Eating disorders affect millions of people world wide.
They affect men, and they affect women.
It's tempting to think that an eating disorder is about food.
But it really isn't.
It's about establishing safety through a sense of control.
Food is just a tool with which to do that.
Bulimia is an eating disorder that like most eating disorders,
is less about food, and is more about
a way that we're trying to cope with emotional pain.
For this reason, we can look at bulimia as a behavioral addiction.
Today I'm going to go in depth into bulimia,
How To Overcome The Eating Disorder Bulimia
What that means is, they eat in a minimal amount of time,
much more than a person would normally eat
in that same amount of time and in that same quantity.
And during that time, they feel out of control over their eating.
Such as what they're eating and how much of it.
And therefore it is experienced as an episode.
Then a person copes, or let's say,
compensates for that episode of binging.
And they do this in ways that are extremely detrimental to themselves.
Things like, vomiting for example,
and that's the most common way
people tend to compensate with binging.
That's why you so often hear people refer to the
binging and then purging cycle of bulimia.
But compensatory behaviors can also include
the use of laxatives, diuretics, other medications,
excessive exercising or fasting.
Like those who suffer from anorexia, people who suffer from bulimia
tend to obsessively evaluate themselves
based on their body shape and body weight
and tend to suffer from inaccurate perception of their own weight.
Which is otherwise known as body dysmorphia.
These compensating reactions that people have to the
binging cycle of bulimia,
are really important to look at.
Because they're just that. They're a compensation.
Each one is designed, to establish something that the binging,
didn't do for them.
Binging makes people feel out of control.
So all of these compensation behaviors are designed for one reason,
to get back into control.
Forcing themselves to vomit is a way to control themselves.
So is developing food rituals.
Such as eating only specific foods or foods from a specific food group.
Or excessive chewing.
So is skipping meals. So is hoarding food.
So is specifically not eating when other people are eating.
When people experience an ailment,
most people want a purely physiological explanation.
And if they don't want that,
most people want an exoteric explanation,
that takes past lives or karma into consideration.
But all of this is done to avoid the actual culprit
which is a mental and emotional one.
If you want to find the actual root cause of your ailments,
and it is especially true with bulimia,
you've gotta look at what you're not wanting to look at.
That is the emotional and mental conditions,
set up for you by your childhood.
That also means, looking at your current relationships in life.
For many people, the relationship they have with their family of origin,
is a relationship they protect as if it is sacred.
They will not entertain the idea
that there was disfunction in those relationships.
In order to preserve the relationships,
the way they are, and not rock the boat,
it's easier to just take responsability for being messed up.
But if they do this they will never have awareness of what is actually going on.
Eating disorders are one of these conditions,
where in order to gain full awareness of what's going on,
you must be willing to revisit the emotional conditions of your childhood,
and confront the reality of your current relationships.
To understand the motive for this particular behavioral addiction
we have to look back at the early experiences
that people had, that have now develepoed this disorder.
If you look in the childhood of people who have bulimia,
without exception, what you find is gaslighting.
that is the core of their emotional pain in life.
So what is it to gaslight someone?
It is to make them believe that their reality doesn't exist.
What you see you didn't see.
What you feel you didn't feel.
What you hear you didn't hear.
Your perception is completely wrong.
And this is the reason that most people who suffer from bulimia,
feel as if they are losing their mind.
Imagine that you walked out of your bedroom,
and while you were gone for five minutes,
I walked into that beedroom and replaced your bedcover.
And you walked back into the bedroom and confronted me.
"Why did you do that?"
And I look at you and say:
" I don't know what you're talking about."
" This is the bedcover that was there the whole time."
That emotional feeling that you would have at that minute,
is the emotional experience in childhod, of a person who has manifested bulimia.
Except here's the thing;
That feeling state, occured so often,
the only way to deal with it,
was to suppress reject, deny and disown that feeling.
And all of the reality that goes along with it.
And to start to gaslight themselves.
This means, they bought into whatever the family story of reality was,
and totally tried to burry the part of them that screaming:
"This isn't right!"
