Much has been written on emotional eating and dieting. I think we all now can agree that there is a direct correlation between eating to fill emotional emptiness and overeating to fill what we think is hunger. It is very difficult to separate the feeling of emptiness in our guts caused by hunger from the emptiness that causes emotional eating but we need to learn how (and certainly can learn) to do this if we are going to be healthy and truly happy people. When we feel emptiness in out guts, empty and alone, then we often grab comfort food to fill this emptiness. Because it is not what will really fill this type of emptiness (emotional), we are not truly satisfied stuffing ourselves with food (even though it is enjoyable at the time) and we keep eating to attempt to fill it, often resulting in unwanted weight gain.
So what does fill this emotional
emptiness in the pit of your stomach? What are the instinctual needs that are
often confused for the need of food in gut feelings of emptiness and fullness? What
is the gut trying to tell us about our needs? This seems like such a simple and
important question that we might wonder why more people are not addressing it.
Doesn’t this effect us all? Ofcourse it does.
The gut is a brain, a center
of intelligence, and has much more to tell us about ourselves than when we need
food and when we do not. It isn’t a far step from the awareness of emotional
eating to the understanding that our gut feeling of emptiness is not just a
gauge of the need to eat food but also the need for more basic psychological
needs. We have defined this for you already in these blog posts, but more needs
to be said to make it clear. We have decided to include a few pages from our
book “What’s Behind Your Belly Button?” that speaks to these more emotional
needs that your gut registers and keeps track of the satisfaction of from moment
to moment.
The following is an excerpt
from What’s Behind Your Belly Button?,
part of a section titled Our
Instinctual Needs, page 133-136 from Chapter 5. We have not included the
entirity of the section but suggest that you scroll to the bottom of this post
and further read about our book on our Amazon page url provided. We think this
section well explains the important reason one confuses the signal of emptiness
accompanying the need for food with the emptiness accompanying other
instinctual human needs and defines these instinctual needs quite precisely. It
is our hope that those of you in the field of counseling, psychology,
education, and medicine will give this great reflection and understand the
importance and implications for viewing human nature from the point of view of
this basic theory on gut instinctual needs and feelings that we are presenting
with a new Gut Psychology. There is truly more intelligence in the gut than it
has previously been given credit.
Excerpt from “What’s Behind
Your Belly Button?” in section titled Our
Instinctual Needs, page 133-136 from Chapter 5:
Our Instinctual Needs
“In reflecting upon our own
feelings and facilitating the reflection process with our clients, we became
aware that the two basic needs of acceptance and freedom-to-be-oneself were
being constantly monitored by a feeling center in the gut area of the body. We
found that the fulfillment of these needs was being registered as empty-full
feelings. These feelings were experienced in the gut area of the body located
between the hara and the solar plexus."
“The lack of fulfillment of either the acceptance or freedom
issues seemed to register as a feeling of emptiness; fulfillment of either
issue seemed to register as a feeling of fullness. In order to understand how
this occurs, as it may seem like an illogical equation, it is useful to imagine
that our instinctual response center in the gut area is much like the gas gauge
in a car. While empty and full are on extreme ends of the gauge, there seems to
be fullness and emptiness that is relative to these extremes. If the gas gauge
on a car is on empty and we pour into its tank even a gallon of gas, we can be
elated in the fact that we can keep driving down the road, at least
momentarily. We found that as long as people perceived that they were moving in
the direction of gaining a balance of acceptance and freedom, they experienced
a feeling of fullness, even though it may be relative fullness. Similarly, if people perceived that they were
moving in the direction of a loss of a balance of these two basic needs, they
experienced a feeling of emptiness, even though it may be relative emptiness. This relative degree of fullness and emptiness
is implied when speaking of one’s energy level in the common adage, “I’m
running on empty.” What people really
mean by this is, “I’m running on a relative amount of emptiness, but I must
also be relatively full or I could not move at all or even utter those words.”
“We found with ourselves and our
clients that it is necessary to continually replenish one’s experience of
acceptance and freedom. They are vital needs and the emptiness and fullness
that registers as a gauge of how well these needs are met, is engaged in the
moment of experiencing. The somatic feelings in the hara area seem to reflect
the sense of the moment. Just as eating a meal today registers a feeling of
fullness that only lasts for a number of hours and we feel a need to eat again
each day, the instinctual needs for acceptance and freedom are cyclic phenomena
and require regular attention and maintenance to be fulfilled. For example, we
may feel quite full if we already have acceptance and then, from some act of
expressing the authentic self, begin to feel an additional sense of freedom. In
this case, we may feel fullness with a balance of both needs for acceptance and
freedom being met. This sense of fullness may be somewhat lasting, but the need
to continue to take the freedom to respond naturally will surely become
apparent with a growing feeling of emptiness if we repress our feelings and do
not continue to experience freedom. Likewise, if we perceive a sudden loss of
acceptance from important people in our lives, we could plummet with a growing
feeling of emptiness and a condition of stress in the body."
