Befriending Your Body and the Food that You Eat - A Bareiter IFS Therapist Explores the Challenges with Living Authentically in your Body
Dealing with Each Side of Food and Body Issues can be helped through Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy.
Are you impacted by a barrage of messages that you aren’t small, thin, muscular, or flawless? These messages usually come from within our family and the larger culture. For example, we may be triggered by images online, social media posts, or family messages about the body. Unfortunately, the emergence of selfies and social media has worsened our body image obsession.
The flip side of this same coin may be disordered relationships with food - addictive behavior, stress eating, and the attachments of food to comfort, reward, socializing, or childhood memories. Food insecurity or family attitudes towards food and nourishment are quickly passed down, and we unconsciously operate from these perspectives.
Complicating it further is the polarization between craving and shaming.
Dealing with Each Side of Food and Body Issues can be helped through Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy.
At Bareiter Counseling Center, our IFS therapists can help you explore your body image. Many struggle with shaming and judging themselves. Using IFS, befriending these parts is vital to change. This depth-oriented and evidence-based therapy will help you understand the root of these parts and why they are so harsh. Underneath, there are wounded parts that need healing.
These food and body parts generally are protective - meaning they serve a purpose and work to keep emotions, pain, or wounds buried.
Understanding that we are connected - body, soul, and spirit, it is essential to embrace and love our bodies. IFS is a gentle way to befriend the parts related to body image and befriend the body we were given at birth. We just have one pass through life with this body, and treating it with respect and gratitude will go a long way towards healing.
Moving towards this attitude about our bodies leads to living more embodied - being attuned to what it needs. We can then pay more attention to the impact of nourishing food.
In addition, with IFS therapy, parts with unhealthy relationships with food may also be healed and transformed. For example, befriending parts that crave certain foods or at certain times may also uncover trauma wounds from childhood. Living authentically from the true self in relationship to food, we can live more gratefully and find we make healthier choices - food becomes life-giving nourishment rather than a medication, numbing agent, or something ‘evil’ to restrict.
Contact Bareiter Counseling Center to delve deeper into the parts you have related to food and your body
