Have you ever found yourself overeating because someone didn't meet your expectations? Today, we're going to explore how the unwritten rules we set for our loved ones can lead to emotional eating and how embracing unconditional love can be the key to breaking the cycle.
So today, I want to talk about this idea of relationships that we have. Lots of times, through programming or past history, we have these ideas, these rules. This operating manual of how people in our lives should behave or what relationships should look like. And lots of times, until we're aware of them, we don't even really know that we have them. But if you think about the most important relationships in your life, maybe someone in your family, maybe it's a best friend, think about your expectations of how that relationship is supposed to go.
And then sometimes, most of the time, we don't tell people these expectations. So I'm gonna give you a couple of examples, because I feel like that explains it best. In my family, there are a lot of unwritten rules about how family should act. Okay, and I've uncovered more and more of them as I've gotten into this work. It's very interesting. But let's talk about families and birthdays. In my immediate family, there is an expectation that on someone's birthday, you call them. This was actually very hard for me during school and residency. I didn't know what day it was or have a reliable calendar, so sometimes I would miss calling someone on their birthday. That did not go over well in my family because there was this expectation that families call each other on their birthday. And then, more importantly, if that expectation wasn't met, that would mean a lot. A lot, right? So if I didn't meet that expectation, people who had this rule would think I didn't care about them if I didn't call them on their birthday. Okay, so this might be sounding familiar.
But if I missed a birthday call, that would be interpreted as I don't care about that person because the relationship rule for birthdays in my family is that you call. Let me tell you another example. This was very funny, I think now in retrospect. Before I knew about this work, and when I was pregnant, because all of your emotions are amplified when you're pregnant, my unwritten rule was spouses should want to be with each other all the time. So, we used to have a meal delivery service, and I was cooking dinner one night. My husband came home, and he went to the other room. He went to our living room while I was cooking in the kitchen. I thought he had to make a phone call or something, so a few minutes go by, and then I went in to check on him because he should want to be with me, right?
So I went to check and see where he was. And he was just sitting in the dark. He wasn't on the phone. He was literally just sitting in the dark. Well, my relationship rule was we should be together. So, by him sitting in the dark by himself, not cooking dinner with me or sitting with me while I cook dinner, to me, it meant he didn't love me like I thought he did. Now, pregnancy on top of this, you could see where the story is going. Lots of tears and crying on my part and fights because I made his not meeting my unwritten rule, my unwritten expectation, mean something about the quality of our relationship, and about his feelings toward me. Very slippery slope here, you can see, right? So, I had these rules. I hadn't told him the rules because in my mind, these are things everyone should know. All of our unwritten rules about our relationships are going to feel this way. It's common sense. People should know this. Any reasonable person would know that a spouse should want to be with their significant other.
So, I never told him these rules, but then he didn't meet my rule, my rule that I hadn't told him anything about, and then I made it mean something was wrong with our relationship. I made a mountain out of a molehill. Okay, so you can see, I am in this very highly emotional place. We talked about last week. I am in the big field. My brain does not like that, especially here. I am big and pregnant, and I think I probably said, "You probably don't even want to be married to me anymore." Like, I went real far with it. Just wanted a few minutes of silence. Okay, so you can see my brain, like, "We should eat because eating makes us feel better when we don't know any other way." So, it makes sense over here. It is a very highly traumatic emotional impact when people don't follow our rules.
Now, I want you to think about these rules as conditions, because this made a lot of mental sense to me when I was learning this work. My rules for a relationship are conditions for a relationship, meaning if you do it this way, then I will love you, or then I will know that you love me. And most of us are striving for in relationships is this idea of unconditional love. So, I put all these conditions on our relationship, which is quite the opposite of unconditional love. And ironically, I used to think that meeting my expectations of a relationship would mean we were closer. But if you can visualize kind of holding your manual of rules, your operating manual in front of you, sort of checking the boxes, "Yes, they're meeting my expectation, yes, yes, yes." That book in front of us causes distance and space between us and whoever is on the other side of the relationship that we're trying to have.
So, our rulebooks are really getting in the way of us having a close relationship. All I needed to do to be closer to my husband while he was sitting in the dark was ask him, "Why are you sitting in the dark?" Like, be curious. Why is he doing something that's different than my expectation? He was doing something different than my expectation because that wasn't his rule, and him having a minute to decompress, then he could be more fully engaged later. I recognize we're gonna go back to the birthday calls. When we do not meet our own expectation, we're usually pretty forgiving of ourselves. So, I made excuses like, "I was busy, I was on call," whatever the reason was that I missed the phone call. Very forgiving of myself, very compassionate. "I was very busy, maybe I had a bad day, whatever." We are generally not that compassionate when someone else breaks the rule.
