I have been in pursuit of weight loss and better health for most of my life. After spending decades focused almost entirely on the physical body and physical aspects of this, I discovered that a lot of what gets us stuck in our weight loss and our health pursuit stems from things that we have not healed, such as past stressful experiences, past hurts, and trauma. In most of our cases we are completely oblivious to this, maybe we think it’s just part of our personality or some sort of flaw. It can look like starting a health kick strong and after a few bad days giving up, or getting close to your goal weight and then self-sabotaging with the wrong foods or not tracking well, leading to weight gain. These cycles and patterns may be rooted in something from the past, often back to childhood.
When we think about weight loss or health, we generally don’t think about much beyond our physical body. We are focused on the number on the scale, getting to a certain size, or perhaps we’re worried about some health conditions we have that we want to improve by eating better exercising and getting healthier. However, a huge part of our overall well-being has to do with our mental and spiritual well-being, and we don’t factor these into the picture when trying to lose weight or get healthier. In fact, we are often completely unaware of how things from our past become subconscious programs that drive what we do, how we react to certain things, and how our ego or brain will try and protect us through these things.
I have maintained an exercise routine, good nutrition, and just a healthier lifestyle overall for well over 10 years now. However, it was only about a year ago, when I went into a health and weight loss program, that I learned about inner healing and how these unresolved or unprocessed events from our past manifest as these self-sabotaging behaviors or actions that counteract our weight loss or health efforts. As I started to integrate the inner healing work into my habits, I have been able to get to the root of my own self-sabotaging behaviors and identify a number of things holding me back that I was completely oblivious to. I have been amazed at how it has changed my life and my overall well-being.
I have shared in previous posts that when I initially started on my own weight loss journey, I was very focused on looking a certain way, getting to a certain number on the scale, and getting to a certain size; but when I got there, I still wasn’t happy. At that point in time, I learned an important lesson that I don’t think I fully understood at the time. It taught me that it didn’t matter how skinny I had gotten or what size jeans I was wearing because there was still something inside of me that had not been addressed. I was not happy with myself. I was not going to be happy with myself until I started to learn how to love myself and that came many, many years later.
As I’ve shared before about six years ago or so I started a program for weight loss, but this program was a little different than anything else I had done before because it was very emphatic on improving your mindset and loving yourself, your body at every stage of your weight loss. This was sort of a first step down the path of inner healing for me. While it helped me a lot and I made strides in shifting my mindset and learning to love myself, this mindset work wasn’t enough to really get at the issues. But I didn’t know what I didn’t know, so I didn’t understand why I’d find myself in the same cycles of moving froward and then going into self-sabotage, or why I struggled to pick myself back up when I faced really hard things in life, or why I kept finding myself experiencing the same types of toxic relationships or betrayals in almost every part of my life. It wasn’t until about a year ago, when I started a new program that integrates inner healing with the fitness and health that I learned about what I am sharing with you here.
So, what even is inner healing; what does that mean? It is self-healing of past trauma, hurts, or various events, circumstances, or experiences you may not have been emotionally equipped to process at the time they occurred. We all have this collection of things we experienced growing up from our parents, grandparents, other adults in our lives, as well as things that happened to us that caused pain or created trauma, stress or fear. In response to these things, we develop defense mechanisms to protect us. This takes the form of certain behaviors or beliefs. This can come from past hurts, painful, scary, or stressful experiences, and traumas.
When we hear trauma, we often think of extreme examples, such as violence, physical abuse, sexual abuse, various types of assaults, etc. While it certainly includes these, it also includes what might be thought of as less extreme examples such as emotional traumas, harassment, adverse childhood experiences. It is experiences or events that caused great distress that went beyond your ability to process the emotions involved at the time of the event/incident.
So when you hear the terms “traumas” and “past hurts” it encompasses a wide range of things. Because these are things that we aren’t equipped to process at the time they occur, they manifest into a variety of conditions, beliefs, or ways of being, for lack of better terms. This can include some of the following things:
- Emotional triggers
- Low self-esteem
- Anxiety
- Depression
- Body dysmorphia
- Bigorexia/megarexia
- People pleasing
- Perfectionism
- Alexithymia
- Hyper-independence
- Co-dependency
Let me give a few examples of what this might look like:
One example might be one of your parents yelled at you or hit you when you didn’t do something right, or you had a parent that was very critical and you could never do anything right. This turns into people pleasing later in life, as a subconscious need to avoid experiencing being yelled at, hit, or criticized.
