Episode 84: How a Lack of Early Nurturance Impacts Your Relationship with Food, with Colleen West
I have a question for you. What do you know about your early years? Like from birth to age two? And what do you know about your mom's pregnancy with you?
If you're like me, not a whole lot.
Turns out, though, this is really good information to have. According to this week's podcast guest, Colleen West, these early years and your experiences within them have an incredible influence on the development of your relationship with food.
Especially when it comes to the nurturance and attunement given to you by your caretakers. I'll let Colleen explain it herself:
"For babies that don’t get tended to reliably, they end up with more need to autoregulate, to soothe from the outside. And that often gets linked with food. And it begins a whole lot of other behaviors and deep burdens that last long into your life, unless those young parts get cared for."
Did that just resonate with a lot of your parts? I know it did with mine.
Preverbal parts are Colleen's specialty, and I'm thrilled to have her back on the show to take a much deeper dive than we did in our first conversation (catch that episode here). Colleen is all about creating connection: between you and your parts, between you and your loved ones, between you, your community, and the wider world. She is unabashedly optimistic about the human capacity to heal, to tap into the wellspring of compassion that is Self. Her professional focus is healing preverbal attachment trauma.
As a Marriage and Family Therapist and IFS Consultant, she devotes herself to training and mentoring psychotherapists, and writing. Thanks to Zoom, she is training therapists all over the world. She is author of We All Have Parts: An Illustrated Guide to Healing Trauma with Internal Family Systems (2021) and The IFS Flip Chart (2023). She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband and the fabulous dog Sky. In her leisure, she likes spending time in nature and preparing feasts for family and friends. More at www.colleenwest.com and www.smarttherapytools.com.
On this week’s podcast, Colleen and I talk about how those early years are so important, and how a lack of nurturance and attunement by parents (with even the best of intentions) can lead to the use of food--or the restriction of food--as a soothing mechanism. In the episode, we discuss:
Why hunger can lead to feelings of panic
How a lack of nurturance in infancy leads to feelings of loneliness, isolation, and fear, and how all of that can impact our relationship with food
How our early experiences can lead us to disconnect from our bodies and their experiences of hunger
The behavioral cues that indicate a lack of nurturance in infancy
How IFS can help to heal the exiles that weren't cared for
Colleen also leaves us with three important points:
If you're currently a parent of young children, do your best to be present with them;
If you're in therapy, slow down and notice your parts and your bodily sensations, and focus on your preverbal years; and
Your own Self-Energy can heal your parts.
This was truly a wonderful, aha-inducing episode that I know will resonate with your parts. Take a listen!
You can find Colleen at:
To listen to my previous podcast with Colleen, head here.
Where to find me:
And if you'd like to take a deep dive into your own relationship with food, considering joining one of my Food and Body Freedom groups for therapists/practitioners and for non-therapists.
Click below to listen!