3 Key Ways Your Relationship can Trigger Stress Eating and What to do About It

It’s Valentine’s Day, and it’s important to acknowledge that intimate relationships have highs and lows. The highs are fantastic and amazing (believe me, I know!), and the lows . . .well, they can really suck. Some lows folks don’t often consider is how your relationship can trigger stress eating, emotional eating, or even binge eating. How? There’s a lot of emotional energy swirling around in relationships, and when things aren’t going well, it can feel intense. When you feel intense emotions, you may want a way to numb out or self-soothe or find any kind of escape you can, and food that tastes good does just that. Whether you are celebrating Valentine’s Day or going through a regular workday in Florida, California, or Colorado, being able to identify the relational triggers of stress eating goes a long way to helping your recovery. Here are three key triggers and how you can do something about it.

Trigger #1: Your fighting results in Stress Eating

Any conflict is challenging. Fighting with your partner is especially difficult because they’re the one person on whom you rely emotionally, physically, and often financially. When there’s conflict, you feel shaken. Unstable even. It can trigger an avalanche of emotions. It can send you right to food to cope. Stress eating, emotional eating, and binge eating during these times is hard because although you can numb out temporarily, feelings of shame and sadness rush back afterward. What can you do about it? Take a time out with your partner for 30 minutes, 1 hour, 2 hours, and make a plan to reconvene and resolve it. During the time out, do something to slow down your nervous system. Breathe deeply. Stretch. Play with your pet. Take a hot bath or shower. Remember that stress eating will only worsen things in the long run and aim for calming down so that you can problem-solve the issue as a team.

Trigger #2: Your feeling iced out and self soothe by stress eating

It’s painful when your partner ices you out. What I mean by that is when your partner shuts down and stops talking to you. It can be for 15 hours. It can be for 5 days. However long it lasts, feeling iced out shakes you to your core because it can trigger abandonment fears, which are awful. You may have experienced similar situations in your family-of-origin. Perhaps one or two parents or guardians shut down and didn’t talk to you. Or, a parent/guardian went so far as to leave you. Either way, it is terrifying for children to go through because it threatens their very survival if a parent/guardian ices them out. Stress hormones like cortisol gush through their bodies. Fight/flight/freeze mechanisms in the nervous system are on overdrive. If you went through that as a child, you likely have similar responses when your partner does it. It makes it so easy to turn to food for comfort. Perhaps you had similar patterns as a kid. Food may have been the only thing you had to make you feel better, albeit temporarily. If your partner ices you out on a regular basis, I strongly recommend that you seek couples counseling to change this toxic pattern. If your partner won’t attend therapy with you, go alone. You can work on abandonment issues and attachment injuries so that you aren’t as activated when your partner behaves this way. In the short-term, let your partner know how much pain you feel when they ice you out. Tell them that it triggers childhood fears and stress responses. Work as a unit to change these relational patterns so that it doesn’t happen again.

Trigger #3: You’re having issues with sex

Sex is one of the top five areas of conflict for couples. For people who struggle with food, eating, and body image, sex is an emotionally heavy topic. There can be a lot of shame when it comes to sex. It can stem from negative body image, religious backgrounds, trauma, rigid gender roles, and myriad other issues. When we don’t feel good in our bodies, it is challenging to make ourselves vulnerable sexually. It’s also common for us to have a idealized version of what sex looks like in our brains, largely driven by highly choreographed sex scenes in the media. Then we can feel like failures and turn to food to soothe ourselves. The reality is that sex is sweaty, messy, and weird. Your body makes all kinds of weird sounds doing it. It actually pretty hilarious when you think about all of these body parts slapping together. Bringing a sense of humor can be a HUGE benefit to sex with your partner. So can increasing communication. I mean REALLY increasing communication about it. One of my former students runs sex seminars where in the first 15 minutes she has people going around saying “penis” and “vagina” to everyone else in the audience. It makes people laugh, breaks down taboos, and teaches folks that it’s easy to talk about sex if you push past the discomfort and get silly about it. Another former student teaches therapists-in-training how to talk about sex comfortably by bringing in a lot of sex toys, conversing about female ejaculation, etc. It’s all about exposure. If you’ve tried lots of things and are still having issues with sex, I recommend that you see an experienced sex therapist who has the training and know-how to help you overcome these hurdles.

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*The INEVITABLE BINGE EATING RECOVERY COURSE is online binge eating education and private virtual group support via a Facebook Group. The aim of this course is to help people reduce and eliminate any type of distressed eating, such as binge eating or binge/purge behaviors via education, behavioral changes, and mindset shifts. The INEVITABLE BINGE EATING RECOVERY COURSE is not a clinical eating disorder therapy or eating disorder treatment programs and is not intended to serve as such. In them, Dr. Marianne Miller works from her role as a binge-eating coach, not as a binge-eating therapist.

**The ELITE BINGE EATING RECOVERY METHOD is virtual binge eating education and LIVE virtual coaching support. The goal of this program is to help people stop any type of distressed eating, such as binge eating or binge/purge behaviors via education, behavioral changes, and mindset shifts. The ELITE BINGE EATING RECOVERY METHOD is not a clinical eating disorder therapy or eating disorder treatment programs and is not intended to serve as such. In them, Dr. Marianne Miller works from her role as a binge-eating coach, not as a binge-eating therapist.