Another example could be being bullied by other kids, or a parent was critical of how you looked or your weight, or maybe you saw one of your parents obsess about and struggle with their own weight or body image. This later becomes body dysmorphia, bigorexia/megarexia (belief you are too small and skinny), or other issues related to self- image or self- worth.
It could be a parent or parents who struggled with alcoholism, drug abuse, or other mental health conditions, which can often lead to co-dependency.
It might be someone who experienced being abandoned by parents, or experienced betrayal from close friends or family or in relationships and that later leads to hyper-independence; like you’re not going to ask for help or depend on anyone for anything.
There are many examples of how past trauma, hurts, and stressful experiences can later affect how we go about our lives and interactions with others. Because they are subconscious, and we are often operating in these ways for so long we may not even realize what is going on or that we can do something to shift these. To do this, however, we have to be able to recognize it. There are lots of great books related to this, that can help you begin to uncover any of these that you may have. One is Running on Empty, by Christine Musello and another is Will I Ever Be Good Enough? By Karyl McBride.
These beliefs, behaviors, conditions continue to repeat in our lives until we recognize them, process them, and release them. These are at the root of most of our challenges with things we want to change, including weight loss and health. For example, if you find yourself in a cycle of starting a new health kick, you do well for a bit and then give up because you had a bad week, this could be a form of self-sabotage rooted in a past stress, hurt, or trauma. If you struggle with binge eating it could be rooted in not having received what you needed emotionally at a young age. It’s not that we don’t want to stop doing these things, we just can’t figure out why we keep doing them, because we aren’t aware of the underlying issue. This is where self-healing and shadow work is so impactful. It helps you get to the root of these behaviors or conditions that hold you back, so you can process them, release them, and move forward. It is not easy work, and it is iterative, meaning you will work through it in layers over time and the more you work through the more you uncover. However, you will also grow and heal in the process and begin to break through all these things that have held you back. You will learn to love and appreciate all aspects of yourself and your unique story, because it made you who you are.
There are different ways you can go about this. Depending on the nature of the past trauma, it may be best to start with professional therapy or counseling. For many others you can start to work through by initially being mindful and paying more attention to how you react to things. For example, what kinds of things trigger you or cause intense emotional reaction for you? What are some things that others may not be bothered by, but which cause a strong reaction in you? These are clues to what your triggers are. As you start to identify them, you can start to look at what the emotion related to the trigger is; is it anger, sadness, disgust? You can then trace the emotion back to get at the core, underlying emotion. A great tool for this is an emotion wheel, which you can find online with a quick google search. Once you identify the emotions you can start to ask yourself when was the last time (prior to the incident at hand) that you felt that way or had that reaction? What was the situation? Go back further from there, and so on until you trace it as far back as you can. Journal it so you can process what is coming up, allow yourself to feel the emotions. This enables you to release them.
As I mentioned this work is very impactful and life changing. That said, it is difficult work as you will revisit things from the past that we very emotionally distressful and had significant impact on you. You will need to process these old emotions to release them and this can be a painful process. There are many resources available from books to websites that help with methods for doing this work. There are a variety of journals with prompts to help you process and move through this work. I have published one, which is available in the store on the website here or through Amazon: https://a.co/d/hHhpaLr
The process of this work is more in-depth than I can go into in this post, but I will be doing a post in the future that walks through doing this work. It is a lifelong process and you work through it in layers. However, you will start to notice changes and shifts as soon as you start doing it, because you will gain new understanding of yourself and the underlying causes of some of the things you may struggle with.
I hope you have found this helpful and feel encouraged to explore inner healing and how it may help you progress in your own health and wellness journey. Please share in the comments what resonated or what you found helpful. If you wish to continue the pursuit of faith, fitness, and joy with me, please like and check out the Faith Fitness Joy podcast. You can also follow Faith Fitness Joy on Facebook and Instagram.