Hypnotherapy for overweight triggered by trauma

Being overweight or engaging in unhealthy eating habits is often nothing more than managing underlying stress or overwhelm in the current, and/or anxiety (a person’s negative perceptions about themselves or their environment/situation) about the future.

It's not uncommon, however, for overweight to be associated with earlier experiences of trauma and abuse, especially where a young person lacked support in managing or recovering from it.

These early experiences can trigger an internalised negative and destructive state to the time when the trauma/abuse occurred with people often recalling vivid accounts of their abusive/traumatic experiences many decades later.

For example, imagine a child shamed in front of the class when their teacher accosted them for failing to provide the correct answer to a question, or in response to their request to visit the toilet outside of break times.

These kinds of embarrassing early events which happen when the brain is immature and shaped easily by our experiences can leave people feeling shame. This, and regret, can materialise as a result of seemingly failing to reach socially sanctioned standards of behaviour in a given situation.

There are important distinctions between embarrassment and shame and an individual’s ability to ‘shake off’ an early experience rather than carry it around with them and allow it to affect their future behaviour. It’s far easier, for example, to be able to laugh about an embarrassing mistake e.g., pushing a door when it needs to be pulled to open it, even with an onlooking audience, than when we feel shamed and see ourselves as vulnerable to shaming and unable to separate ourselves from behaviour. The experience that shames us is regarded as a judgement on self, e.g., “I must be stupid” or “I’m not good enough” leading to chronic self-esteem and confidence issues which can then in turn trigger chronic emotional eating and/or self-harming behaviours.

Using cognitive behaviour hypnotherapy, we can encourage a client, after some prep work, to revisit early traumatic experiences in the safety of the therapy space by using therapeutic tools such as age regression or timeline therapy during hypnosis. Here, we have the benefit of the adult mind who knows better, with greater wisdom and experience, to go back to the earlier memories and revisit the embarrassing or shaming moment and reframe or reconstruct it by experiencing it with an adult mind. These kinds of interventions used by a skilled therapist can be incredibly powerful, emotional, life-changing and empowering. They help to lift the burden of feeling and thinking the way a person does and enables a new sense of power in their newfound insights and growth.