For example: the reason that bulimia is comon
in conjunction childhood sex abuse, aside from the control aspect,
which I'll be going into later,
is because of this type of gaslight that's so present
in situations especially of incest.
When a small child is being abused by her father sexually,
inside she knows it's scary,
she knows something isn't right.
But the story that Daddy is telling her,
for example, is: "you know me and you we just have a very special relationship,
and this is our very special time together.
These two realities do not match up. It is a gaslight.
But the little girl will tend to surpress that core reality of hers,
in alignment with her father's reality of the situation.
In this way, by defending his estimation of their relationship
and saying: " My Dad and I have a special relationship."
" And we have special time together."
She begins to gaslight herself from the inside.
But as you can guess, a person cannot do this to themselves and stay healthy.
This is a form of supression so intense
that it's impossible for that not to bubble up through the floorboards.
And it bubbles up through all kinds of behavioral issues.
Any time you surpress something, that intense,
when you surpress that much negative emotion,
it acts like a poison inside,
that begins to make you feel as if you're completely toxic internally.
One of the very best examples I've seen of this dynamic,
and how it plays into bulimia, that you can see for yourself,
is a character named daisy, played by the actress Brittany Murphy
in the film, 'Girl Interrupted'.
There does not always have to be sex abuse going on
for there to be bulimia,
But there ALWAYS has to be gaslighting going on,
to manifest bulimia.
Now it's important to understand that most families
don't intentionally gaslight their children.
Most of the time this is done in an unintentional way.
Because we're so good at gaslighting ourselves.
We're great at gaslighting other people.
But here's the thing you guys;
It doesn't really matter
whether somebody does something intentionally or unintentionally,
it's still happening.
And therefore it's still doing damage.
It's not like if somebody runs over your car with a truck
and your leg breaks, you can say:
"Well, it's not really broken because they didn't mean to do it."
No it's still broken.
For example:
If a child has a dad that is alcoholic and passed out,
but mom says: "Dad is just tired. He had a long day at work."
That is gaslighting.
If the conflict in a household happens behind closed doors,
and the child is required to join the rest of the family
in giving the impression to the outside world
that the family is perfect,
and that there is no conflict going on at all,
this is gaslighting.
If the affection or love that is being shown in a family
is not sincere and is done for show,
that is a gaslight.
If gifts or other form of love are given as a form of leverage
so the child will owe the parents something
or feel indebted to them in some way,
but the parent says they do it out of love,
and shames the child for thinking otherwise,
this is a gaslight.
In this type of setting, love feels disgusting and toxic.
To make matters worse, you can only really control things from inside reality.
You have to be in the reality that your boat is about to go over a cliff,
in order to do anything to alter that reality.
But here you are in a setting where you're constantly being told
that your reality doesn't exist.
So you can't do anything about it can you?
You end up in a situation where
the circumstances of your life seem pretty crappy.
But because that's not reality, you have nothing to do about it.
You end up completely and totally out of control.
And this lack of control goes even deeper.
A boundary is a sense of who we are as a person.
People like to complicate boundaries,
but really boundaries are nothing more than definition.
It's what defines me uniquely from the rest of the world.
it's what are my feelings, my thoughts, my preferences,
my likes, my dislikes, my desires, my needs, my perception.
What's mine. That's all a boundary is.
So, a boundary really doesn't have anything to do with other people.
Does it?
Until the point at which there is a conflict,
between what uniquely defines me, and what uniquely defines you.
Such as my desire, conflicts with your desire.
Or my sense of reality, conflicts with your sense of reality.
Boundaries are always important for us,
but there are specific times in our life
where the development of boundaries is critical.
These are phases, while we're growing up, of individuation.
And if we experience trauma around boundaries at that point in time,
we don't develop healthy boundaries.
We don't develop any personal definition or a healthy sense of self.
We feel totally out of control of ourSELVES'.
The people in our lives and the circumstances in our lives,
are instead the ones that have control over us.
Some parents, specially those that are narssisistic,
cannot differentiate, between their children and themselves.
