When I first started working with emotions and food, back in my well-meaning but naive early days as a health coach, I had a very limited understanding of shame.
Through all of my study and reading, I had come to believe that shame and food went together because of how diet culture created more shame. If you’ve spent any time in wellness spaces, you’ve probably heard about the Diet Cycle: we start a diet because of negative thoughts and projected shame from the outside. We restrict to feel better. The restriction eventually breaks down, and we soothe the feelings of deprivation with rebound eating. Then we feel more shame for breaking the diet, and on Monday we try to fix those feelings with another diet.
It’s an exhausting loop, and the model captures something real about how we get stuck in a strategy.
But here’s what it misses: seeing that we have a strategy to deal with shame doesn’t actually show you where the shame is coming from.
The Biology of Shame
Today, after much more robust somatic education and years of personal and professional practice, I understand shame differently. Not as a cultural imposition, though culture certainly plays a role. But as a biological experience with its own mechanics in the body.
Shame is an affective emotion connected to the freeze response and the dorsal vagus nerve. One useful way to understand it is as a movement of energy from the outside of the body inward.
Think of joy or excitement. The movement of energy goes from your core outward, like fireworks expanding from center to periphery. Shame moves in the opposite direction: from the periphery back to the core. Picture those fireworks playing in reverse. All that energy, instead of radiating out, collapses inward.
You can feel this in your body if you bring it to mind. The drop in the chest. The urge to make yourself smaller. The wish to disappear.
When Shame Shows Up Around Food
Shame will arise any time there is an interruption to well-being, flow, exploration, interest, excitement, or joy.
When it comes to food and nourishment, getting our needs met requires action. To nourish ourselves well, we need to be able to:
- Know what we need
- Be able to get it or prepare it
- Be able to engage with and enjoy it
- Be able to feel satisfied and stop when we’ve had enough
If any of those steps don’t go smoothly, we feel bad. We feel shame. Not because we are bad, or broken, or undeserving of good things. But because something that ought to flow naturally ends up feeling like an enormous task, and we experience the interruption.
The thing that most often interrupts our ability to nourish ourselves is stress, and the nervous system adaptations that formed in response to early and persistent overwhelming experiences.
Your Body Is More Intelligent Than You Know
Here’s the part I find most remarkable: your body will only hold onto shame as long as the freeze response persists and as long as you’re unable to engage with nourishment with a sense of ease, health, and flow.
Shame is not a verdict on your character. It is a signal from the biology that something in the nourishment cycle is being interrupted. And when we work to organize the nervous system so that interruption is no longer needed, shame begins to dissolve on its own.
This is very different from trying to think your way out of shame, or repeating affirmations, or white-knuckling through another plan. It works at the level of the physiology, which is where shame actually lives.
Getting on Your Own Side
Now that you know a little more about shame and food, I hope you can begin to see beneath the surface of the diet cycle model and understand what’s actually happening in your body.
The shame you feel around eating is not proof that something is wrong with you. It is proof that your nervous system has been working very hard, for a very long time, trying to help you survive.
My greatest wish for you is that you discover how brilliant your body truly is, and that you find your way onto your own side.
Because that is where healing begins.
in peace with food: Galina
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