Feeling or feeding - that is the question

I'm about halfway through an intense workbook my life coach recommended to me called The Food and Feelings Workbook, by a psychotherapist named Karen Koenig, and it's been a huge challenge to stay with it. Not because I don't completely agree with what she's saying; I do. Completely. It's just that the challenge of it is that, with each activity, I need to revisit my old non-felt feelings, feelings that were so hard to contend with at the time they occurred that I chose instead to eat.

Well, it's quite a list and it makes for an exhausting weekend to exhume some of these experiences and try to understand what the emotion was trying to tell me before I scrambled the lines of communication with coma-inducing food.

Koenig asks, "Are you drawn toward yummy when you're feeling crummy?" I've heard the expression, "It's not what you're eating, it's what's eating you," and scoffed. Hell, it's what I'm eating! But I reach for the food as a panacea for all that ails me. Koenig's point is that people who use (and refuse) food to contend with uncomfortable emotions need to start handling feelings the "normal" way, or else nothing will change, no matter how strenuously one diets or exercises, because the food-equals-emotional-comfort equasion will git ya every time. I know this is true. I also accept that I'm about 12 when it comes to emotional maturity.

Sometimes someone will say something hurtful to me and it'll take me hours of thinking about it before I finally come to the conclusion, "Hey, I'm pissed!" The pure feeling doesn't have a chance because it's intellectualized to death, while I use both hands to stuff my face in an effort to avoid the feeling from bubbling up. I eat food the same way some smokers smoke, to keep at bay a sense of free-floating anxiety/guilt/loneliness/shame that seems to be simmering always in my heart, in every cell of my body, like a low-grade fever.

Although I certainly can point to my parents' ways of coping with emotion (Dad simply discounted them and trudged on, while Mom slid down the food/shame/depression cycle) to discover the genesis of my own way, it was my mother's death when I was 17 that kicked everything into high gear. It just hurt too much. It just became the only way I could get through the day, with a surruptitious double cheeseburger and a boysenberry shake, or a chef's salad drenched in 1000 island dressing. I got all A's my senior year of high school. I also gained 100 pounds, going from a husky 220 to a soft, billowy Pillsbury Boyish 320 by graduation.

And all the time the relatives kept saying things like, "Steve's doing fine; I don't know how he does it; smiling all the time and getting good grades." I was learning how to be the jolly fat man, the happy, chuckly guy who acted as if all was well, when inside the depths of feeling were so painful as to require thunder, lightning and the very earth cracking open.

Making the connection to overeat was very simple - I felt hollow inside, my heart had broken and there was this huge space inside me, and food may not have filled it but it comforted me. My Dad's way of dealing with Mom's death was to pull a curtain around it, not talk about it, not talk about her, until she was an unacknowledged spectre in the house. My grandparents, who lived next door and who missed their daughter intensely, started and ended each sentence with, "Cookie always said . . . " and ". . . . according to Cookie." That was her nickname. I bounced between the two extremes, sometimes eating an early supper at Grandma's (where talk was all about how much Cookie loved string beans) and joining my dad for dinner later in the evening (eaten in silence).

I could've used some counseling but I was too busy being fine that it never occurred to anyone to offer it or suggest it, not the teachers at school or concerned aunts. It was a different era; you only got psychological help if you were crazy. I wasn't crazy; I was just utterly sad.

Now here I am, a grown man of 49, still mulling over the feelings I had 32 years ago, because they never got a chance to be fully felt back then.

I keep picturing a huge tank, a million gallons big, with a film of sulphuric acid coating the bottom. The only thing I ever did was to stuff cotton balls one by one into the tank, each in turn soaking in the acid but not doing anything about dissipating it. Now the tank is filled with acid-soaked cotton balls, placed there one by one over the years, a failed attempt to keep the acid from burning. The thing is, I'm out of cotton balls now. There's only one thing to do, and that's send in the Hazmat team. It would've been easier to clean up the acid when it was spilled to begin with, had I known how to do it. But now I'm learning how.

And the only reason I don't reach for the butter pecan ice cream is there's none in the house.