How Your Relationship With Food Mirrors Your Relationship With Your Parents

The first form of love you receive in life is often from food. Being fed as a baby provides attunement, regulation, soothing, and being held, seen, and cared for. For the rest of life, food can then be connected to am I safe, seen, and heard. It makes sense that if you're not feeling these things as an adult, food would then come in to provide you with what you're looking for.

This all starts with how you were supported in the early stages of your life. Your first life experiences set your nervous system up to feel, on a day to day basis, calm and regulated or on constant high alert. As you age, your relationship with food will connect with the relationship you have with your parents.

Reflect on your relationship with your parents...

• Is it cold and distant?

• Is it overbearing and enmeshed?

• Is it stern and strict?

• Is it warm and understanding?

• Is it communicative and open?

• Is it confusing and disorienting?

Now, get curious about your relationship with food.

As you reflect about your relationship with food, are you noticing any overlaps with your observations about the relationship you have with your parents?

Sometimes, your relationship with food will mimic your relationship with your parents.

So if your parents are cold and distant, you might be restrictive and distant with your food. If your parents are overbearing and enmeshed, you might find yourself overeating, binge eating, attached, and enmeshed with your food. Your parents are often the first relationship you have in your life. So when learning how to have a relationship with anything else, including food, you will use the template you already have. If you have no examples that anything could be different in relationships, then whatever relationship you have with food will feel comfortable and regulating to you because it is what is known in your body on how to relate.

Sometimes, your relationship with food will be reactionary.

If your parents are cold and distant, you might turn to food to receive the comfort, soothing, and care you wanted to receive from your parents. If your parents are stern and strict, you might use food to feel a sense of freedom and choice. If your parents are overbearing, you might push food away to try to get the space you're desiring. As children, we will do whatever we can to make sure we're accepted into the family unit and will be protected and safe. You adapt to your parents way of relating with you to receive the belonging you're desiring and food becomes the place where you get to receive the regulation and attunement you're also wanting to feel.

Next time you notice the urge to play out a familiar pattern with food that you know doesn't support you in feeling how you want to feel in your present day body long term, explore if one or both of your parents are showing up at the table with you.

Here are some questions you can ask yourself before you reach for food:

• How am I feeling right now?

• Does this feel familiar?

• Is there a memory I have with my parents where I experienced the same emotions?

• How am I wanting to feel?

• How am I relating to the food I'm thinking of reaching for?

• Have I connected that a certain food will make me feel a particular way?

• What am I thinking?

• Is this my inner voice or does this sound like one of my parents?

• Do I believe having this particular eating experience will provide me with what I'm looking for emotionally?

Change starts with awareness.

As you connect your relationship with food with your relationship with your parents, you may begin to see that food will never actually be able to give you what you're looking for emotionally ongoing. Food can support in the moment to provide you with the regulation, calm, attunement, support, safety, pleasure, joy, freedom, and inner peace you may desire AND it cannot provide this long term.

Updating your relationship with your actual parents may or may not be able to occur. You can cultivate awareness of the kind of relationship you have had with them and what has been internalized. You can begin to discover what kind of relationship you want to have with yourself now so that everything that food has provided you with emotionally throughout your life you're now offering to yourself by being the parent you have always needed for you.

You don't have to navigate this alone. If you're ever looking for more support, email me at support@stephaniemara.com to get set up with a free 20 minute Connect Call.