Peace with Self, Peace with Food - A Trauma Healing Approach for Emotional Eating

By Galina Denzel

It's not about willpower, and it's not about the food.

Most people blame their eating behaviors on a lack of willpower.

Eating intuitively hasn't worked.

Eating less and moving more? Trying to change your body image? These only last so long.

Many people are worried that they can never have a healthy relationship with food.

Peace with Self, Peace with Food looks past all that, and gets to the heart of what causes our battles with food.

Through her years of training and practice in trauma healing — as well as her own reconciliation with food and self — Galina Denzel has developed a program to help readers embark on their own journey to healing.

Personal and ancestral traumas inform behaviors around food, and Peace with Self, Peace with Food will help you identify patterns laid down even before you were born.

Patterns that have long contributed to your eating behaviors, and continue to affect your relationship with food today.

Through the exercises in Peace with Self, Peace with Food you will come to understand your eating habits and the neurobiological network that has held them in place until now.

What's more, you will see food, your mind, and your body in a new light.

Not as enemies to be tamed, but as allies that can teach you how to care for yourself, and for your health, with love.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pure Belonging
• Release date: Feb 10, 2022
• ISBN: 9798985259919

Book preview

Introduction – The Way Here

I’m sitting in the retreat coffee shop, listening to the mountain stream, sipping on a once-warm coffee. The white curtains are dancing with the wind, here and there interrupting my writing, moving my sheets, rearranging my thoughts.

Drawings, charts, textbooks, a memoir, and a straw hat full of crayons and pencils cover every inch of the table.

I only have a couple of hours before my first Emotions and Food retreat starts. The girls will be here soon—and my heart is both opening to embrace the work we will do over the next few days and constricting around the thought that I won’t be enough.

I won’t be enough to hold the ocean of pain and suffering each one brings.

I won’t be enough to support each of them just as she needs.

I won’t be enough.

And then I laugh out loud. Isn’t this theme of never being enough and never having enough at the heart of our complex relationship with food?

Something about this honest question frees me from the pressure of being in some imagined rescuer role and invites a lighter breath, and I can hear the stream again and the laughter of kids in the cafeteria.

Over the next few days, teaching the practices at my first Emotions and Food retreat, I test a theory. I test whether the tools and knowledge that helped me heal from emotional eating and body image suffering are universal and will work for my students. I test whether the clinical skills I learned in my years of training as a trauma resolution practitioner are as powerful for others in healing their relationship with food as they were for me.

During the retreat, high in the magnificent mountains of Bulgaria, surrounded by ancient ruins, pristine nature, and rich mineral hot springs, a group of beautiful women open their hearts to the healing that is possible through the body.

They are brave, and they go all the way in and all the way down to join me for several days of lectures and embodied practice that will forever change us.

When we leave the retreat, something new has happened.

I have started developing a method for healing from food suffering that is powerful beyond anything I imagined.

We all feel palpably different.

A beautiful, compassionate community has been born.

Our perspectives, relationships, and stories have shifted.

A different kind of future has started to emerge.

Where there was rigidity and perfectionism, there is flow and hope.

Where there was restriction, there is allowing.

Where there were tears, there are smiles.

A healthy nervous system is one that can change direction.

Kimberly Ann Johnson

Chapter 1 – Origins

Like all things worth birthing in the world, Peace with Self, Peace with Food came to me in the most unusual way. It didn’t happen in a dream or some cosmic energy-channeling experience. I didn’t have an awakening. There was no climb to the top of a mountain, where my eyes suddenly opened and I could see.

One day, after twenty-five years of a complex, dark, and hopeless relationship with food and my body, I found myself being able to just eat without fear. I found myself knowing which foods I needed, being able to enjoy them, and being completely at ease and free from obsessive thoughts after eating them.

I had somehow stopped dieting, weighing myself, counting calories, inspecting my body for endless flaws, and trying to fix it.

I was finally at peace with myself, and at peace with food.

You might wonder how that happened and what I did.

At that time, I was asking myself the same question.

It was a great surprise to find myself free from years of food and body image suffering. This profound change of how I experienced myself came at a time in my life when I had completely resigned and given up hope that my relationship with food could ever change.

See, I had spent twenty-five years of my life suffering and trying to find help, and nothing had been helpful. I had tried various nutrition approaches, supplement plans, homeopathy and flower remedy therapies, acupuncture, physical therapy, exercise plans, and years of weekly psychotherapy. Nothing had been able to budge my deep-seated food fear, the constant obsession with how I looked, and how everything in my life revolved around food and exercise.

So when I moved to the United States at the age of thirty-one, I made a decision. You could say I surrendered, but it was much less graceful than that. I gave up.

I decided I was done with fighting. I was exhausted and miserable.

