I've been working with people with food and weight issues for over 20 years now and one of the biggest things that stands out for me about most of my clients is how disconnected they are from themselves. By disconnected, I mean they are cut off from their intuition (or it's there and they don't listen to it), they don't know who they are, and they don't
have a life purpose or great passion.
Most of them are drifting through life on autopilot and just going through the motions. At their core, they feel empty and dissatisfied with their lives, and this leads them to turn to food to soothe and comfort themselves.
I have a lot of compassion for these clients because I lived like this for a good portion of
my early life. It's a very painful way to live and it requires deadening yourself to cope with it. After a while, people just become numb and apathetic. They dig such a deep hole for themselves that it becomes very hard to climb out of it.
Many of these people have had childhoods where their emotional needs were neglected. This often starts the cycle of self-neglect that is so hard to break. We wind up treating ourselves
the same way our parents treated us. We neglect our true needs, we don't listen to and pay attention to ourselves, and we don't act on our intuitive promptings. We are often paralyzed by self-doubt and fear.
When we do this, life becomes an endless repeat of the same old thing, day after day, like in the movie Groundhog Day. There's a wonderful quote by Robin S. Sharma that says, "Don't live the same year 75 times and call it a
life." Now how many of us can relate to that?
When we're plagued by the feeling "Is this all there is?" and a sense that something is missing, we are correct. What's missing is us. We're often MIA - Missing in Action.
