Victoria Kleinsman (00:00.024)
Hello, my loves. Welcome to another episode, a solo episode of the Body Love Binge. So today I am recording on the 22nd of May and it is absolutely beautiful, bright blue sky and sunshine and it’s going to be over 22, 23 degrees all week. So when you listen to this, I hope that the sun is shining wherever you are. If you like sun, I don’t like it too hot to be honest, but

It’s just nice to feel the sun on your skin, isn’t it? Anyway, let’s dive in. The title, as you always know, is, I Had a Happy Childhood. And this honestly comes up with almost every single one of the amazing, incredible people that I work with. But Victoria, I had a happy childhood. My parents loved me. I don’t have any trauma. So why do I have an eating disorder?

And I get it, I really do. And apart from Tabitha Farrar’s story, and she said she also didn’t have any trauma. She just lost weight to ride a racehorse and then the migration response kicked in and the anorexia took hold. And that can be the case as well. But from every single person I’ve worked with and including myself, it hasn’t just happened like that. It’s been a clusterfuck of…

different layers and different reasons and different whys. And that’s what we’re gonna dive into today because when I first fully started my recovery and kind of stumbled upon inner child work and re-parenting and childhood stuff, I was also the one that was said to my coach, but I had a happy childhood. We went on holiday every year. What else did I say when I said I had a happy childhood? You know, I had a mom and dad who loved me.

We had a nice house, I didn’t want for nothing. And that was about all I said. And then we dove in deeper, which is what we’re gonna do today. Because when we think of trauma, we think of big stuff. Usually we think of abuse, neglect and violence, something dramatic that would hold up a court case as yes, that’s clearly the reason. But the thing is, I want you to really sit with this. The absence of the big stuff,

Victoria Kleinsman (02:24.172)
does not mean your emotional needs were met. And unmet emotional needs in childhood is actually trauma. It’s just not the kind of trauma that a lot of people talk about. It is being talked about more and more, which is a great thing. Sometimes the word trauma is overused, but if your needs are not met, then that is complex, chronic trauma, especially if your needs are not met in a big way.

and we’re gonna go into that in this episode, so perhaps you can relate. So this episode is for the woman or the man who has spent years in therapy being told, well, you had a loving family and perhaps feeling like they’ve got nothing to work with in regards to why the eating disorder was there for you. Perhaps no permission to grieve, no explanation for why they feel the way they feel or why the eating disorder, the body obsession, the constant hunger.

the guilt, the shame, why it’s all still there despite doing all the work and having the therapy. So this one’s for you, my love, if you’re saying, I had a happy childhood. trauma is not only what happened to you, trauma is also what didn’t happen to you. The incredible Gabor Mate, whose work I returned to again and again, talks about this so beautifully. He says that trauma is not the event itself.

It’s the wound that the event or the absence of what should have been there leaves inside of you. It’s the disconnection from yourself that happens when your environment cannot meet your needs. So your parents would have loved you deeply, genuinely, with everything they had, and still they have been unable to give you what you needed emotionally. Those two things are not in conflict.

And this is not about blaming your parents. Please hear that. This is not a blame podcast or a blame exercise. Your parents were doing the best they could with what they had and what they knew and with their own unhealed wounds, their own nervous systems, own capacity. But here, I want you to understand what you’ve been through without the blame. But we’re here to understand you, to understand why the eating disorder was created.

Victoria Kleinsman (04:48.299)
because it was created for a reason. So your eating disorder, your disordered relationship with food and your body, it was not a malfunction. It was an incredible, incredibly intelligent adaptation. Your nervous system, your body, your young developing brain created it because it needed to cope with something that felt unbearable. And often what felt unbearable wasn’t a single traumatic event, it wasn’t an acute.

experience, it was the chronic everyday experience of having emotional needs that weren’t met. Needs like being seen, being heard, being held, being allowed to take up space, being allowed to have needs at all. When those needs aren’t met, a child doesn’t think my parents are struggling, a child thinks there must be something wrong with me and when I say a child thinks or doesn’t think,

This is often pre-verbal before they even know what words are. But I need to pull it into words for you to understand, but their nervous system will be thinking without using actual words. They won’t be thinking without words or with words if it’s later on that the parents are struggling. The child always makes it about themselves. Because if the people who are supposed to love you most cannot meet your needs and your parents are literally gods to you at that age,

until adolescence, then the only explanation that makes sense to the child’s brain is, I must be the problem. Otherwise you’re royally fucked, right? If the people that are on this earth to take care of you and meet your needs, if they’re unable to do that, no blame here, then it kind of makes sense that the child would, through words and thought or through nervous system, decide that it’s their fault because at least it gives the child some kind of control or

making sense of what doesn’t make sense, right? So when those needs aren’t met, a child doesn’t think, I’ve just repeated myself, my parents are struggling, their child thinks there must be something wrong with me. I must be too much or not enough or disgusting or unworthy or just wrong. And that belief, that core belief that can be pre-verbal usually is, it goes unconscious, it lives in the body.