They see their children as a complete extention of them.
So they're not able to honor their child's reality.
They're not able to see that their child has separate desires,
separate thoughts, separate feelings, separate perceptions.
Therefore they're gonna invalidate their child's reality 24 hours a day.
As a result, the child experiences relentless boundary invasion.
This can take the form of extreme situations,
like being spanked for saying no.
Or more subtle situations, like the child saying:
" I want the red one."
And the parent saying: "No you want the purple one."
But the thing to understand is, with people who suffer from bulimia,
these kinds of interactions where their sense of self is being disregarded,
go on all the time.
People with bulimia, who are in fact in touch with their childhood memories,
will report that they felt more like dolls in childhood.
They felt like, they were completely at the mercy
of whatever decision the adults in their life had for them.
And that was really scary because
when these adults didn't really have a way
to acknowledge the reality of their child,
most of the time they were making decisions
that made absolutely no sense for the child.
Instead, like when we're interacting with a doll,
I decided you're gonna be hungry so now I'm gonna feed you a bottle.
Meaning that when the child is actually hungry they're not being fed.
When they protest these invasions however,
they learn very quickly that this leads to punishments,
or withdrawal of love, and worse, gaslighting.
They can't say enough is enough to the parent.
If they can't express their dissatisfaction, which is toxicity,
the parent turns it back on the child.
Which is a bit like forcing energetic vomit
back into someone's mouth.
So they cannot acknowledge the invasion or stop it.
Imagine the despair of that situation.
They begin to feel totally out of control of themselves.
In the same way a doll would feel out of control, if it was alive.
Because someone else is treating it like a belonging with no personal choice.
The only way this child can cope in this environment,
is to abandon their own boundaries,
their estimation of reality along with it.
And begin to gaslight themselves, and violate their own boundaries,
for the sake of closeness with the social group.
Because of this, people who suffer from bulimia, feel full of toxicity.
Which they have to get rid of somehow.
These people also feel as if they're completely unable to get away from
these people, places and things that are causing them pain.
Now this leads to a feeling internally of I can't take it anymore.
As if that's not bad enough,
because of these early child experiences,
they don't feel as if they have people to turn to.
People who are safe.
People who are supportive.
People who do make space for their reality.
And so, they feel completely and totally alone.
In other words, they have to control this energy
that's happening inside them somehow.
But they have to do it in secret.
Here's an important thing to understand;
For people with bulimia,
their relationship to food is very much a mirror of their relationship to love.
It feels like something that someone desperately needs
in order to feel good and feel comforted and soothed.
And so one has no control over doing that
because there's desperation for it.
But that once you take it in, there's a consequence.
Sort of like a poisoned apple when someone is starving.
This is how love was in their early childhood home.
And this is how food is now.
Food seems like the only safe and reliable thing,
as well as the only source of pleasure,
it seems like the only way to take in energy,
and the safest way to take in energy
to solve the feeling of being totally depleted.
It seems to be the only way to sooth the feelings of emotional starvation.
Feelings which they have been taught through gaslighting
that they were not allowed to have.
So they can't have any tolerance for them.
It soothes the pain they can't directly acknowledge,
of not being seen, felt, heard and understood.
So that they can feel safe
that someone is gonna consider their best interest and capitalize on them.
But they have learned that they can't trust that.
So the minute they swallow the food it is as if they've just been betrayed.
They feel as if they are being betrayed by the food,
just like they were betrayed by someone in the family home,
from whom accepting love is dangerous.
And as if they had betrayed themselves
by being too dumb to fall into that trap again.
They feel disgusted with themselves,
and ashamed of themselves as a result.
All that being said;
What needs to happen in order to heal from bulimia?
1. The single most important thing that you can do
to overcome bulimia, is to stop gaslighting yourself.
And stop letting yourself be gaslit by others.
In fact, and this is gonna be hard to swallow,
there is no possible way, to heal from bulimia,
unless you are able to stop gaslighting yourself.
You have to see that in your childhood you were gaslight.
Over and over again.
