In her TEDx talk Feel it…Before you feed it, Helen Philipsen asks “What was the problem that made food your solution?”
She describes emotional eating as an addiction. She says she sought treatment for herself in an addiction clinic. It worked.
Through her treatment she got to address the self-worthiness issues that she was medicating through food.
Helen Philipsen doesn’t discuss her problems, so, as an example, I will give mine.
When I ask myself this question — What is the problem I am medicating through eating — I travel first to the immediate
My house needs flooring. I need more money.
And quickly fly out to the more grand
I say no to partners who can bring in money.
I rejected even the father of my child.
That. THAT was spite.
But why?
What happened before.
I was lonely. I didn’t think anyone understood me.
Ok. Why? Where did that come from?
Go back to childhood.
Nope. It wasn’t childhood. I felt held by the world in childhood. I had a wonderful mother, an ambitions father, a doting big sister.
Yes, in Junior High School I started to dress differently. Like the people waving American flags out of their trucks, I felt disenfranchised already.
I had hyperhidrosis. Boy, did I have hyperhidrosis. Could not put my hands on my desk. Could not touch my papers.
In high school, still sweating, I read Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. I was smitten. Smitten with talent, smitten with literature. How can something so deep and wrenching as open betrayal be illustrated so vividly? What did high school lunch or who likes whom have to do with the truth I found it books? How could real life compare to the clarity literature offered?
I studied writing and books.
And never could find a home for this respite outside of college.
Nonfiction media came close to answering my call professionally, but it disappeared in the folds of the new millennium, in reality TV and the colorful Internet content that now stands in for information.
So, in my 30s, when I did the thing that sealed my fate to eat more than I need, I was responding to an intellectual loneliness.
Dating partners cared about picket fences and building a life of conrol. Friends from high school were concerned with their 401Ks and worked to “take care of my family.”
I never understood any of it. Why would you be born, be supported by people who didn’t live out their life in order for you to grow and mature and then you yourself sink into working only for the care of others? Who were the people who lived for themselves? Oprah? Elon Musk?
I couldn’t compare to those people. I was already behind.
My intellectual projects begun but undeveloped, my dream job far away and run by men who liked young women (Charlie Rose), I had no place to go.
Again, like the people who wave the American flag off of their trucks, I began to spite everyone. Feeling out of place at work, I stopped going to meetings. I huddled like a hermit. I got a weekend job at a group home, invisible to my chosen profession.
Happy only when I was giving an ear to professors about their work, I started an at-home interview series. I posted to YouTube.
I tried starting a cleaning business.
Still nothing.
I had friends, work and a good mind.
To anyone watching, I was normal.
But I felt out of place. I still could not shake hands without premeditating for days, counting the days, hours and minutes before the meeting. I was a monster, unlike everyone else. Imposter syndrome must have taken hold here. I REACTED like everyone else. But I felt like I belonged on Mars. I also began to begrudge my pretense. I was posing. Posing at work, posing while I shopped. Posing on dates. Was I on the sociopathy or psychopathy spectrum. I didn’t seem to feel like everyone else. I did not know what missing someone was like. I had never been in love. Boyfriends were projects, games. I was a narcissist.
Was that all drowning in the sorrow of an invisible condition? Where had the happy girl gone?
I worked on my hyperhidrosis.
The wake of the tidal wave that was the disconnection set in motion in 7th grade, however, remains in my life, washing over me daily, asking for compensation daily. So I eat more than I should and I work hard not to be ashamed of it.
Helene Philipsen calls for self-awareness before consumption.
“Feel it before you feed it,” she says.
She says this is “fundamental identity work, without which we can spend a lifetime, adrift at sea on everybody else’s current.”
But, oh man, drifting in your own currents means asking why you were ashamed of sweat you had little to do with. Why you did not embrace and guide that girl. Why you played along, eventually falling out of love with playing. Why you hid in books and yet could not reach out to the dead authors and could not make a career of even this secret, warm love.
That’s a lot of current to wade through.
Or is it simpler than that?
Is it a treatise that says:
- I was born
- I breathed
- After breathing, I had a right to anything life brought
Helene Philipsen says to feel the feelings, to remove shame and to seek help. I have done two out of three. The shame is hard.
Only because, through the shame, I did things. Things that hurt others. Things that led to new loneliness.
Glossing over it all seems callous, like I am not making amends. And yet, for the moments when I experience self-love. When I forgive the girl and the woman. When I see that she was seeking a home and that her spite was self-deprecation. When I sink into that vulnerability, let it wash over me, I love that person. I want to hold her and help her as I would anyone else. I do not begrudge.
And, yes, at that moment, my love spreads to all people. And the cupcakes rest untouched.
