Think of sun. Warm and bright. Now think of darkness. Cold and sightless. Which do you associate most with happiness? Which would you associate most with depression? Cold and dark don’t exactly inspire a good mood. The same goes for a family that loves unconditionally (warm, open, loving and feels like basking in sunlight) versus [...]
I've been meaning to share this link to a news article that ran earlier this month on AOL news online, which claims there is a link between a child's sugar cravings and his or her potential for alcoholism. It's not terribly conclusive, and I'm sure there will be theories to debunk the ones cited here, but [...]
Eating becomes an act of love as soon as you begin to educate yourself about what you’re putting in your body. (The food manufacturers don’t care about your health like you do. They care about making a buck – your hard-earned buck.) For a meaningful book about eating and emotions, I really like Geneen Roth’s When Food is Love – but I recommend all of her books to be honest.
I wrote about chakras when I wrote about back pain and the adult child. Chakras come into play when thinking about the bowels, too. Why? The first chakra is located at the base of your spine, the tip, called the coccyx. It’s considered the “tribal” chakra, related to your relationship to your tribe, acceptance of your self, and to your ties to family and community. The primary fears associated with it are “tribal/family identity, bonding, and the tribal honor code; the support and loyalty that give one a sense of safety and connection to the physical world” (Carolyn Myss, “Anatomy of the Spirit”). Self-pity is often an issue when this chakra is out of balance.
Many children of alcoholics have poor diets — unbalanced — because we grew up in households where there was too much drama in general for nutrition to have a focus, be consistently provided, or explained to us. Eating disorders aren’t uncommon in the alcoholic universe (I remember that my mother was obsessed with being skinny (which she already was) and my stepmother was on and off diets for about 25 years). The nightly family dinner was not enjoyable for most of us and more likely than not contained more tension than nutrition.
Most books that detail the effects on people who grow up with drinking parents mention lower back issues. I endured two injuries to my back early on, one when I fell down a flight of stairs at ten years old and then pulling a muscle playing basketball at twenty. My back was never the same. I became one of those “bad back” people at too young an age. My back now injures easily. It’s important that I always take care of it.
