New Help for Food Addicts
By Forrest Samnik, MSW, LCSW
The word addiction is associated with known killers such as nicotine, heroine, and alcohol. So how can something that is necessary for survival – FOOD – be addictive?
The answer is simple. Anything that numbs us from pain can be addictive. Think about it. Pain is something most of us try to avoid. If you are in pain and you do something that makes the pain disappear, are you more likely to do that “something” again? The unbelievable amount of money spent on over-the-counter pain relievers says, “YES”.
But what if the pain isn’t physical? Our society has a little more sympathy for someone who is addicted to pain killers because they are living with intractable pain. People living with emotional pain, however, often feel shame as well.
Further, the “something” used to ease the pain doesn’t have to be a physically addicting substance for someone to become addicted. People become addicted to pornography, gambling, and exercise but none of these activities are “addictive substances” like heroine and nicotine. And just because gambler’s bodies don’t physically become sick if deprived of gambling, it doesn’t make gambling necessarily any easier to quit than heroine.
Food addictions are even more insidious. Food is the one addiction that we can’t abstain from. A smoker can quit smoking. A gambler can quit gambling. But nobody can “quit” food and continue to live. It is the one addiction that cannot be “cured” through abstinence.
So why can some people eat and not develop an addiction to food and others feel they can’t ever get enough? There is one thing that all addicts have in common: Avoidance of pain. If you are addicted to food, chances are you are not even aware of what pain you are avoiding. You have become so adept at avoiding pain, the pain you are avoiding may no longer be in your conscious awareness. Like Pandora’s Box, all the scary pain is locked up tight.
The pain probably began in childhood. Perhaps you were ridiculed, shamed, or lived in a family filled with conflict or abuse. Perhaps you were deprived of love or food itself. Perhaps you felt abandoned, alone, guilty, or not good enough.
Until you treat the avoidance issues that are causing you to eat, you will not be successful long term. Sound scary? It doesn’t have to be. Amazing new therapeutic techniques have arisen with the advent of Energy Psychology. Although psychological functioning involves thought, emotions, chemistry, neurology, genetics and environmental aspects, bioenergy is also involved. Just as an audiotape or computer hard drive contains information in electromagnetic fields, similarly our brain and body operate electromagnetically.
Energy psychotherapy uses the bioenergy systems to assess and treat emotional, physical, and psychological problems. In addition to many standard therapeutic elements such as rapport, listening and discussion, energy psychotherapy also involves procedures that specifically address the underlying energetic aspects of the problem. These techniques can easily and effectively collapse toxic emotions such as anger, sadness, guilt, grief, jealousy, and fear. It can be thought of as emotional acupuncture. These therapies often achieve observable and measurable results rapidly and usually without causing undue emotional distress.
When energy psychotherapy is applied to food addiction, we are treating the underlying cause of the addiction – the clogs or imbalances in the bioenergy systems caused by emotional clutter. Diets don’t work because food is not the problem; it is only a symptom.
If you are over weight or suffer from a food addiction, help may lie in the exciting field of energy psychology. For those readers wanting more information, call LifeWorks Counseling & Coaching at (727) 781-6567.
Forrest Samnik, MSW, LCSW is a psychotherapist and life coach with a private practice in Palm Harbor. For questions or comments call LifeWorks Counseling & Coaching at (727) 781-6567.