Some of us grew up being told we are too much.
(Insert me holding a sign that says “Welcome to the too-much-ness club.”)
When we are repeatedly told or shown that how we are being overwhelms others – it’s most natural that we internalize those messages.
They become embedded in the way we think and feel about ourselves – and can often lead to behaviors that cause suffering.
Jacquie’s story
Take Jacquie – a young adult who struggles with restriction, bingeing and purging. She shares that every time she feels sad or disappointed, she withdraws and retreats from her partner and her family.
She binges and purges, sometimes for several days in a row, until she finally “pulls herself together”, and she can restrict again.
“At least when I go downstairs again, they won’t see me like a total mess…as long as I restrict, I have some sense of power over how I am being.”
“My sadness is too much”, she tells me. “And if it’s too much for me, it will definitely be too much for other people. It’s my job to care for my sadness…”
Let’s unpack this together.
Emotions are internal messengers from the interoceptive system – the one that tells us about body states and necessary actions, so that we have the best chance to thrive in our environment.
Infants, toddlers and young children do not have the capacity to regulate their emotions (or care for the messages they convey) on their own.
This is what parents and older adults are there for – so that they can offer support to the young and developing energy system.
When the child experiences repeatedly that their emotions are welcome, held and made sense of, the child can internalize the parent’s attuned presence.
The nervous system learns that what goes up, eventually comes down, and there is nothing wrong in feeling what we feel.
Daniel Siegel, father of interpersonal neurobiology, coined the acronym PART to explain this.
It stands for presence, attunement, resonance and trust – what parents can offer to their children for emotional regulation.
For those of us who were told or shown we were too much, the PART-ing didn’t quite occur the same way Dr. Siegel suggests.
For reasons within and outside our parent’s control we didn’t receive the experience of being held with presence, attunement, resonance and trust.
We grew up without the internalized capacity for emotional regulation.
Here are two common scenarios I see here in my work which illustrate this well.
One – little Jacquie feels sad about her friend moving away this week.
It’s the first week she’s having to go to school and sit alone at lunch. When mom picks her up, the first thing Jacquie notices is that mom is overwhelmed. Something happened at work, and also Jacquie’s older brother just got suspended for getting into a fight. As Jacquie tells her mom what happened, her mom tries to cheer her up – she can’t hear another thing that went wrong, so she tries to distract her daughter.
“Let’s go to the mall on the way home, it will cheer us all up!” – mom says!
Jacquie is left feeling like there is no space for her, ever. She’s sad and angry, and on top of it she starts to shut down, because what’s the point of sharing anything anyways…no one hears her. She’s just too much.
The young psyche can only make sense of this exchange one way – “something is wrong with me, I am too much”.
Adam’s Story
Two – little Adam grows up in a family where there is very little time for spending time together. Mom and dad are immigrants, and each working two jobs. They are always working, and grandma, who babysits, is way busy with his energetic toddler twin sisters. Any time he needs anything, he has to go to grandma and ask several times, each time getting louder and louder. It’s hard to get her attention, and he’s always the one asking for help. No one ever asks him if he needs anything. He’s the older boy – he’s expected to be more independent.
As he grows up into his teens, he shuts down more and more, starts to smoke weed, and behaves in more and more risky ways outside the home. His parents are super concerned, but only talk to him when he gets in trouble. The more he’s deemed the problem child, the more he behaves in high risk ways. He feels bad too, because they both have been working so hard for the family to get stable in the new country, yet here he is, always angry, always causing trouble.
By the time I see him, he’s in his mid 20’s, addicted to several drugs, and trying to get clean. The amount of self-hatred and shame he’s accumulated can only begin to melt as he connects with the grief and helplessness of the emotional neglect he’s experienced.
Escalate or withdraw
Two scenarios – in the first – the message of being too much was internalized because of the perceived state of the parent.
In the second – it’s the emotional neglect that made Adam louder and louder.
For many of us, the message that we are too much has serious repercussions in how we relate to food and other substances that numb and distract.
On one hand we can use restriction to sustain states of high arousal which numb and distract from what we feel, on the other, we can use overeating as a way to both numb and offer ourselves a refuge in the emotional storm. Both sympathetic arousal and dorsal shutdown get managed in that way – with food, and not with presence and connection.
The behaviors around food aren’t just helping how it feels to be “too much for oneself” as Jacqui shares.
They are also keeping at bay the original emotions of what it was like to live without the presence, attunement, resonance and trust that the developing system expects.
And right under them are the original emotions we suppressed.
Several layers of emotion
If I can draw you a word iceberg here it would look something like this.
^
FOOD BEHAVIORS (managing arousal or shut down)
___________________
Feeling like I am too much (1st layer or hyper arousal or withdrawal)
_________________________
Feelings about being alone with my emotions – despair, helplessness, hopelessness, hatred, rage, fear, terror (2nd layer of hyper arousal or withdrawal)
__________________________________________________________
Original emotions – sadness, anger, frustration, disappointment, fear, panic, terror, etc. (that I had to suppress) – (original deepest layer of hyper arousal or withdrawal)
_________________________________________________________________________________
Ancestral layer – any somatic experience relating to being too-much that is epigenetically inherited from the parental attachment system, lineage, culture, and ancestral field (inherited layer of hyper arousal or withdrawal)
______________________________________
What might you do to support yourself if you carry this feeling of too-much-ness?
- To the best of your capacity – find the support of people who can be with you while you have your emotions, and who can hold themselves through it. In the beginning this can be the individual professional support of mentors, counselors, therapists, coaches, spiritual advisors. As your ability to be with your emotions in the presence of another increases, slowly begin to practice being with yourself in well-facilitated smaller and larger groups.
- With professional support, find a way to create a coherent narrative of your young life. This can be challenging when you don’t have explicit memories, but the body always remembers, and a body-oriented approach to therapy can support you in finding order in what may look like the chaotic and painful aftermath of your early life.
- Learn how to offer somatic support to yourself when you experience strong emotions and start to differentiate between the “layers of the iceberg”. Which emotions are about the present and which are about the past timelines?
- Find ways to express your emotions without words. Art therapy, dance therapy, sand tray therapy, are all avenues into experiencing what happens inside and symbolizing it, so it can move from the somatic and unconscious into what is known, remembered, expressed and conscious.
Do you connect your eating behaviors with feelings of too-much-ness?
How does this show up in your life?
Feel free to reply and let me know!
In peace with food:
Galina
p.s. When you are ready to learn and practice creating more somatic capacity for your present and past emotional experiences, you can apply to be in my next 6-month Transformation Group. Learn more and apply here. The next one begins in July and we have two spots.
Leave a Reply