The Depressed Pattern
Jay Earley, Ph.D.
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When your Depressed Pattern is triggered, you may feel hopeless and low energy. Your natural buoyancy, spark, and energy is literally depressed. You may feel lethargic and believe that there is no point in doing anything because your life seems hopeless. It may be difficult to get up the energy to do much of anything other than go through the motions of your life. You may have little appetite and have difficulty sleeping. You may isolate yourself from most people because you don't see any point in trying to relate to them. Of course, this often contributes to the sense of bleakness in your life. Your inner landscape may feel empty and gray with no life. You may feel sadness and grief, or you may just feel dead inside. You might also feel anxious and agitated. You may also feel bad about yourself. You may feel that your life is hopeless because there is something intrinsically wrong with you. You are worthless or inadequate and that's why your life can't work. You believe that you are deeply flawed. You carry much pain about this, though the pain may be buried behind the bleakness. | |
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The Food Controller Pattern
Bonnie Weiss, LCSW
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The Food Controller tries to regulate your eating when it thinks it isn't good for you or might be dangerous. It believes that without its efforts, you will be out of control and ruin your life. This can result in being obsessed with food, worrying about your weight and your figure, feeling bad about your eating habits, going on diets, making resolutions, or feeling shame about lapses in meeting your eating goals. The Food Controller may be rigid and punitive. It may have fixed and precise standards for how you should eat. The biggest problem may be that the Food Controller Inner Critic tries to enforce these standards by attacking and shaming you when you fail to measure up to them. Even if the Food Controller wants what's best for you, it often goes about this in a harsh, punitive way. It may have learned this strategy from the way your parents tried to control you as a child. Your Food Controller may be activated even if your eating isn't out of line. You may feel as though you are fighting a chronic battle with someone who doesn't see you. This kind of Food Controller has an unrealistic view of who you are or the danger of your impulses. It may attack you for really enjoying your food or for occasionally eating too much. Or even if you are somewhat impulsive with food, your Food Controller may react in a way that is much more harsh, punitive, and rigid than is needed. Your culture may have an unreasonable ideal of thinness, and this can result in feeling that you have to rigidly control your normal impulses. In this case, your Food Controller may work against what is natural and healthy for you. On the other hand, your Food Controller might be reacting to an out-of-control Indulger Pattern that is having a damaging effect on your life. There may be a real need to moderate your eating, for the sake of your health or your appearance, but with the Food Controller Pattern, this is done in a harsh, shaming way rather than a constructive way. It may make you feel really bad about yourself whenever you binge. Paradoxically, this often stimulates a need for self-soothing, which is often done by more eating. So often the judgmental strategy that the Food Controller uses actually backfires and makes things worse. | |