You were constantly lead to believe that your reality didn't exist.
That you didn't see what you saw. That you didn't hear what you heard.
That what you felt you shouldn't feel.
You are probably still defending that reality
that your family got you to accept as real.
The reason that bulimia is so difficult to shift out of,
is because you have to be willing to go through a reality collapse,
in order to restore yourself to your actual core reality.
The one you suppressed, rejected, denied and disowned so long ago.
You've gotta stop defending the reality you were given.
To use a previous example that I gave as an analogy,
you are the person who's daddy told you,
that you are just having a "special relationship".
And so now you keep telling the story,
we just had a "special relationship".
You need to see your feelings, your thoughts, your perceptions,
your reality as very important to acknowledge.
Because this is the thing, your default mode, is to gaslight yourself.
You're doing this to yourself all the time.
And now is the time to catch yourself in the act.
You binge because you have very real emotional needs that aren't getting met.
And as a result for those emotional needs not being met,
and you violating your boundaries all the time,
you're constantly feeling negative emotion.
So here's the thing,
your need to be seen, felt, heard, understood,
what's happening with those?
Absolutely nothing.
You're hanging out with people and giving them the impression,
that you feel close to them, when it's not the truth. Is it?
The truth is, in many moments you don't feel that way at all.
But that's a truth you keep to yourself.
You're in fact gaslighting the world and gaslighting yourself
by creating this division between the reality
of what's going on with you and your loneliness,
and what you're portraying.
You are starving emotionally.
That's the reality.
Relationships were not safe for you
and so you're living a separate existance from people.
And the aprooval that you are starving for,
that's not something that you can manipulate people to get.
And this is what you're trying to do.
If you're gonna be honest with yourself,
the reason that you're trying to control your body shape and weight,
and the way you look,
is because you're trying to manipulate people to give you approval.
But here's the thing, they're not really giving you approval
if you have to manipulate people to get it.
Step out of the space of separation, shame and fear, into actual connection.
You have to change your relationship to love
in order to change your relationship to food.
This is a process that is too long to detail in a short video.
To learn how to do this, pick up a copy of my book,
The Anatomy Of Loneliness (How To Find Your Way Back To Connection)
3. You binge in response to negative emotions.
Like we've been talking about,
the core of bulimia, is perpetual gaslighting.
Think about what happened when you had a negative emotion as a child.
Done yet?
Was it validated?
Was it treated as if it was real?
Hell no!
What you learned is that negative emotions, won't be tolerated.
What's worse than that, you may have learned,
negative emotion doesn't exist.
This means that every time you feel a negative emotion,
you're going to respond to it
the way you have been conditioned to respond to it.
You're going to deny, reject and disown it.
You're gonna try to deny it away, and shut it up with food.
Because remember, you believe it shouldn't exist.
In order to reverse this, you've gotta do the exact opposite
of what you've been conditioned to do.
When you feel an emotion, you have to go towards it,
instead of away from it.
Now here's the thing, if we try to go away from an emotion,
we're not understanding how emotions work.
If we try to run away from or avoid something,
this is actually a form of resistance.
You live in a universe where everything you resist persists.
That means, you're gonna be turning a flame into a forest fire.
Every emotion is valid.
Sit with every one of them.
Every emotion is like a cover for a personal truth
that is trying to bubble up to your conscious mind.
If you try to "eat away" that emotion,
you will never receive that personal truth.
And that personal truth, is the very thing trying to help you
to make the right decisions for you in your life.
For more information about all of this,
watch my video titled:
The Emotional Wake Up Call
You need to learn to acknowledge and learn to express
the truth underneath these emotions.
Or else you will continue to feel toxic.
The pattern of binging and compensating for it in controlling ways,
is set in place because you do not listen to these emotions when they are small.
And so you ignore your body's cues and don't make small adjustments
like getting enough sleep or saying no to things.
Or eating little snacks throughout the day.
So you end up in a situation where you need to cope,
and cope once a small flame, is a forest fire.