So I decided I would live with my food and body image challenges, just as my students lived with chronic pain or autoimmune conditions. I would live the fullest life possible and resort to the fact that there was no help for me. After all, it had been twenty-five years of inner turmoil and constant noise in my head, and at least fifteen of those years were spent trying to actively get better, to no avail.

So when that organic change happened and I found myself free from food suffering and free from body shame and self-rejection, I was shocked.

You might still be wondering what I did.

But first, let me tell you what I didn’t do.

I didn’t do anything to change my body image, or to love and accept myself as I am.

I didn’t join the body-positive or health-at-every-size movement.

I didn’t learn intuitive eating (that had never worked for me before...).

I had done nothing to address my food issues—those crazy-making thoughts and behaviors so many of us experience when we are at war with food.

I was as mystified at finding myself feeling free and normal after twenty-five years of struggling with food as you might be reading this.

So I set out to retrace my steps and find out what had really happened.

The only thing different in my life at that time was that I had spent a significant amount of time learning and practicing nervous system regulation skills as a part of my training as a trauma resolution practitioner. Somatic Experiencing was the first trauma-healing modality I trained in, and these massive changes happened unexpectedly during the intermediate year of my studies with Dr. Abi Blakeslee.

Something about bringing my nervous system back to balance had transformed my relationship with food. I could eat when hungry and stop when full, and my mind was finally free from obsessive thoughts about everything food and weight. And it didn’t stop there.

I simultaneously found that I could really love my body and love living in my body for the first time. It was like I had finally landed inside the home of my body, and it felt right; there was no other place I wanted to be.

As I retraced my steps, looking through notes from personal sessions, textbooks, and manuals, I was starting to realize that something about my training had profoundly shifted my whole way of being.

Before I set on the path to study trauma healing, I had always thought that my food behaviors could be changed if I changed my way of thinking. If I only had the right mindset and accepted myself and followed what my nutritionists and therapists were saying, I would heal.

I had no idea that the body had deeply hidden, implicit reasons for these behaviors.

I had no idea that my history mattered.

My birth story mattered.

The many illnesses and traumas of my childhood mattered.

The dynamics of my family of origin mattered.

My relationship and attachment injuries mattered.

The political and social environment around me mattered.

These are all factors—well documented in research literature—in developing an eating disorder. But no one had ever explained that to me. After all, when you go to a therapist to talk about your eating issues, they typically don’t ask you whether you have birth trauma, if you were breastfed and held enough, or whether your parents were living in daily fear of the government, do they?

Things started to come together the more I retraced my steps. And the more I reached out to supervisors, teachers, and colleagues to share what I was finding, the more I saw that there were others who, like me, had spent years suffering and had given up on a solution, having no idea that trauma was a major driver of emotional eating and body image suffering.

Something in me wanted to scream the truth I had found from the rooftops—but it would be a few years before I could do that.

I had so many questions. What were the shock and developmental trauma imprints that were healed during my training and therapy sessions? What did my body have now that it didn’t have before? How was I relating to myself and others in such a profoundly different way that it trickled up and ended the insufferable decades-long battle with food and my body?

I eventually found the answers, and I set off on a quest to teach these skills to my students, who wanted to be at peace with self and peace with food too.

Out of my own healing journey, years of follow-up research, and the kind collaboration of my retreat students, I created the Peace with Self, Peace with Food method, which this book is about and which I teach online through workshops and small group coaching.

I want to tell you everything you need to know to step on your own path to peace with food, but since you are just beginning this book, I ask you to bring your attention inward by answering these two questions:

Journaling Time

What is your heart’s desire when it comes to your relationship with food?

If you could transform it, what would you love to have, feel, or experience?

What do you think has kept you from having peace with food in your life so far?

"My heart’s desire is for food to be separated from shame and punishment and reward. Initially this came up as: ‘I wish food was optional, like if I could eat once a month in one fell swoop like a snake that would be ideal,’ but I think what that really means is that the daily contending with decisions about what is and isn’t ‘good’ for me, and then the emotional ramifications of each of those decisions is exhausting.

I would like for my desires and actions to be in harmony with each other when it comes to food, to want the thing that is truly nourishing, to know what truly nourishing would even feel like. I would like to be more comfortable with feeling the wanting, to know what to do with it when the thing I want is something that will interfere with my body feeling good in the longer run... What’s kept me from having peace with food so far is really the overwhelm I feel with my job. I haven’t found anything else that helps me manage that crazy level of stress and tension. I am really out of balance, but I don’t know what to do about it. It seems like I’ve tried everything

Lori, California

"My heart’s desire? I would like to be free. I would like to be in control of what and how much I eat. I would like to use food, for the most part as fuel, but also be able to enjoy any foods that I want and feel good. I never want to feel shame, or guilt, or regret, etc. around food, again. I want to be in control of food and my eating, and I don’t want my food and eating to be in control of me.

"With everything I