Victoria Kleinsman (07:13.57)
The body never forgets, the body keeps the score. It lives in the nervous system. And then the eating disorder comes along and says, we’ll manage this together. I’ve got this, I’ve got something to help you manage something that doesn’t make sense. So let’s talk about what a happy childhood can actually look like when we dig beneath the surface, because none of those things might have felt like a big deal at the time. None of them would show up in a social workers report or perhaps even with a therapist.

but all of them leave a mark. And when I say, let’s look about what a happy childhood would be like, I meant to add quotes into that. Like you generally thinking that you had a great childhood and your eating disorder hasn’t stemmed from anything childhood related. Let’s say you were sent to your room when you were upset. You were having a big emotion. Maybe you were crying hysterically. Maybe you were having a meltdown. Maybe your behavior in that moment wasn’t great.

and you got sent away, go to your room until you calm down and think about what you did. Now, I want to be really clear here. Your behaviour might have needed redirecting. That’s completely fair. But you were not bad. Your behaviour was bad. Not you. You were a child having a feeling you didn’t have the capacity to regulate on your own because children literally cannot regulate their own nervous systems without a co-regulator.

That’s not a character flaw, it’s just neuroscience. It’s just what babies and children, that’s why they need parents to co-regulate for them until they learn how to co-regulate themselves. But what you needed most in that moment was someone to stay with you in the big feeling, to say, sweetheart, I can see why you’re really upset. That behavior, that’s not okay. That behavior’s wrong, but you’re okay, and I’m here. So we’re not gonna do the behavior again. We’re gonna learn from that.

and I’m just gonna be with you while you’re having this emotional experience. See the difference? And so instead, what your nervous system learned was when I feel big things, I lose the connection. When I need someone the most, they go away. Especially if parents, and again, this is not to slate parents, I mean, goodness me, I’m sure gonna fuck up my daughter in ways that I’m trying not to. I’m doing my best, that’s all we do. But if the parent didn’t distinguish between the behavior being bad,

Victoria Kleinsman (09:37.92)
and the child being bad and just saying, no, that’s bad, that’s wrong, or maybe even you’re bad, that’s wrong. The child doesn’t know the difference. So it needs to be specified to the child. The behavior is bad or wrong. You are not bad or wrong. You’re always perfect and lovable. It’s the behavior that needs to change. So what do you do with your big feelings after that? If time and time again, you’re sent to your room to think about what you did, or you’re having a big emotion and you get sent away.

You learn to suppress your feelings. You learn to swallow them, manage them somehow, and food becomes a very effective way to do that. Maybe your parent looks disgusted when they changed your poo inappie. And this one is pre-verbal. It’s so early that most people would dismiss it entirely, but stay with me. And again, no fault to any parents out there. Babies are incredibly attuned to the facial expressions of their caregivers.

Your face as a parent is the baby’s mirror for who they are in the world. If your mother or father showed disgust, even fleetingly, even unconsciously whilst changing you every time you did a poo, your tiny nervous system absorbed that. Your body doing a completely natural, completely human thing produced a look of disgust on the face of your God. And I say your God because like I said,

Previously, your parents are like gods to you. And so you learned my body is disgusting. The natural functions of my physical self are shameful. I don’t know about you, but it’s very common in so many of my clients. I’ve come through this now, but it’s so common in the old me was so ashamed to need to go for a poo, to go to the toilet. And I used to almost be in awe of like, especially men that just didn’t give a shit.

Ha, shit, no pun intended. And they just spoke about going to the toilet and just did it as if it’s okay, because of course it’s okay. I have so much shame around having human needs and especially going to the toilet. So if you can relate, maybe it was from your caregivers, not intentionally, but you know, ugh, gross, like this is horrible, like let me change it up, this smells, it’s horrible, but you know, they’re not doing it on purpose, but your nervous system, especially if you’re a sensitive person,

Victoria Kleinsman (12:03.145)
and you will be most likely if you’re watching or listening to this, your nervous system takes it on. Like I said, your parents’ facial expressions are so crucial in babyhood. And this is where the body shame can begin. It doesn’t only have to begin in magazines and social media or comments from other people at school, but before you even had words. Let’s say you were put in a separate room to sleep from the moment you were born or very soon after.

