Victoria Abadi Therapies

Addiction Counselling

Tel: 07983 726647

The Discomfort of Comfort Eating

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It is such a paradox to call comfort eating comfort eating. We understand that addiction is always about feeling uncomfortable and reaching towards something to take the discomfort away. Whether that be the minor discomfort of boredom or the extreme discomfort of grief. Either way a much more accurate term would be ‘numbing eating’. Initially reaching for your ‘food of choice’ may feel comforting but when you reach for that same substance time and time again, day in day out it becomes increasingly more painful. Eventually the pain of the addictive behaviour outweighs any pleasure or comfort you may have originally felt and you end up with two problems. The initial discomfort you were trying to avoid and the pain of repeating a self defeating behaviour.

It is imperative when working with any form of addiction that the sufferer learns to sit with discomfort. Conversely the more you are able to sit with discomfort the quicker the discomfort passes. I am a qualified mindfulness teacher and an integrative cbt practitioner. I combine mindfulness/ ACT with cbt techniques in order to address the addiction from a two pronged approach. I use mindfulness and Acceptance Commitment Therapy in order to be able to sit with uncomfortableness and be able to accept the present moment just as it is without needing to reach to something to change your reality. The cbt approach enables you to challenge negative core beliefs about yourself, which in turn affects how we feel which has a knock on effect of changing the way you behave.

If you would like to address an addiction of any kind please feeel free to contact me at victoriaabadi66@gmail.com or call me on 07983726647.

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