structure and chemistry of the developing brain. These can result in difficulties in regulating emotions, moods, and behaviors; chronic disconnection; and self-abandonment. They can also result in poor emotional and physical awareness, lack of emotional endurance and resilience, and difficulty activating ourselves throughout our lives.
In part 1 you’ll learn how you can enhance the structure and chemistry of your brain for improved self-regulation. You’ll also learn about your body’s stress-response apparatus. When, as infants and young children, we encounter responsive and nurturing adults, we develop healthy stress-response mechanisms. When we are exposed to chronic stress and negative emotional arousal, we are forced to manage this high-intensity activation through tension in many parts of our body. When we have developed these patterns in childhood, it is highly likely that we will continue to use these same patterns throughout life. Continual high emotional arousal can lead to physical changes that contribute to poor nervous-system regulation and multiple health challenges.
If you happen to be an overeater or imbalanced eater who had kind and loving parents and a great childhood, I show you how even the most well-intentioned caregivers may inadvertently fail to meet their children’s early developmental needs.
In part 2, you’ll learn that even if you missed out on emotional attunement early in life, or if you experienced insufficient or inconsistent nurturance as a child, you can still strengthen your neurological circuits and change the physical structure of your adult brain for improved self-regulation. By understanding how your brain works, you can learn to pay mindful attention, or internally attune, to your emotions, bodily sensations, needs, and thoughts. I show you how you can relate to yourself and others in ways that create and support healthy brain connections and facilitate learning and growth. Psychological and neurological maturation can continue throughout our lives.
Part 2 presents the seven skills that make up what I call inner nurturing, along with information, tools, and special tips that will help you begin using these skills to practice self-connection and self-nurturance. It’s best to practice the skills in the order in which they are introduced, as they are designed to regulate emotional and physical arousal (and to begin rewiring your brain and altering your stress response) before attempting to problem-solve and meet your authentic nonfood needs.
Through practicing these skills, you’ll learn to access an internal nurturing voice: a mature, wise, validating, affirming, unconditionally kind, loving, soothing, comforting, encouraging, protecting, hopeful, and helpful adult voice. This is the part of you that can help you stay with and process your unpleasant feeling states, reframe self-defeating thoughts, remind you of your strengths and resources, and help you meet your needs. Without this voice, a very young part of you — your feeling self — is running the show too much of the time.
As you establish and reinforce the alliance between this mature, wise part of you — your Inner Nurturer — and your feeling self, you strengthen the connection between the parts of your brain necessary for self-regulation. You can also apply these seven skills to other areas of your life where you’re having difficulties with self-regulation, such as exercising, spending, or procrastinating.
In part 3, we complete our work on nurturance by learning some strategies for attracting nurturing others into our lives. Many emotional eaters have had little exposure to nurturing people. Lacking consistent and sufficient external nurturance when they were young, they have difficulty establishing nurturing connections with other people and often settle for undernourishing relationships. If you’re dissatisfied with the quality of the nurturance you’re receiving, you can find solutions here.
We’ll also look at the four habits you’ll want to cultivate in order to better nurture others. The people closest to us, as well as those we interact with in our communities, benefit when we strengthen our nurturing skills. Giving is truly receiving: learning to nurture others helps you nurture yourself.
Inner Nurturing: Not a Quick Fix, but a Forever Fix
Building new skills takes practice and patience. You will not master them overnight. Allow yourself the time you need to proceed through the three parts of this book. A slow and steady approach is needed to conquer your emotional eating and meet your goals.
As you work on these skills and habits, watch any tendency toward perfectionism, which may imbalance you further. It’s more important to practice what you’re learning consistently — not perfectly. In the beginning, the skills may feel challenging. Learning to turn inward and use a kind, supportive inner voice may feel awkward. But as you build the integrative circuits of your brain, it will get easier, and you’ll feel better equipped than ever to address your needs and set limits on unwanted behaviors. That’s the power of inner nurturing. Now, let’s get started!
If you regularly eat when you’re not hungry, eat beyond fullness, or choose to eat unhealthy comfort foods, there is a good chance that your eating has an emotional component. A craving, or an exaggerated desire to eat in the absence of true physiological hunger cues, represents an emotional appetite. Emotional hunger often feels the same as physical hunger.
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