like I was. Now look, this is a sensitive one and I’m not here, I want to make it very clear, I keep saying this, but I’m not here to make anyone feel terrible about their parenting choices or their parents’ choices. But let’s just be honest about what this means biologically. We are mammals. Mammal babies sleep with their mothers. It’s what every instinct in a baby’s body is wired for. The proximity, the warmth,

the heartbeat, the smell, that is safety. That is regulation. This is, am not alone and I’m safe. When that’s removed, the baby’s nervous system doesn’t think, it’s fine. There’s a baby monitor next to me. I’m being watched. It doesn’t know that. It goes into a low level survival response, even if your baby looks happy and relaxed. And there’s research linking early sleep separation

to people being lighter, more anxious sleepers as adults, because the nervous system never fully learned that it was safe to go deeply unconscious and completely relax in sleep. Because going unconscious when you’re alone and small from an evolutionary standpoint is dangerous. So I am such a light sleeper and it really fucks me off and there’s nothing I can do about it.

I mean, maybe someone who is a light sleeper has healed that, but I’ve always been a light sleeper. And I really believe it’s because from day one, my mum got back from the hospital, no fault to my mum, and that put me in my own room straight away. And if I had my nappy changed, if I was fed, and if I wasn’t too hot or cold and I cried, I was just left to it because apparently I didn’t need anything. If I had a clean nappy, I was fed and I wasn’t too hot or cold. I didn’t need anything. I was just being a crybaby.

Victoria Kleinsman (14:25.262)
Whereas actually I was probably shit scared and alone and wanted the warmth and the safety of my mother and to be with her and have her emotionally comfort me and regulate me and just feel safe. I didn’t have that. So if you notice this within yourself, this could be the reason. So just get curious, ask your parents if they’re still with us, some questions without blaming them, but just get curious to learn yourself better. Because you might just be a person whose nervous system learned.

very early that being alone at night isn’t safe. Not because nothing happened to you. I’m sure your parents with the monitor came to you whenever you needed something, unless they were taught to just leave you to cry if you had your nappy, a bottle or you weren’t too hot or cold. That’s fucked up and not okay. But my parents didn’t know any different. That’s what the professionals told them to do, right? So even if your parents were attentive, your little nervous system knew that you were alone and you weren’t with your mother being held.

Let’s say your parent regularly looked annoyed or burdened when you wanted their attention. Not every time, but maybe not even most of the time, but regularly enough that your body learned it, that your body catalogued it. You’d reach out to them or call to them or need something and you would see it. The slight sigh, like, the slight flick of irritation, the eye roll, the kind of…

the sense that you were interrupting something more important. And again, your parent most probably wasn’t a bad person. They were probably exhausted, overwhelmed, doing their best and trying to actually get something done. I know I’m guilty of this and I’m making a big effort not to show my annoyance when I’m in the middle of cleaning the kitchen and in the middle of literally doing a task that I need to get done and my beautiful little daughter needs me and inside I’m like,

Can I just like finish what I’m doing? But no, she needs me in that moment. So I’ve really worked on not showing my facial expression of like, oh my God, that’s so annoying. Can’t you just wait a minute? No, she can’t, she needs me. So that’s my work. But even if this was regularly communicated to you, what you’re learning is that you’re a burden and you’re an annoyance to people and people have more important things to do. So you’re a child whose entire sense of self

Victoria Kleinsman (16:47.635)
is built through the mirror of your caregiver’s face, because it is. If that mirror regularly reflects to you that you are a burden, you don’t think again, or your nervous system doesn’t think that my parents are having a hard time. Instead, you internalise, I’m too much. My needs are inconvenient. I should want less. And that becomes a life sentence of shrinking, of not asking.

of finding other ways, of controlling ways to manage the need for the connection and the attention that was never met. Let’s say there was a sibling, a brother or sister who needed more, a sibling with an illness or a sibling with a disability, one who was louder or harder or took up more space in the family system. And without anyone ever sitting you down and saying it explicitly, you understood or you internalized

that your needs come second or third or not at all. You become the easy one, the low maintenance one, the one who was fine. And people probably told you that was a compliment. she’s so good. She never makes a fuss. Look how good she is helping with her brothers and sisters or whatever it is. But underneath, you’re making a fuss on the inside.

you were making a fuss on the inside, you just learned very quickly that nobody was coming to meet it. You have needs, you had needs back then. Let’s say the atmosphere in the house was anxious or unpredictable or heavy. Maybe nobody ever shouted per se, maybe nothing overtly bad ever happened, but there was a tension in the air that you could feel. A parent with depression maybe.

