Mary is married with two children. She has the luxury of being a stay at home mother because her husband has a good job. But she has a fixation on food. There is never enough. She buys too much, she cooks too much, she eats too much, and she feeds her children too much, causing both herself and them to be dangerously overweight.
When she looks in her kitchen cabinets, if there is even one single empty space, she panics. She has to go to the store and buy more food, even if there is no place to put it. From the outside, this looks like insane behavior, because she is not poor and is not in danger of not having enough to eat.
However, if you knew Mary better, you would find out that she grew up in a poverty stricken single mother home as the daughter of an addict. They were reduced to dumpster diving in order to get enough food to live. Mary herself struggles with her own addiction, but there is nothing that can cause her to panic like an empty space in the cabinet.
Now Mary knows logically that there is no need to fill every empty space with food, and that she can get food whenever she wants. So this is not a logical issue. She feels this deadly panic when she sees that space, so it is an emotional issue. Every time she sees any empty space where food should be, she returns to her childhood where she was afraid, panicked, hungry and ashamed of having to dumpster dive. She continues to reconnect with an event from her past and time travels back to it every time, experiencing the same horrible feelings she did as a child.
So how does Mary get from head knowledge to heart knowledge? She has to stop doing “mental drive bys” of her childhood, quickly flying past it in the hope of never reliving it. But she relives it every time she uses something from her pantry – she just doesn’t realize it. She thinks that going back and facing some of the more traumatic events from her past will cause more stress than she can handle, so she just remains in her cycle.
Mary has to recognize that her cycle of panic over food is not just “who she is”. She needs to come to the full realization that she made a vow to herself to never let herself or anyone in her family ever experience the hunger and shame she endured. Her way of handling it, when she finally had enough money, was to cram food everywhere – in the pantry, in herself and in her children. But it is an unhealthy coping mechanism, causing herself and her children medical problems, and causing financial arguments with her husband over unnecessary spending on food.
She needs to pray and ask the Father to help her acknowledge the truth of her needs and be open to changing. Once she is willing to change this, she must pay attention to how she is specifically feeling both physically and emotionally when she gets blindsided by the panic. Then she needs to use breathing and “happy place” exercises to be able to get control of her thought processes to look at things logically.
Next, she needs to do the one thing she has been avoiding – bring to her memory the worst of the childhood episodes. She needs to pray to the Holy Spirit and ask Him to reveal what memory she is connecting back to. She needs to relive it just as she remembers it, in the first person as a child.
She is angry at her mother for putting her in this situation. She is frightened that there will not be enough food. She is ashamed for dumpster diving. She feels helpless to break the cycle, because as a child, she has no resources, no experience and no one else to help her.
The moral she learned from going through it was that you can never have enough food, because at any moment, the people responsible for your welfare can suddenly disappear and leave you alone without any money or food. She then determined what she would do to make sure she was never without enough food should her provider disappear. She would stockpile it so she and her children would never go hungry.
Next, she would need to step back and look at it as an adult bystander and retell the story. The adult passerby saw an out of control addict who should not have had custody of her child, but who was doing the best that she could with her limited resources and capabilities. The child needs to be told that all providers are not like her mother, but that her mother was just very broken and incapable of doing any better at that time.
The bystander would need to tell the child how sorry she was for what the child went through, and she wished she could have been there for the child to make sure she never had to worry about food. The adult would explain that the child would go on to be married to a wonderful provider, and she would never have to be without food again. This new provider had never left and was not threatening to abandon her. The danger is over, you are no longer a child, you are no longer alone, you are no longer destitute. You have a house and family and more food than you need. You are finally safe.
Next, Mary needs to invite Jesus into the memory and asked Him to help her. We don’t know what exactly He would reveal, but she would receive a revelation very specific to what only Jesus knows her soul needs.
Mary would have to accept the adult and Jesus versions of what happened, and that the lesson she learned in childhood no longer applies to her current adult situation. Her mother is no longer her provider. There is sufficient food in the cabinets. She is no longer in danger of her greatest fears coming true.
She must embrace her new narrative by retelling it to herself and a supportive group over and over. She must elaborate on what it truly means for her today, in her current situation. She must envision herself dealing with her panic in a constructive healthy way, re-explaining the truth to herself when she reconnects with her past.
Then she must prepare herself through prayer, asking God to help her as she tests herself, and take something out of the cabinet and not replace it. How does it feel? She must breathe to regain composure. She must repeat the narrative and tell herself that there is sufficient food for an army, but that she can go to the store whenever she needs in order to get more.
She now has the resources and the capability to feed herself and her family. She is safe. She tells herself what a good job she did by processing through the feelings. She can reward herself in a small, healthy way. She repeats this process until an empty space in the pantry no longer evokes panic in her. She remains in the current reality instead of regressing to her childhood past.
This is an example of how to RESET your Life Patterns. If you are ready to start moving forward in your healing and need more help, look at the options we offer in our community. Next, we will learn about the ECHO process as a way to help fine tune what we learned during our RESET.