Emotional Eating is hugely influenced by your emotions and how you manage them. The Havening Techniques® are an approach to dealing with any kind of emotion or anxiety that is troubling you. They combine very gentle exposure therapy along with calming touch and 'brain-games' to activate useful and helpful resources while the emotion, sensation, or traumatic memory, has been activated in the background.
Stuck emotions
One way in which these techniques can be used is with stuck emotions. In this video, I guide you through a Havening meditation to SNAP you out of whatever you have gotten stuck with. Whether you are feeling anxious, angry, stressed, sad, or some other emotion, you can use this process to shift that stuckness, and move on more positively and calmly.
Reprocessing Trauma
If you find that you are often in a state of fight-or-flight, becoming anxious for little or no apparent reason, then this may be because of an old, traumatic memory. There is a strong correlation between adverse childhood events (ACE's) such as family dysfunction or abuse/neglect, and eating disorders. Emotional eating can vary hugely in its severity, as can ACE's. These two are often linked: experiences, and especially the beliefs that developed out of those past experiences, influence how we respond to stress in our life now, and whether or not we reach for food in such circumstances.
These memories can come from small t traumas: small, repeated issues like being told you aren't good enough, are too X or too Y, from having a parent who was absent or alcoholic, among many other issues. They might also stem from big T traumas like suicide, abuse and others.
Multiple studies suggest that the amygdala is involved in memories for emotionally arousing topics. These memories are kept constantly active so your brain can check all in-coming inputs against these memory templates, and if it finds something similar, it puts you on alert. This activates your sympathetic nervous system, and cuts off your rational brain (pre-frontal cortex).
Activating such memories, and either being able to stay with the emotions that come up as you are also creating a space of calm through the Havening Touch and the therapeutic space, or letting yourself move away from those emotions through various brain-games that stimulate your mind, body and imagination in different ways, allows them to be reprocessed. In this way, they are then stored in a different part of the brain: in long-term storage rather than in constantly active amygdala storage.
It is possible that this approach also helps by bringing your prefrontal cortex into play at a time when normally the amygdala would try to turn it off and keep you in fight-flight-freeze. This helps build your inner resources, so that they more quickly come online in future situations, as well as helping with the therapy taking place.
All this makes these techniques very effective at changing old behaviours and patterns, so that you can move forward with greater calm and a sense of confidence. And when you can release stuck emotions and old trauma, you will no longer have the same reasons to reach for food.
Havening, therefore, is very effective at working on the 'emotional release' aspect of dealing with emotional eating.
