Rational Wellness Podcast 024: Healing From Trauma with Debi Silber
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Debi Silber speaks with Dr. Ben Weitz on overcoming trauma and how to avoid emotional eating. She has developed a multi-pronged approach to helping people avoid or heal from a life crisis. We may use food as a way to numb and distract ourselves. Debi has a Masters in Nutrition, is a personal trainer, Whole health coach, and is now completing her PhD in Trans Personal psychology. She is doing her dissertation on betrayal trauma and post traumatic growth. These situations makes us feel broken and we end up unfit, overweight, overwhelmed, exhausted, and unhappy. Debi explains that we think we are stuck there but we’re not. But you can use such situations to grow–what she calls post-traumatic growth. That crisis may reveal something in you that is unshakable. This is the upside of trauma.
You must have a willingness to change and grow. Another thing that is important factor is to have support from friends, counselors, coaches, etc. The next thing is to have the right mindset. If you have a program running in your mind all day long that you are not worthy and you are not important, then you will never heal. You need to create some new neural circuitry and reprogram your mindset. And finally, you have health. If you go through a life crisis and you don’t have your health, it will be that much harder to heal. So you need to get and stay as healthy as you can.
I then asked Debi how to deal with emotional eating. Debi explained that emotional eating is when we are trying to sooth, calm, numb, relax from our problems or our pain. Food is just our drug of choice. You need to ask yourself when you are stuffing yourself, to stuff the feelings. You need to ask yourself what are you really hungry for? What are you trying not to feel? Is it a conversation with a partner that you need to have? Is it that you really hate your job? Is it a health issue you area avoiding? What are the painful emotions you are trying to suppress?
Debi explained that one woman she was working with had an unmet need to do community service. When she started doing community service, the weight just started falling off. If you feed what you are really hungry for, there’s no need for emotional eating. I asked as a patient, how do you know what it is that you really need? As a practitioner who is working with someone on a weight loss program, how do you get them to figure out or tell you why they are not exercising or eating those foods they are not supposed to? Debi said that she will ask them about their relationships. You have to probe them about their personal life and what they are feeling about themselves.
Debi has written a best-selling book, The Unshakable Woman: 4 Steps to Rebuilding Your Body, Mind, and Your Life After a Life Crisis https://www.amazon.com/Unshakable-Woman-Steps-Rebuilding-Crisis-ebook/dp/B01N5SHR28/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1485902403&sr=8-1&keywords=the+unshakable+woman Debi can be reached through her website: https://debisilber.com/about/
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