A parent whose mood you had to read the moment you walked through the door or the moment they walked through the door. A family that looked perfect from the outside, but from the inside it felt suffocating and like you’re having to walk on eggshells or the energy was just unpredictable and heavy and just off. Children are extraordinarily sensitive to the emotional atmosphere of their home. You can say all the right things. You can pretend to smile, but they know.

Victoria Kleinsman (19:06.731)
You were not imagining it. Your body was reading it accurately, if this is what happened to you in your home environment. And your nervous system was on constant low level alert, scanning for safety, scanning for signs that everything was okay. And that’s exhausting. That’s dysregulation. And a dysregulated nervous system looks for ways to cope.

Right, so this one’s close to my heart, the next thing that I’m gonna talk about because it’s my own story too. I grew up in a codependent and meshed relationship with my mom. And I want to talk about what that actually looks like because I don’t think people realize how common it is or how much damage it does. All of it comes wrapped in love. It’s all from love. I’m not saying it isn’t, but I wanna dive into that. My mom would say things to me like, don’t be upset.

you make me upset when you’re upset. And she would say, oh, you’re just like me. She wanted me to be the mini version of her. I didn’t want to play with other children. I wanted to be with her all the time, with the adults in her world. I wanted to feel grown up because the enmeshment had happened so young and so completely that I didn’t know where she ended and I began. So does any of that sound familiar to you?

So here’s what’s happening in a relationship like that. The child learns very early that their emotions are not just their own. Their emotions are a problem for the parent. So they become an emotional manager, not just of their own feelings, but of their own parents’ feelings as well. They learn to scan the parent’s emotional state, to self-censor, to suppress anything that might cause the parent distress in any way.

And that child becomes a child who doesn’t know how to exist independently because they’ve never been allowed to. Their identity has been so intertwined with the persons, with the parents, that the question, who am I, has no answer because they’ve only ever been an extension of the mother. And what Gabor Matei describes is the sacrifice of authenticity and attachment.

Victoria Kleinsman (21:26.241)
The child doesn’t get to be themselves. They get to be whoever keeps the parent comfortable. So it’s a sacrifice of authenticity for attachment. I said that wrong. So it’s a sacrifice of authenticity for attachment. The child doesn’t get to be themselves. They get to be whoever keeps the parents comfortable. And when they grow up and wonder why they can never say no,

why they feel responsible for everyone’s feelings in every room they walk into, especially those close to them, why they feel a kind of formless anxiety about who they even are when they’re not needed by someone else. Because if you’re not needed by someone else, then you don’t even know who you are. That’s not anxiety, that’s a self that was never allowed to form properly. And that is absolutely something we can heal.

I also remember from childhood that I had no privacy. My mum would like, if I wrote letters to my friends or to my boyfriends, like in early adolescence, she would always find them and read them or she’d read my diary or she’d push to tell me everything. So I had, I couldn’t keep any secrets from myself. So it was like I, I couldn’t have anything for me. And I believe that’s also why, partially why my eating disorder started because at least it was fucking mine. Like it was like a rebellion unconsciously in a way of like,

this is mine, I have autonomy over myself and there’s nothing you can do about it. So I want to speak now about Erika Commissar because she has been such a catalyst for my own journey with my own daughter, through pregnancy I consumed a lot of her stuff and through my inner child’s work as well. Her work is so important, it’s backed by neuroscience and it’s so, it’s consistently ignored because quite frankly it’s inconvenient.

So Erica Commissar is a psychoanalyst who wrote a book called Being There, that’s her first book, and it caused quite a stir when it came out because she says it makes a lot of people uncomfortable. And I think anything that makes us uncomfortable is usually worth paying attention to. The central truth she keeps returning to is in the first three years of life, a mother’s presence is not a preference.

Victoria Kleinsman (23:47.967)
It’s a biological necessity. Not physical presence every second, but emotional presence, attunement, warmth, responsiveness. The baby’s experience of having a mother who is genuinely, consistently, lovingly available. And here is the inconvenient part. The part that our culture, particularly the messaging around women’s empowerment and having it all is completely glossed over.

Babies are not resilient in the way we’ve been told they are. We’ve been told and sold this idea that babies are adaptable, that they won’t remember, that as long as their physical needs are met, they’ll be absolutely fine. And Erica is saying with three decades of clinical evidence behind her, that that is not true. This is a story we tell ourselves because the truth is too hard to sit with, with the world and the society that we’ve built.

