For those who see/saw a therapist for compulsive eating

[ryan_86 335]

I'm considering seeing someone about my compulsive eating. I've been slipping back into eating when I'm not hungry, and while I haven't gained weight back yet, the thought scares the hell out of me.

What do therapists suggest for this? I'm worried I'll go in there and be told things I already know.

[Introversion 1,876]

There's no garden variety answer for this. Therapists and counselors make their suggestions based on the root causes of your overeating because different people overeat for differing reasons.

Some people are emotional overeaters or stress eaters. Other eat to ease loneliness or boredom. Some folks suffer from pathology such as binge eating disorder or compulsive eating disorder.

Still, others overeat in response to past abuse...a theory is that a bigger body habitus serves as a type of psychological armor. Finally, some people eat too much because they're food addicts.

In my case, my counselor determined I had free-floating anxiety and PTSD due to childhood trauma. I grew up in a home where one parent was a drug addict. I witnessed domestic violence and saw things a child should never see, so I used food to distract me from powerful feelings and flashbacks well into adulthood.

I was given tools to address the anxiety and PTSD head-on. You see, it's never directly about the food...most of us ate too much due to a root cause. The counselor unearths the root cause and formulates a plan to help you work on dealing with that.

Once you address the root cause of your overeating tendencies, the compulsive drive to eat decreases unless you're truly addicted to food.