So, think about that for a minute. If we miss the expectation, we don't meet the expectation. You know, I don't make the kids' lunch, whatever the expectation is for mom, do I? I don't make the birthday phone call. Very forgiving of my human flaws, and why I might miss the expectation, factors we're human, and we're flawed, and we're not always gonna do it right. We're not always gonna meet our own rules of what we think that relationship should look like, what a good wife, good mom, good friend is. We're not always gonna make our own rules because we're flawed. We're just forgiving ourselves. We're not forgiving when someone else breaks the rule, and that spiral, just making it mean so much about the relationship, can really be harmful.
So, we are looking for this unconditional love, this very close relationship. We have to become aware of these rulebooks, these unwritten expectations, these operating manuals we have that we think are important. Let go of them. Perfection from our partner in whatever relationship it is, our friend, partner, or sister, brother, or mother, our colleagues at work, expecting perfection from them, following our book they know nothing about. And then, when they fail, we make that mean something about their relationship can be very detrimental, not only to the relationship, but to us, because it's a prime spot for overeating. It's just opening up this cavern of potential negative emotions out of nowhere.
It's a rule that usually is made up, usually sold on TV, or someone told us about it, and then we take it as, "Yes, that is the rule." Said the examples I've given sound familiar, but there are a lot of rules, especially in families and this programming that we have of what is right and correct and that way we're supposed to be. We can start teasing that out and really get some serious work done on all these little pitfalls, all these little areas where we might be triggered to overeat.
I'll give you one more example that's a little more under the surface, a little deeper. In my family, and we get it from our family, so not my family. I love my family, and my family, conflict is bad. Okay, so this is a rule. It means the end of the relationship, and I'm not exactly sure where this came from. Otherwise, I have gone back and asked my mom about it now that I've uncovered this. She will tell you to this day, conflict is bad. She doesn't like to see anyone disagree. So that was the way things were, right? That's the rule. Any small disagreement that I had with people would be much more stressful to me because I would think that the end of our relationship. So any conflict, even the smallest one, would make me feel very insecure about the relationship. You can see, prime for people pleasing.
I didn't want conflict. I needed people to please. It never feels good to hold all of this, but people pleasing doesn't feel good and does not give us the closest relationship that we're looking for because not only do we have the rulebook between us, now we also have this false pretense of not really being me. And that wasn't really me when I was people-pleasing. So, not only did this rule of no conflict lead to people-pleasing, it also made me get involved in relationships that I wasn't even a primary member of because I wanted to fix things. It made me uncomfortable to see other people disagree. So, that I would try and fix things that I had no business fixing, and I would sort of take on that emotional stress trying to fix someone else's relationship because I thought conflict was bad. And the end of the world, basically. Very well ingrained in there.
So, the example of my mom, when we moved her into a tiny house for her to retire, her and my husband have a way of communicating that makes me uncomfortable, or did. I'm used to it now. I've done some work on it, but it felt very conflict-driven. Really, they're picking at each other, and that's their relationship, and it works for them. But it took me a long time to realize that because I felt so stressed out about their relationship because it felt like conflict to me. And it felt like I needed to fix it because I needed them to have this very harmonious relationship or the end of the world was coming. So, it made me stick my nose in where it didn't belong, didn't need to be fixed. And it really put a lot of emotional stress on me.
So, we have sort of layers of the rules in our way, which is us in a relationship with these unwritten rules and making the expectation mean something wrong with the relationship. That's one level. Then there's a second level or more of these baseline rules where we can get into people-pleasing, and we can get into fixing things that don't need fixing. Both of those put a lot of emotional stress on us and can send us into the primitive brain where we want to overeat because it feels so uncomfortable.
So, what I encourage you to do this week is just think about your top three relationships, your most prized relationships, and think about, do I have rules for these people? Do I have expectations and standards that I am holding them to, number one, that might be a little bit unreasonable? They haven't even told them about. And that if I didn't meet that expectation, I would probably be much more forgiving than I would be at them. And see if we can just start to drop those manuals.
So, I hope this has been helpful. I wanted to bring this up and talk about it because we're not quite all the way through the holiday season, and we might have some rules for how the holidays are supposed to look, rules about who should show up and who shouldn't show up, and what that would mean if they didn't. And I thought maybe this could just take the pressure off of some of our holiday gatherings, our relationships with the people that we love. Unconditional love feels much better for us and has much less risk of eating. That's the only reason it's important. This has been useful for you, and I can't wait to talk to you next week. Until then.