4. Develop healthy boundaries.
whether you like it or not,
because you are in an individual perspective in this time space reality,
you have your own feelings.
You have your own thoughts.
You have your own desires, preferences, perception.
It's OK to have those.
Now, you're hearing this from a spiritual teacher.
So really hear this;
It's as important to develop a strong sense of self,
as it is to transcend selfhood.
It is important that you know that you have the ability
to choose what and how much to take in.
And when to say enough.
But in order to make the right decisions for yourself
instead of to feel powerless about making those decisions,
for fear of consequences,
you need to develop this sense of self.
For information about how to do this,
watch my video called:
Personal Boundaries vc. Oneness (How to Develop Healthy Boundaries)
5. Dive deep into these painful emotions
that you've been trying to avoid through this cycle of behavioral addiction.
Emotions such like, loss of control,
emotions like, I'm feeling disgusting, internally feeling toxic,
feelings of being completely crazy and not fitting in,
and dive into these emotions with the completion process.
I've developed a process which is specifically designed
to resolve these unresolved issues
that are creating that emotional component within you
that's fueling the addiction in the first place.
I've written a book about the process that's titled:
The Completion Process
I've also trained people to facilitate the process.
You can find them on www.thecompletionprocess.com
You can also watch my video titled:
How To Heal The Emotional Body
To learn an abridged version of this process.
This can also be a powerful tool to use
in order to restore yourself to your actual reality
and ungaslight yourself relative to the home you grew up in.
6. Because so much of you is denied and so much of you is suppressed,
you created fragments in your consciousness.
You're split like hell.
Now here's the thing,
This is the primary way that a physical human being copes.
You just had to cope with this in excessive ways,
and this is why you feel this constant internal turmoil.
In order to resolve these splits and get back in touch with
the feelings, thoughts, perceptions, desires and reality you suppressed,
watch my video titled:
Fragmentation ( The World Wide Disease)
And start to acknowledge and work directly
with your polarized internal fragments.
I detail how to do this in the video.
Doing this will restore your capacity to relate to yourself
in a way where you will have both empathy and understanding.
And it is this empathy and understanding for these parts of yourself
that will make it so you are no longer guessing
at what you need, in order to get to a better place.
Instead, you will know.
7. Take in energy from all the senses.
When we have bulimia, most often we feel like,
the only way to take in energy is through our mouth.
But that's not the only way to take in energy.
And it's a very limiting one.
And it's a way of taking in energy
that you already have associated with a lot of negativity.
I'll give you some examples;
When I look at something beautiful, that beauty that I'm looking at is energy.
I can imagine sucking that in through my eyes
and allowing it to permeate my whole being.
Breath is something that is very easily used to take in energy.
I can simply imagine that every time I'm breathing,
I'm breathing in energy, and it's filling in every tiny cell,
every bone, every organ.
Almost like, a balloon being filled with air.
Another example, I can imagine that all of my pores
are like tiny little mouths,
that are sucking in energy from the outside all the time.
When I hear a sound that I enjoy, I can allow that sound to permeate
and fill up my body.
All of these are ways of nourishing ourselves.
The good news is, this will make you feel less starved,
less depleted and you don't have to stress out about the calories doing it.
8. Make how you feel the most important part of your life.
If you suffer from bulimia,
you have a very difficult time with pleasure in general.
It's not something which you have a lot of access to.
To the degree that most of you tend to think
that pleasure can only be found through food.
And if there isn't that element in your life
there will be nothing left for you in terms of pleasure.
Now, it's very common for people with bulimia
to come up with all kinds of justifications
for why it's impossible, to dedicate yourself to pleasure.
Or why pleasure is something that just can't happen for you.
But look at those justifications.
You've gotta take this risk to just prioritize doing things
only because they bring you pleasure to do.
Not to live your life and make decisions according to what you have to do.
This makes your life a choar, not a choice.
And it dipleats you on top of maintaining the reality
that food will be your only pleasure.
Albeit, a poisoned apple pleasure.
