She came to see me for healing and we talked about her life. Her mind took her to a time when she was a little girl of four, and her parents were hugging her, but she didn’t feel any love from their hearts. Her father and brother teased and humiliated her. She felt empty and unloved. But there was another part of her that was watching the scene. With her mature mind, she now understood that her mother and father felt ’empty’ to her, not because she didn’t deserve love, but because they were missing love in their own lives, and they simply didn’t have enough to give. Anna had always thought that she’d done something wrong, that she didn’t deserve to be loved, but now she knew the real reason.

Sugar Is Love

I asked her to trace back to the past and find another picture in her memory. She went to a time when she was 10, and she was sitting at the table eating chocolate cake. Her mother had always given her this when she had been a good girl. The cake tasted so great! Her mother made it, and the sugar was ‘love from Mom’. It felt good; Anna knew her mother liked her if she could have dessert or treats. She desperately wanted to please her mom, and eating her mom’s cake definitely pleased mom. She was happy eating that cake, and life was okay. She now saw how much the sugar was equated to mother-love.

She then went forward many years in her imagination, and she saw a picture of her boyfriend leaving her for another woman, and now she realized that she had been turning to food for years to fill the gaping holes. She was having many revelations — gaining wisdom for her essence that was helping to heal her.

She looked at her habitual thoughts. She said: “Here’s the first one: ‘Nothing is all right.’ And the next: ‘Life is not fair and no good.’ And, ‘What’s the use?’” These were words she often heard from her father and also the part of her own mind that she tried to stuff down with food. A voice in her mind constantly told her to eat all the cookies she wanted.

I asked her to experience her strength now and to talk to that old compulsive voice. She said to it: “I’m in charge now. There’s no way you can get me to eat those cookies when I’m not hungry. I get to decide. You can be creative instead of destructive. You can stop eating those cookies now.”

Letting Your Essence Guide You

Another time, I asked her to go to the place of guidance within herself to give herself some more understanding of her situation. Her essence spoke to her in the form of her inner wisdom: “You often eat when you’re lonely. Your loneliness is a spur to help you grow. Blocking or numbing it with food only hinders you. Accept your loneliness, your boredom, your anger and your grief. Work with these feelings; let yourself feel them, and then come back to the love.”

I then spoke to her deeper mind directly: “You don’t have to feed yourself junk any more. When you were little, sugar was a reward. The people in your family showed their love through sweet food, but it’s not a reward any more. You can reward yourself in new ways now. You can give yourself love and nurturing. You can reward yourself by eating wholesome, healthy, delicious food in moderate amounts. You’re not a little girl anymore, and the old ways are over. The rewards you get now are 10 times greater. You deserve them, no matter how many things you did that weren’t good. You deserve nurturing because your essence is goodness.”

Anna then got a spontaneous image of herself out on a cliff overlooking the ocean. She watched the waves roll onto the beach and out again. The clouds were floating peacefully above her. She felt a peaceful presence that brought her back to herself once again.

Finding a Greater Comfort

Eating is not only a necessity; it’s a ‘comfort habit’, a habit that seems to make you feel at ease and secure. Other such habits that seem to create comfort are smoking, drug use, nail biting, hair twirling, and drinking. These habits are attempts to alter consciousness. Many of them involve trying to fill that primal need of the infant cradled in its mother’s arms, warmly fed and loved in a peaceful, idyllic way. You long for this ultimate satisfaction, for comfort and security and love. You long to be the infant at peace, and you seek to create that state by putting something into your mouth, into your body, to quiet your tension-filled mind. It seems to work for a short while, but it has long-term repercussions and many negative effects.

The Underlying Issues of Food Addiction

The roots of most food problems stem from basic human issues of love and self-esteem. Food is used to fill emptiness and loneliness, to mask self-hatred and shame, to find comfort and pleasure, to tranquilize — so many reasons. When you know of other ways to get your needs met and your problems solved, food ceases to be the only alternative.

Not everyone has experienced the lack of early nurturing. Some people have a simple physiological addiction to sweets or carbohydrates or fats. But for others, the addiction is compounded with the satisfaction of these deeper needs. The primary principle here is that you have the capacity in your adult years to bring yourself what may have been missing earlier in your life.

Also read » 4 Simple Ways to Cultivate Unconditional Self-love

Beating Your Inner Gremlin

When you know it may be some ‘gremlin’ or some lonely little kid that, as a part of you, is eating all those cookies, you get to make the decision about how you handle the matter. You can give the ‘gremlin’ or the child some other way to play or get nurtured — and you can eat to satisfy a more evolved part of yourself. You can talk to these parts to remind them that they do not have the ultimate power over you.

When you can center yourself in your essence, then you can eat with greater awareness of who you’re really nourishing.

[Editor’s note: The following section was added by the Complete Wellbeing editorial team to supplement the original article with current research context.]

What the Research Says About Compulsive Eating

The connection between emotional pain and compulsive eating that Marilyn Gordon describes in her clinical work is now well-supported by neuroscience. Studies show that highly processed foods, particularly those high in sugar, fat, and salt, activate the brain’s dopamine reward pathways in ways that closely resemble the neurological response to addictive substances. A widely cited review published in Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews found that intermittent, excessive sugar intake produces changes in dopamine and opioid receptor activity comparable to those seen with drugs of abuse. This is why the craving for junk food so often intensifies precisely when we are stressed, lonely, or emotionally depleted: the brain is seeking a quick chemical fix for an emotional wound.

Research also confirms that adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), including emotional neglect, parental unavailability, or a home environment where love was conditional, are significantly associated with disordered eating in adulthood. A large-scale study published in the Journal of Eating Disorders found that adults seeking treatment for eating disorders reported substantially higher ACE scores than the general population, with patterns of childhood trauma mapping onto specific eating behaviors in adulthood. When comfort and affection were scarce in childhood, the brain learns to seek substitute rewards. Food, especially sweet food, becomes one of the most accessible.

Mindfulness-based approaches and therapies that address the emotional roots of eating, such as the inner-healing work described in this article, have shown strong results in clinical settings, often outperforming diet-focused interventions alone when the underlying driver is emotional rather than physiological.

Related reading » How to Transform Oneself With Mindfulness

A version of this article originally appeared in the October 2014 issue of Complete Wellbeing print edition. It was published on this website on 1^st June 2016.

Last updated on 26^th March 2026

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