Women Food and God: An Unexpected Path to Almost Everything
By Geneen Roth
There have been only two sizes of clothes in my closet for the past thirty years — fours and smalls. You may conclude that I didn’t need to read a book like Women Food and God. But I did.I’m reflecting on interviewing Geneen Roth about a decade ago. Back then, I wrote that I wanted to read her book, in part, because inside my wicker hamper — that I purchased in New York City when I was 21 and working for a fashion and beauty boutique PR agency — I had four bags of chocolate. Ghirardelli. One-and-three-quarter-inch squares of 60% cacao filled with caramel. Pure heaven. Hidden in my hamper. I told my therapist then, and she gently reminded me, “What did you hide in the hamper when you were a little girl?”
I burst into tears. I’d forgotten I’d told her. I had hidden in that hamper my “gloppy” underpants, after my second father, my adoptive father, got done with me. I hid the sweets in the hamper in the present because I subconsciously reconnected with my six-year-old self, when I was the one who pulled all the dirty laundry from the basket, sorted it, washed and dried it, and put it away. From age six. It was part of the secret. And now I’m hiding chocolate and caramel — the treats I secretly eat when I feel empty.
Geneen Roth writes in Women Food and God, to pay attention to how you truly feel. When I’m foraging for chocolate in the Target bag hidden in my hamper, I am likely feeling unloved, and the creamy sweetness oozes into all the empty places inside me. And then it’s done, and the empty wrapper is jammed in the bottom of a garbage bag, and my heart feels empty. There is a twist to this.
After I got divorced, I got diagnosed with late onset Type One Diabetes. At the time, I weighed 112 and danced three hours a day after my on-air anchor shift. The sudden onset made no sense, until one day soon after the diagnosis, I was in a meditative state, and I “saw” my pancreas weeping. I perceived it saying, “The diabetes is due to the lack of sweetness in your childhood.” That made amazing sense. For one thing, my then-husband and I had had sex just about every day of our more than 8,000 days together, and now, divorced, I couldn’t count on that to fill me up. As a kid, I equated sex with love.
Roth says our emotional states get frozen in time. And, in paying attention to how we are truly feeling, we release the emotion. Finally, we feel that emotion, allowing it to move through and out. Ask yourself “What’s going on in my body?”
I was determined to break myself of the chocolate and caramel habit, knowing that it would be something else, if I didn’t work through these frozen feelings. I brought this issue into therapy where we used EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing). We worked through my adoptive father’s ways with me, and then, I began to see playful memories with my real dad. In EMDR, everything feels present, even if it’s decades old. Safe play with my dad. Fun play. Sweet play. That kind of sweetness I wanted to reinforce. Yes, caramel is still my fave, but it doesn’t torture or compel me. It’s just caramel.
In Roth’s book, she mentions the clarity that comes from inquiry. When we question, we pull ourselves into the present, and thereby, cease stuffing the empty spots in our soul. When you feel, Roth says, express it, don’t stuff it.
Roth tells her students to “eat what they want when they’re hungry and to feel what they feel when they’re not.” This is an amazing book. I am lighter just having read it.