9. And this will be difficult for you
because people who struggle with bulimia
tend to also struggle from a perfectionistic complex,
you can't approach the resolution of bulimia
the same way that you approach most things,
which is: "I'm gonna do all of it at once."
This isn't gonna work.
Healing doesn't work this way,
life doesn't work this way.
Every time you finish an episode of binging
you tell yourself: " Never again."
Look at the pressure that this puts on you.
You've already learned that it is these painful or negative emotions
that really fuel your binging behavior.
And here you are adding that pressure to that emotional state.
Making you more likely to binge, instead of less likely.
Here's what you normally tell yourself.
You tell yourself you're gonna lose all the weight,
overcome your shame, start making the right decisions for yourself
and have healthy boundaries from now on.
You've just taken several healing processes,
one of which, may take years to do,
and you have said: "I'm gonna do it all,
in fact, it would all be done by now."
As if everything that is standing in your way
is just your personal resolution to do it.
That's not the case at all.
That's like saying: " I'm done with this laziness
and tomorrow I'm gonna carry the empire state building to france."
You are setting yourself up to fail.
Because everyone on earth would fail at that.
I know how desperate you are to stop this cycle.
I know that when you are desperate
the last thing on the face of the earth that you wanna hear
is that something is gonna take a long time.
But it's the reality.
The reality is, healing from bulimia, is not gonna be an overnight process.
And it's not something that can be done just because you decide it's done.
As if it not getting done is some personal failure.
You're gonna have to start with one thing at a time
and become a master at it before moving on to the next thing.
And you can expect relapses.
And none of this means you're failing in any way, shape or form.
The standards you are keeping for yourself are impossible.
And you need to stop gaslighting yourself
by telling yourself that someone can.
And so you must be a failure or less in some way because you can't.
What happens when you try to stop
all the things you have labeled as bad at once,
is that all of them happen again, at once.
This only makes you feel more out of control.
But it isn't because you're out of control,
it's because you set yourself up.
10. Assuming that you are actually facing and healing
the emotional component that is going into bulimia,
you can start to eat for what feels good.
If you want to understand what healing is exactly,
because sometimes when I say:
"As long as you're healing emotionally"
that makes no sense.
Watch my video titled, What is Healing?
Eating to feel good is totally different than dieting,
obsessing over calories, and even emotional eating.
It's none of those things.
If you start to eat food with the idea
that you're specifically eating so that you feel good,
not emotional eating,
then what happens is, you naturally and intuitively
start to make the right choices for yourself,
and your food eating personally.
Here's an example: I'm not gonna eat a big piece of chocolate cake
because I know that I'll start to get a headache
and feel sluggish if I do it.
I know that if I eat soup I will feel warm and like I have more energy.
Eating this way not only puts you back in touch with your own personal truth,
it also makes you much less likely that you'll get that feeling
of having made a mistake in taking in foods.
That leads to your purging behavior.
For more information about how to do this,
watch my video titled:
How to Improve Your Relationship with Food
As with most things, I could do one book,
if not several books, on how to heal from bulimia.
But in this video I've put forth the most important points
I can promise you, if you go through these points,
if you start to actually apply these changes
you will experience healing relative to bulimia.
With that being said, It is quite common, and definitely possible,
for people to have bulimia in conjunction with anorexia.
For that reason,
if you notice some of these symptoms of anorexia within yourself, as well,
in conjunction with your bulimia,
I suggest that you watch my video:
How to Overcome the Eating Disorder: Anorexia
as well.
It will give you a full picture of the awareness you need for your healing.
The time has come to reestablish your sense of self.
The time has come to realize that you have very valid reasons,
for feeling the way you feel.
That your perceptions are important.
That you have needs that must be met.
And it's important that you express that reality
to other people.
It's time to restore your sense of reality.
And to stop gaslighting yourself.
And to stop allowing yourself to be gaslit by other people.
I can promise that by doing this you will not only
end this conflict that is constantly going on inside you,
you will also be making choices that are right for you personally.
Choices that will lead you straight into a life that is actually fulfilling.
A life, where I promise, you will experience pleasure.
Have a good week.
