In this post, we’ll be going over ideas about shadow work for binge eating.
First, let’s quickly go over what shadow and shadow work is.
What is Shadow Self & Shadow Work?
Your shadow self, or shadow, is the side of yourself you have no awareness of. It holds all the qualities you disowned during your formative years.
Although you learned to repress these qualities and push them outside of your awareness, they still live underneath the surface.
They unconsciously guide your actions and are the unseen cause for many of the troubles in your life.
Shadow work is the intentional practice of becoming aware of your unconscious shadow and integrating these neglected qualities into your being—becoming whole.
This is a process of building self-awareness, self-acceptance, and universal Love.
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
Carl Jung
NEXT READ: Everything About Shadow Work (Comprehensive In-Depth Guide)
Shadow Work for Binge Eating
Food addiction is a national issue in the western world.
Part of this is because of a powerful impulse to eat—an insatiable appetite with a complete lack of self-control; binge eating.
Eating more despite having already eaten and filled themselves up—as if possessed by something beyond understanding.
This is an attempt to fulfill an impulse that’s coming from somewhere in the psyche.
A compulsion and fixation about food indicate that something within you needs to be addressed so it can be sated through emotional acknowledgment and soothing.
Whatever emotional soothing you need is being misinterpreted for hunger.
For example, the difference between feeling lonely and hunger is that you can eat until you’re not hungry. Still, you can’t eat your way out of loneliness (or whatever deep-rooted emotion affects you).
It’s a self-soothing strategy that has become self-destructive.
This self-soothing strategy typically comes from how you were soothed as a child, most often by the mother—assuming she knew how to soothe herself.
What self-soothing method you learned in your formative years has become internalized and is what you naturally, or even unconsciously, gravitate to when something in you needs soothing.
My experience with binge eating
I grew up morbidly obese. And I’m assuming it’s because I didn’t form much of an emotional connection with my mother.
However, she always did well to feed me growing up (albeit much more than I needed).
I can’t blame my mother because she was depressed for years dealing with my narcissist father. (Understand that just because someone tried their best doesn’t mean it was good enough).
But it wasn’t until I was older that one day I looked and the mirror and saw how obese I was.
Looking in the mirror and checking the scale, I hated what I saw. At that moment, I promised myself I would lose the weight or I would kill myself.
Within 6 months, I dropped 60lbs.
In retrospect, I used my own self-hate to motivate me to do better from that moment forward.
These days I have too much damn Love to do that again. So my own “death ground” strategy has lost its appeal. So I’m stuck trying to build more self-awareness for the unseen (which is…like..fucking hard).
This past year I’ve put on over twenty pounds. This is actually the heaviest I’ve ever weighed.
But since I have no more conscious “hate fuel” in the tank, I’m resorting to studying this topic from the perspective of psychology and spirituality. Hopefully, you guys find something of use.
Sorry for the detour; let’s get back into it.
Emotional Bankruptcy & Passing Down Shadow
There’s something in your being that you haven’t integrated into your being.
So instead of expressing this untapped quality, it’s trying to get your attention through an insatiable appetite.
Some unconscious quality in the psyche is experiencing starvation that you can only interpret as physical hunger. Which leads to binge eating.
However, the satiating thing your psyche is looking for can’t be found in food.
This sort of “emotional bankruptcy” is a debt that tends to be inherited from the parents.
An “emotional debt” has unconsciously been passed to you. Your caregivers have passed down their own insatiability and depravity onto you via shadow.
Ancestral Trauma & Psychological Inheritance
To consider a more psycho-spiritual approach—
There can be intergenerational trauma that has been encoded in your being from past generations. This trauma in your family can manifest your tendency to binge eat.
However, this would make more sense if you come from a family of big eaters. Not if you’re a more independent case.
Killing the Fantasy That’s Holding You Back
For every addiction, the slipping person always convinces themselves, “it’s no big deal.”
This is denial.
When someone isn’t capable of dealing with a negative experience, they self-soothe with a fantasy.
If someone calls you ugly, you fantasize that they’re just jealous of you somehow.
If you break up with your partner, you fantasize that someday they’ll come back.
This fantasy aspect is meant to soothe you, but it has a tendency to pull you away from Reality.
The mind has to put itself in a state of denial and make-believe to feel better about itself.
The cure for this fantasizing is to face the Truth. Face your limitations. Focus on the steps in front of you—Not some far-off vision.
Avoid tunnel vision that “keeps your head in the clouds and your feet off the ground.”
(It just so happens that everyone breaks through their own form of this if they are meant to expand their level of consciousness).
There may be a fantasy part of you that NEEDS to die.
Being Socially Deprived
If you lack relationships, whether it’s friendship or romance, you may be self-soothing to make up for being relationship-deprived.
You may simply need more social reinforcement to become more healthy.
Whether it’s by simply noticing other people and wanting to be a similar shape. Or wanting to fit in more with your own support system that happens to be healthier than yourself.
(Becoming consciously aware of how unadapted you are in the outer and/or inner world; utilizing shame).
Perhaps it takes someone who really cares about you to point out that you matter to them. Which can activate something in you to change for the better.
This assumes that you can be affected by someone to feel better about yourself. Unfortunately, people who are painfully adept at spotting false flattery and lip service may not quickly get this.
Inner Child Work & Cultivating an Inner Caregiver
Eating a lot of food does not provide emotional satiety because it’s not the correct nourishment you need.
Assuming that the “emotionally bankrupt caregiver” is a fundamental factor—
It makes sense that you mend or create an image of a regulating caregiver.
You learn to care for yourself and set sensible parameters because you care enough about yourself to do so.
It also helps to imagine that there’s an insatiable child within you and speaking to it.
Both of these cases can be accomplished with Active Imagination meditations. This is where you imagine a being representing your caregiver/inner child and allow it to act and speak freely.
By conversing with this being, you communicate with your unconscious mind (assuming you can keep your ego from inhabiting the being’s form for the unconscious to have complete control).
Then pay attention and honor your unconscious.
You will learn which emotions you have trouble tapping into and regulating.
Remember—that’s what it wants.
It’s what you want.
Here are some resources I recommend:
A Light Among Shadows is a guide to self-love and being that helps you overcome negative self-talk, instill genuine self-acceptance, and overcome self-hate and resentment by making sense of people’s level of consciousness and your spirituality.
Shadow Work for Beginners Series helps you beat negative patterns and beliefs, integrate your shadow, heal your inner child, reclaim your projections, build emotional maturity, and take back your life by becoming whole.
Shadow Work for Relationship Series helps you heal your attachment style, navigate relationship issues, and build a healthy, mature relationship.
Advanced Shadow Work is an ongoing publication with continued in-depth insight and practical advice you won’t find anywhere else on the internet for practicing shadow work, self-awareness, inner healing, spiritual development, and more!
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