Why growing human(kind)ness works

I love it when science affirms what we’re doing here with growing human(kind)ness!

Dr. Mate, an expert on addiction, nurturing, ADHD, and parenting, has greatly influenced my work. I value his wisdom and compassion. In this article here, Dr. Mate explains how lack of childhood nurturing wires the brain for addiction.

Here’s what I took from this interview:

1. If we have compulsive patterns with food, they’ve most likely been in place since early childhood. This doesn’t mean we all were abused or neglected. It does mean that we had unmet needs. We encountered stress and lacked sufficient nurturing from caregivers to cope.

2. Our patterns are a response to stress. They were meant as a way of caring for ourselves, and often still are. In other words, we’re not hating ourselves or sabotaging ourselves when we overeat. Our overeating is rooted in self preservation and kindness.

As we soften the stress and offer ourselves nurturing, we’re able to create new patterns of self soothing.

3. We go back to addictive or compulsive patterns when we’re stressed. This is why we can be doing great with food and then struggle when life throws a hairball (or 2 or 3) at us.

What this tells me:  we need soothing, stress relief, and support to heal any form of compulsive behavior, to create different wiring in the brain. That’s why punitive approaches to healing overeating don’t work, and even make me angry.

I’m hoping this article helps us appreciate how our early experiences wired us to self soothe with food or other external means. What I’m trying to say, dear ones, is overeating is not your fault.

Dr. Mate also shares that with nurturing, we can rewire the brain and heal these addictive patterns. We can lower the stress. We can heal ourselves by offering ourselves love, compassion, and tenderness.

What a beautiful promise!

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