So what actually happens when a baby is repeatedly separated from its primary attachment figure, the mother, whether that’s through returning to work very early, through frequent childcare, through a mother who is physically present but emotionally absent due to her own depression, anxiety or overwhelm, is this. The baby’s stress response system activates. Cortisol floods the system and a developing brain

that is marinating in stress hormones is a brain that is being shaped at a neurological level towards anxiety, towards hypervigilance and towards emotional dysregulation. And that shaping happens fast. The architecture of the nervous system is being built in those early years at a rate that will never happen again. What gets laid down in that window is the foundation that everyone and everything else is built on for that baby.

And I want to talk now, which is what Erica Commissar talks about, the myth of quantity over quality. One of the things she pushes back on hardest is the idea that quality time makes up for quantity of time. That you can be absent for most of the day and then be fully present for two hours in the evening and that balances it all out. For an adult, maybe, yes, but for a baby whose entire sense of safety and self is built through the consistent

Victoria Kleinsman (26:13.174)
repeated, predictable experience of their mother being there. No. Babies do not experience time the way we do. They think there is, they don’t know what time is. They think like when they’re hungry or upset, it’s literally forever. They don’t know like in a minute, sweetheart, or in a few hours, mom is coming home. They don’t know that. They’re like in the now and that’s all they’re in. They don’t experience time the way we do. They experience presence and then absence.

connection and disconnection, safe and not safe. And every time the mother leaves and does not return quickly, the baby’s nervous system registers an emergency. is not illogical, it is biological. It is millions of years of evolution telling that infant, the person you need to survive is gone and you don’t know if she’s coming back.

Victoria Kleinsman (27:12.792)
Just take a moment to like, see if that resonates from your childhood experience. And again, no blame if you are a mother and you’ve had to go back to work and send your kid to childcare. It is what it is, but it’s worth speaking about now because this is about you and your experience as a child that will have shaped you into who you are today. And fathers matter, but mothers matter differently. So another uncomfortable truth is that Erica Commissar

talks about and she’s not dismissing fathers. She celebrates involved present attuned fathers, but she is clear based on the neuroscience that mothers and fathers are not interchangeable in the early years. The mother’s voice, her smell, her specific hormonal and neurological attunement that happens between a mother and her baby, particularly when she’s breastfeeding is unique.

It is regulating in a way that is specific to the mother-baby bond. And when that bond is constantly interrupted or unavailable, something specific is lost that cannot simply be replaced by another loving adult, however wonderful they are. Again, not blame, just information. So what about mothers who are present, but not really there emotionally?

Commissar is also clear that physical presence without emotional availability is its own kind of absence. A mother who is on her phone a lot, a mother who is depressed and going through the motions, a mother who is anxious and projecting that anxiety onto the child, a mother who is overwhelmed and checked out, because let me tell you, motherhood is fucking hard. The baby feels all of it. The baby is not fooled by physical proximity.

What the baby is reading consistently and constantly is the emotional state of the mother. Is she calm? Is she present? Does she see me? Am I safe? And a mother who is struggling for whatever reason, whether that’s postnatal depression, her own trauma, financial stress, relationship breakdown, is not available to provide that attunement that the baby needs consistently. And again, that is not her fault.

Victoria Kleinsman (29:31.511)
but the baby’s nervous system, it doesn’t know that. The nursery question. I know this one’s gonna land the hardest because so many of us as mothers have sent our children to nursery. I am so blessed that I haven’t because I have my own business, I run my own days. And most of women have had no fucking choice, right? Because we were told it was fine, even beneficial because we needed to work, we needed to breathe.

or we’re doing everything we could just to keep going. And Erica Commissar is not saying nursery is always harmful, but she is saying that sending a baby under the age of three to full-time childcare, particularly in the first year of life, carries real risks that we are not being honest about. That group care settings, however lovely, cannot replicate the individualized, attuned, consistent

presence of the baby’s mother. That the ratio of carers to babies in even the best and smallest nurseries means a baby will inevitably spend significant time with their needs unmet or delayed severely, their signals unread, their stress response activated with no co-regulator available. And she’s saying that we owe it to mothers and to babies to have that honest conversation.

rather than reassuring everyone it’s fine because it’s easier than addressing the systemic failures, the lack of parental leave, the impossible cost of living, the complete absence of village that puts mothers in this position in the first place. This is social failure, societal failure, not a maternal one. But for those of us who grew up in childcare from very early on, who were passed between caregivers,

who spent long days in environments where nobody truly knew us, nobody truly saw us or were truly attuned to us, our nervous systems remember, our bodies remember, and that memory shows up in our adult lives in a way that often makes no logical sense until you trace it all the way back. So the bottom line, what Erica Commissar is really asking us to do is stop pretending

