How Your Developmental Stages and Current Food Habits Are Connected

The Satisfaction Cycle is a concept that comes from Body Mind Centering and has impacted the field of Somatic Psychology. It describes how our developmental movement patterns influence our actions and sense of self in the world.

It consists of:

• Yield

• Push

• Reach

• Grasp

• Pull

These were all important ways that you as a baby experienced the world through your body. Any of these movement patterns that innately occur can get interrupted by your home life, traumatic experiences, and life situations.

Yield

Involves allowing your body's weight to rest into the ground, someone's arms, a bed, the floor. If your home life or external environment growing up felt unsafe to relax into, this ability to yield can get disrupted where you feel constantly tense and on alert. This can show up as an adult in relationship with food of having a difficult time slowing down and relaxing into your eating experiences, always feeling like you have to move on to the next thing.

Get curious, when you eat, how do you feel in your body? Do you feel tight, tense, on edge? Do you feel like eating is getting in the way of moving on to your next thing? Do you find yourself eating on the go where yielding into the experience wouldn't even be able to happen?

Not Yielding has protective purposes. Constantly looking out for danger can feel like it's keeping you safe so that you're ready for anything that comes your way. Living in this bodily state though can be exhausting and shut down digestion affecting your ability to assimilate any nourishment coming in.

Push

Gives a baby the ability, after yielding, to push into the floor to get up to crawl around. Push allows for mobility, movement, and the beginnings of separation from your parents as you explore your world. Push as an adult can translate into having clear boundaries and feeling comfortable with saying No. If your push developmentally was interrupted, in your relationship with food it can feel more difficult to say no to certain foods or to say no to others where food comes in to navigate the misalignment you're feeling.

Get curious, what is your relationship like with saying no? Do you find yourself eating foods that leave you feeling uncomfortable? When someone offers you food when you don't want it, do you find it difficult to say no? When you want to say no to someone, do you often say yes anyway and what do you notice play out with food afterward?

Not pushing back, not saying no has probably been incredibly protective in your life. You might have avoided conflicts, this might have supported you in feeling connected to others, this could have even kept you at a distance from yourself to not have to be in your body with the perhaps intense emotions and sensations there of all of your unique needs.

Reach

Gives you the opportunity to explore the world more. Now that a baby has learned to yield and push, the baby reaches out for objects in its environment to discover its surroundings. If yield and push were not fully integrated, reaching out can occur too soon with a sense of overreaching or a full reach does not occur leading an adult to feel like they can't reach out and ask for what they need. This can show up with food as not feeling deserving of giving yourself the food your body needs or overextending yourself to others where food comes in to bring you back to yourself.

Get curious, does it feel comfortable asking for support? How do you feel about reaching out to others to share what you need? When you sit down to a meal, what thoughts or emotions arise experiencing that you're giving yourself something that you need? Do you find yourself constantly putting others before you and find that the only thing you will allow yourself to reach out for is food?

Reaching out can be scary. If no one was there to catch you, reaching out can feel like an endless abyss of threat to your wellbeing. Food might have become the safe space to give yourself what you need or not reaching out for food can be an attempt to numb out from all you want to reach out for in this world.

Grasp and Pull

Work together for a baby to now reach for what they want, grasp it, and pull it toward themselves. Think of it like a baby reaching for a stuffed animal they want, pulling it toward them, and being able to receive the satisfaction and comfort of something they wanted. Let's say your grasp and pull were interrupted, for example, when you reached out for a parent to pull them closer to you for comfort and they weren't there for you, it can leave you feeling emotionally starving and hungry. This can show up with your food as an adult of either undereating never feeling like you're going to get what you need or overeating, emotional eating, or binge eating to give yourself some experience of grasping for something and successfully pulling it toward yourself.

Get curious, do you trust that you're physical and emotional hungers are going to be satiated? Does food feel like the safest thing to grasp for? When you do receive what you need physically or emotionally, how do you react?

You could be reaching out in your life and it can feel safer to ignore or numb out when you receive what you need. This goes against maybe everything you were taught that your needs were perhaps experienced as not important or missed or gone unnoticed. You could eat and eat and eat and still feel hungry.

If any of these developmental stages got interrupted as a baby, as an adult the practice is to begin at the start with yielding.

Yield into your seat while eating. Slow down with the taste and smell of your food. You can also practice lying stomach down on the floor and allow your belly to yield and relax into the ground. From there, you can practice, like a baby, pushing into the floor with your arms and then your legs. You can put something near you and notice what it feels like after getting up on your hands and knees what it feels like to reach out for that thing, grasp it, and pull it toward you. You can do this practice slowly and notice what felt fluid and easy. What felt a little more difficult, unpracticed, and harder to complete. This will all just be information of developmental movements you could keep practicing in your life now. It's never ever too late to repattern your responses to your food, your body, and your world.

I wanted to let you all know I have put my Intro to Somatic Eating™ mini course back on sale for 50% off until midnight marking the Summer Solstice Tuesday June 21st.

​If you're new here, Somatic Eating™ is my life's work and is a body-oriented, sensation focused therapeutic approach to eating. This approach facilitates a decrease in patterns of emotional eating, binge eating, chronic dieting, binge-restrict cycle, and body image concerns. This mini course will provide you with three Somatic Eating™ tools that will begin to shift your relationship with food to one that feels more regulating, grounding, and connecting.

You can learn more by clicking here and if you have any questions, email me at support@stephaniemara.com anytime.