OMG

I just discovered my new favorite author of all time.  She’s Geneen Roth.  The book is When Food Is Love: Exploring the Relationship Between Eating and Intimacy.  Here is a little taste of what you will find in this must-read book:

“The wonderful thing about food is that it doesn’t leave, talk back, or have a mind of its own.  The difficult thing about people is that they do.”

“Eating is a metaphor for the way we live; it is also a metaphor for the way we love.  Excessive fantasizing, creating drama, the need to be in control, and wanting what is forbidden are behaviors that block us from finding joy in food or relationships.  And some of the same guidelines that enable us to break free from compulsive behavior–learning to stay in the present, beginning to value ourselves now, giving the hungry child within us a voice, trusting our physical and emotional hungers, and teaching ourselves to receive pleasure–enable us to be intimate with another person.”

“It is my belief that we become compulsive because of wounds from our past and the decisions we made at that time about our self-worth–decisions about our capacity to love and whether, in fact, we deserve to be loved.  Our mother goes away and we decide that we are unlovable.  Our father is emotionally distant and we decide that we need too much.  Someone we are close to dies and we decide that there is no reason to love anyone because it hurts too much at the end.  We make decisions based on our pain and the limited choices we had at the time.  We make decisions based on how we made sense of the wounds and what we did to protect ourselves from being more wounded in that environment.  At the age of six or eleven or fifteen, we decide that love hurts and that we are unworthy or unlovable or too demanding, and we live the rest of our lives protecting ourselves from being hurt again.  And there is no better protection than wrapping ourselves around a compulsion.”

“For those of us who are used to waiting for someone to bring love to our lives, the discovery that being intimate is a choice that we make at every moment is as close to magic as anyone ever comes.”

“We become frightened of intimacy because our intimate experiences were frightening, not because we are incapable of loving.  If we are ever to deeply love ourselves–or anyone else–we must first examine why we are frightened.  We must go back to the beginning, re experience (or perhaps allow ourselves to feel for the first time, since when those feelings first arose, we pushed them away) the rage, hurt, fear, betrayal, loss of what it was like to be a child we were, a child in our family of origin.”

“I am in the process of taking my childhood room apart.  And with each feeling I touch, cry about, and put away, each memory of fear, each experience of loss, the walls are crumbling.  And I am setting myself free.”

To read more, get yourself a copy, or read my notes at:  When Food Is Love

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