Victoria Kleinsman (31:54.561)
that the early relational environment doesn’t matter. To stop telling mothers it will all be fine when the research says something more nuanced than that. To stop building a world that actually supports mothers to be present in those critical early years because right now we’re asking mothers to be fucking super women with no support and then wondering why so many children grow up with anxiety, depression, eating disorders.

and a profound inability to feel safe in their own skin. You deserved a present, attuned, emotionally available mother, not a perfect one, simply not one who managed to lose the baby weight and have her hair dyed and have the lashes done and all those things that society puts pressure on women to do, just one who was there, a mother who was there who saw you, who could hold your emotional world without collapsing herself or disappearing.

And if you didn’t get that, it makes complete sense that your nervous system has been searching for safety ever since. In food, in control, in shrinking, in achieving, in people pleasing, in all the ways you’ve tried to manage a world that never quite felt safe enough. That is not a weakness, that is an adaptation, and it can be healed. Right.

The thread that runs through all of this, what all of these things have in common is this, they are not dramatic. They are not the stuff of traumatic trauma memoirs. Nobody would write a book about being sent to their room as a child or having a mother who said, you make me upset when you’re upset or being dropped at nursery at six weeks old. But they all communicate the same thing to a developing nervous system.

And that communication that your nervous system is learning is you are not safe to be fully yourself here. Your needs are not welcome. Your emotions are a problem. You must manage yourself and probably everybody else in order to keep the connection you need to survive. And a child who receives that message in whatever form through no fault of the parent over and over again does not grow up and can continuously decide.

Victoria Kleinsman (34:15.085)
sorry, does not grow up and consciously decide to develop an eating disorder, they grow up and find the most available, the most socially acceptable, the most invisible way to cope with feelings that never had anywhere to go. That’s what the eating disorder is, and that’s what it’s always been. And understanding that, like really understanding it, it’s not just intellectually, but it’s in your body, it’s in your bones, it’s in your nervous system.

And that’s where the healing begins as well. It lives in the body, not in the story. This is what’s so important. And this is where a lot of people get stuck in talk therapy alone. The belief that you are disgusting or too much or unworthy or not enough or don’t deserve to take up space, that didn’t form in language. It formed pre-verbally. It formed in your body, in your nervous system before you had words for it.

which is why you can spend years in therapy understanding it intellectually, building a narrative, making sense of it in your head and still feel it in your body like it’s the most real fucking thing in the world because the body keeps the score. The nervous system remembers what the mind can’t even access. I worked with a client recently and when we did the inner child work together she went back to being three years old.

And what came up wasn’t a story she could narrate clearly. It was a feeling, a somatic full body feeling of disgust, of being too much, of not being allowed to have needs. And when we traced it back, we found it. Her mother had been so overwhelmed. There was a sibling with a serious illness. There wasn’t enough room for my client’s needs in the family. Not because she wasn’t loved, but because her parents were running on empty.

and a three year old cannot understand that. So she concluded, I must be the problem. The belief shaped everything from there on. The eating disorder was the solution to a problem that that child created to make the world make sense. And here’s something even more heartbreaking. The belief that she was disgusting, literally disgusting in her body, likely went even deeper than that pre-verbal.

Victoria Kleinsman (36:43.245)
possibly from infancy, because when a mother is overwhelmed when she’s struggling with her own mental health, a baby absorbs that. The womb is a soup for your mother’s emotional state. The first weeks of life, the way you’re held or not held, the attunement or the absence of it, all of that gets stored in the nervous system before there are any words at all.

And this client in particular told me that her mother went away for, I think it was a couple of weeks, not long after giving birth to her because she just needed some time away to cope, because she was so overwhelmed. So her mother was just gone. And the baby, this client as a baby, didn’t know time. So the mother’s gone. Not safe, not safe, not safe. Must be too much. I’m disgusting. The nervous system is creating its own language, which is why…

talk therapy doesn’t always get there because it’s a feeling that’s in the somatic nervous system in the body. And then when someone in therapy might say, therapist might say, well, you had your grandma to take care of you. You were very loved. You had people who loved you instead of your mother if your mother had to go away. Well, technically, yes, but your grandma is not your mother and your nervous system knows the difference. And this is not to catastrophize. This is to validate and to say,

no wonder it’s kind of all making sense now. And I want to come back to this is not about blame because it really matters. Understanding this is not about sitting across from your parents and saying you ruined me. It’s not about making your parents the villain of your story. Most parents, the vast majority, were really doing the absolute best that they could. They had their own wounds.

their own childhoods, their own nervous system that nobody ever helped them to regulate. And many mothers who returned to work early had no choice. They weren’t supported. They weren’t told the truth. They were handled a narrative that said, can do it all without anyone asking who was actually going to pay the cost of that. This is about understanding the root because you cannot heal what you don’t acknowledge.