“We found that the basic needs for
acceptance and freedom seemed to determine people’s behavior. These two needs
functioned much like a teeter-totter, with one need on each side of the scale.
Often one need was given up for another, but the organism was constantly trying
to find a balance of these two needs. We saw through reflection on feelings
with our clients and ourselves that a struggle for a balance of these two needs
was present in behavior from infancy throughout the entire span of adult life.
We postulated that this urge to balance the two needs for acceptance and for
freedom seems to be leading people toward the feeling of having fulfilled their
unique purpose. Because these two needs were found consistently to be present
in our clients, we viewed them as shared universally, and thus instinctual in
the human family."
“The duality and paradox of these
two instinctual needs lies in the fact that there is really no such thing as
acceptance without the freedom to be ourselves. People often would say I want
to be loved for who I really am. And people found that when they were perfectly
free, they desired most to share their experiences with someone else who would
accept them as they truly are. Dr. David Viscott, who was a popular American
psychiatrist that influenced the self-help approach using talk radio and
syndicated TV along with the publication of a number of notable books, speaks
to the importance of the fulfillment of both of these needs when he posits that
the most fulfilling relationships are those in which people are free to be
themselves. He views the feeling of loneliness in a relationship as the longing
for the sacrificed part of oneself given up for the relationship. We postulated
that it is essentially impossible to experience the essence of one instinctual
need without the other.”
“Like the energy of yin and
yang—opposites of light and dark forming a unity in our lives—or the Uroborous
symbol —the completion of one world creating another in the natural evolution
of the planet, we eternally seek a state of harmony and balance of our two
instinctive human needs of acceptance and control, which are felt in our gut as
emptiness and fullness. The urge for a balance of acceptance and freedom works
in a similar fashion as does Dr. Jung’s idea of the urge of the
self-individuating through holding a union of opposites. We see in the natural
world, or the holistic force of the morphic field described by biologist Rupert
Sheldrake, this pattern of dual energies as opposites forming a unity, repeated
again and again, and it is no surprise that our gut intelligence contains this
same pattern originating, expressing, and evolving our human nature. We found
in our counseling that if these needs do not feel like they exist in balance,
it is as if they do not exist at all, and people feel empty. The people we
counseled expressed that their lives were in constant transition, and that they
were often experimenting and yearning for a state of harmony and balance of both acceptance and freedom of
their own responses."
“It became clear from the
communication with people in our counseling experiences, that the instincts of the
need for acceptance and for feeling free to respond naturally were rooted in
the somatic experience. In our experience with people, the gauge for the
fulfillment of both the instinctual needs of acceptance and freedom, like the
biological need for food, was located in the gut area. The feelings of
emptiness or fullness that were experienced as a signal of the instinctual
needs of acceptance and freedom were easily confused with somatic feelings
related to the biological instinct of hunger. With its attendant sensations of
emptiness and fullness, this confusion concerning the similarity in feeling of
these needs in the gut area seemed to explain why there was a propensity for
some people toward over-consuming food. People expressed to us that they attempted
to fill empty feelings in the gut area with food. This caused over-consumption
and a denial of the real needs of the person that could result in food
addictions, as well as other unhealthy life choices."
“We found that in order to get in
touch with their instinctual feeling responses, there was a need for people to
reflect back to a much earlier time in their lives. The emotional issues in the
present were generally what Dr. Jung identified as triggers for issues that
began in early childhood. It seemed sensible to trace the feelings in the
present back to the earliest possible experience of that emotion so that the
original source of the issue could be worked out. Reflecting on inner somatic
feelings—on the impact of life and its meaning to the person—during earlier
times gave people access to the record of their inner awareness. We often found
that people were more aware of emotional feelings than the somatic instinctual
feelings of emptiness and fullness. Because the emotional feelings are directly
connected in the solar plexus, to the more purely somatic level of feelings in
the hara, we used the awareness of them as a signal and starting point to
become aware of the feelings of emptiness and fullness."
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