body, everything is there for a reason and everything needs us to show up for it. Can you show up for your shame? Can you speak to it with love? Can you speak out like, “I'm shameful about this, I feel this way, this is the story I'm making up, this is how I'm linking these two things together, I did this and I feel this”

When we begin to navigate this and become honest with ourselves, we begin to really move this energy and free up space. So much of our emotional landscape is congested with a lot of heaviness, a lot of sadness, anger, frustration, depression, guilt, shame, and more. So often the medicine that we need, the thing that we really need is just us showing up for that part to say, “I love you, I'm here for you. How can I love you more? How can I support you?” It’s you speaking to that part as if it is a young child. 

When we look at shame or we look at the not good enough, these are all parts of our system that we need to be really, really intimate with. Do you have a part of you that doesn't feel worthy of love? Okay, where is it in your body? What do you need from it? What is it trying to communicate to you? How can you speak to it with love? 

 So often, we are just trying to bypass these feelings and busy ourselves and distract ourselves and numb our bodies, and we're not actually doing the deep work of healing and therefore our emotional landscape is congested. We feel overwhelmed, we break down, we get sick, and all of that kind of stuff happens. If we can be extremely emotionally responsible, we can begin to pay attention, listen, stop, feel, feel to heal, and navigate all of this stuff with so much more ease.

And feeling shame around bingeing only keeps that cycle going. It keeps you more alone in the struggle, less likely to reach out for help. It keeps you from opening up and normalising your experience. It keeps you feeling like you’re this crazy person who can’t stop eating and ‘why is no one else like this??’. It keeps you feeling like there’s something wrong with you. And how else can we comfort all of these horrible feelings? Bingeing. So we need to face the shame head on. And heal it responsibly.

FOOD FOR THOUGHT

• What is your relationship to shame? Do you let it take power. Do you hide what you’re ashamed of from others? Can you identify what shame feels like for you?

• What do you currently feel ashamed about?

• Think of something you feel ashamed about now. Sit with the shame. How does it feel in your body. Where is it?

• What kind of loving conversation can you have with the feeling? What is the shame trying to communicate to you?

• How do you want to feel on the other side of the shame process?

With Love,

Bríd