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And if you keep telling yourself, had a happy childhood, there’s nothing to heal here, you’re leaving your inner child out in the cold. She’s in there. She’s always been in there. Carrying beliefs about herself that were never true, doing her best to keep you safe, creating behaviors and coping mechanisms that made total sense at the time. And she needs you now.

What does this look like then in practice? What do we actually do with all of this? First, permission. Give yourself permission to grieve. Even if there was no abuse, even if your parents were kind and loving, even if your childhood by all external measures looked fine. Grief doesn’t need a dramatic reason, it needs truth. And the truth might be, my emotional needs weren’t met and that little version of me deserved more.

That’s enough, that needs to be grieved. Second, get out of your head and into the body. This work cannot be done purely intellectually. You have to be willing to feel it in the body. The somatic work, the inner child work, the nervous system regulation, that’s where the healing really happens. Not just understanding it intellectually from a distance.

but in actually going back to little you and being with her somatically. That’s what we do in one-to-one coaching together. And one practice I love is you can lie on your side with your knees stacked, one hand in front of you. So it’s like supporting you and you gently like rock yourself back and forth like this.

So your hand and arm is doing the work and your body is just being rocked like that on its side, then you go onto the other side and do it that side. And I know it sounds simple or maybe silly or pointless, but this is really a part of healing the somatic work. This is what you are most likely missing. This is what a regulated nervous system feels like. This is reparenting at the most basic, most primal level.

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the body responds to it because the body has been waiting for it. There’s a reason why, without even knowing anything about children before I had my surprise daughter, the best surprise ever, there’s a reason why still I rock her and pat her and kind of do this motion with her when she’s upset or needs soothing. That’s just a primal, intuitive thing that I do without even thinking about it. So if you were just left to cry because you’d…

you had your nappy changed, were fed and you weren’t too hot or cold and off you go by yourself, you don’t need anything, you’re just being too much or a crybaby. You perhaps needed to be rocked and held and shook very gently and patted, whatever it is. That’s what you need to be doing for yourself now and for little you that lives within you. And the third thing is to write a letter to your younger self. So the first thing we’ve got is permission to grieve.

the childhood you didn’t have that you needed, with no blame. The second thing is to get out of your head and into the body with somatic work. And the third thing is to write a letter to your younger self. So not a letter explaining everything, making sense of it, tying it all neatly up with a bow, but a letter that is saying things like, I see you and I’m sorry. Your needs mattered. You were not too much.

You were not disgusting. You were just a child or a baby and you deserved more than you got. And your parents were doing the best they could. No blame there. You deserved more though and I’m here for you now. And then the fourth thing, understand that your eating disorder, your relationship with food and your body is not the enemy. It was a messenger. It was a part of you that said something’s wrong.

When everyone else said, you’re fine, recovery isn’t about fighting it. It’s about understanding what it was trying to protect you from. And then showing that part of you that you are safe now, that you don’t need it anymore, that you’ve got yourself. Because so many people talk about fighting the eating disorder, fighting recovery. No.

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Why are you trying to find something that actually was there to help you and to help you cope and to make sense of a world that didn’t make sense, pre-verbally even? It’s about understanding it, loving it, and moving forward with love and determination and re-parenting yourself and creating a life that you love and allowing yourself to be who you truly are. And that’s all the parts of what we do in coaching.

And again, no blame here. If you’re a parent and you’re like, shit, I fucked up my child. No, I also believe that everything happens for a reason. So whether you’re a parent and you’ve done things that I’ve spoke about here and you feel bad about it, full permission to let that go, change things if you can, if it feels right to, but also everything happens for a reason. For example, the childhood I had, the childhood I have had, I wouldn’t be the woman I am today if I hadn’t had that childhood.

So I’m so grateful for the way my mum parented, even though I didn’t get my needs met and I was locked outside when I cried by my grandma and there’s so many things that went on that was actually laughter and I’m not gonna go into that, but there’s a lot of things that I can now see clear as day that, whoa, no wonder being a sensitive person as well, no wonder I internalized all of that, no wonder I started to rebel and wanting my own autonomy, no wonder, no wonder, no wonder.

So if you’re sat here and it’s resonating with you, just close your eyes, put a hand on your heart, just breathe and just send, show love, compassion, warmth to baby you.

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send so much love and warmth maybe see and feel yourself rocking her patting her soothing her

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just say through words or through your energy that I see you and I’m going to give you what you need from this point.

So if you’re ever sat in a consultation or a therapy session or you’ve scrolled through my content and thought this doesn’t really apply to me because I had a good childhood, I want you to consider the possibility that your good childhood might have been missing something invisible, something that never got named because nobody had the language for it or the space for it or the capacity for it. You don’t need to have suffered

obviously to be worthy of healing. You don’t need to be or have a dramatic backstory or have a nervous system that learned it wasn’t safe to take up space. The eating disorder made sense. It always made sense. And now together, we’re going to make sense of something better, okay? So if you’d like support with all of this to go deeper and specific for you,

then you can either join the Freedom Collective and you can start with a 14 day free trial to see if it’s for you, or we can go deeper and apply, you can apply for one-to-one coaching. So I love you, whatever it fucking takes, that was my mantra through recovery, and whatever it fucking takes includes all the scary, actionable steps like eating more and gaining weight, but it also involves all the deeper inner work where you don’t even know where to start and unpack and you have to go there in order to move forward.

And before I end this episode, I do have an email that I got from, I’m not sure if she wants me to say her name, so I won’t say her name, to just, she’s asked a question and it does tie in with parenting and pregnancy and all that stuff. So it’s quite a long email. Let me just see if I can scan through it. She’s struggled with anorexia on and off for 10 years. She’s pregnant now, which is great. She’s 31 weeks pregnant.

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She’s never struggled as much, so I’ll read it in her words, I’ve never struggled as much as I have during these past few months when it comes to eating. The body changes on top of everything else have made it so hard to eat more. I think the fact that I’m pregnant invalidates in my mind the reality that my body genuinely needs more energy right now, which makes it even harder to allow myself to eat adequately. Rationally, I know what I need to do to recover.

but I feel so mentally fatigued from the past few years from anorexia and with pregnancy on top of that, I just have no motivation or real desire to fight this anymore. I don’t know what to do at this point. I think a part of me is scared I might just be a lost cause. Well, my love, you’re not a lost cause and it’s not about fighting it. It’s about meeting yourself exactly where you’re at. And also I’m curious like why being pregnant would invalidate the need for more food. That’s…

The most validating thing from my personal experience anyway, that when you’re growing a literal human being inside your body, you not only need more food for yourself, but also for that human being that you’re growing. So I want to just say, you’re not a lost cause. Stop fighting it and stop meeting yourself where you’re at. Doing all the inner child work because pregnancy and wait till you have this beautiful baby.

the boy or girl that you have will mirror back to you what you didn’t have in your childhood. It will mirror back to you what you need to work on now. There’s so much that will come up, but it’s being, you’re being invited to do this deeper work. And I that’s not really a concrete answer. I mean, the concrete answer intellectually, you know, eat a lot of fucking food, follow your hunger, eat completely unrestrictedly, eat whatever your body’s asking you to have. That’s the most important thing that you can do.

And it doesn’t even, you don’t even have to have a reason. Yes, you’re growing a baby. Yes, you need strength to give birth. Giving birth is called labour for a reason. It’s painful and it’s hard. It’s the most beautiful, sacred, empowering experience you’ll ever have though as well. Everything has a cost and a gain, right? So do the things you know intellectually are needed, but don’t fight it. Do the deeper work to be like, why do I want to nourish myself or why do I not want to nourish myself? Start asking yourself,

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questions and then start getting to know yourself through the deeper questions you’re asking and the deeper answers that your unconscious and your psyche will give you. I kind of need you on a coaching call to ask you more about this because I don’t just want to say you know what to do go and eat unrestrictedly you’ve got a baby that you’re growing like like the stuff I have said but you’re saying that you’re fighting and you’re exhausted stop fighting and ask yourself deeper questions so something will shift.

underneath it. I kind of need you on a coaching call to support you further, but I hope what I’ve said has helped and thank you for being here, all of you, as always. And if you haven’t already, please rate my podcast five stars. If you think it’s worth rating five stars, if you don’t, please don’t rate it at all. Don’t rate it any less than five. I want as many people as possible to receive this wisdom that I give with love.

And if you do want to work with me on a deeper level, you can apply for one-to-one coaching or join the Freedom Collective, which has everything you need to recover from any eating disorder. And you can try it free for 14 days. Everything’s on my website. All right, love’s much love, and I’ll see you next time.