Healthy Autonomy

Food Refusal as a Result of Trauma

This workshop will explore the link between not being wanted as children, from conception onwards, and our later self-rejection through denying ourselves good, healthy food. When our mother does not want us, we can only survive by ‘not wanting’ ourselves; when our needs are too much for her, we learn to negate our own needs, including suppressing our appetite and natural desire for nutritious, nurturing food. Topics for discussion may include: -

• Self-weaning: Rejection of the mother’s breast at an early age due to feeding being a toxic, rather than a nurturing, experience
• ‘Fussy’ eating: children who do not want to eat or limit their diet as a result of trauma (this can often be prompted by the conception of a younger sibling)
• Unhealthy eating: suppression of appetite, choosing foods that do not truly support our health, ‘comfort’ eating, binge eating, vomiting
• ‘Anorexia’: self-starvation as a means of control, over ourselves, our unbearable feelings and our environment
• ‘Body image’: not wanting to become a woman (or man) due to sexual trauma; being thin as the only acceptable way to ‘be’

Refusing ourselves food is a survival strategy to keep our trauma buried; when we begin to feed ourselves in a healthy, loving way, we begin to feel. Moreover, it is through feeling that we learn to honour our own needs, and to feed ourselves. On a physical level, the nature of our gut flora changes according to our emotional experiences, and the food we eat. The journey towards appropriate, healthy eating can either take place within the victim-perpetrator dynamic, which perpetuates the problem, or free of it, when we encounter the reality of our trauma biography.

Lucy Jameson was born in London in 1976. She discovered IoPT in 2012, and in 2015 began her training as a practitioner. She is co-manager of The Centre for Healthy Autonomy in London (www.healthy-autonomy.co.uk) an apprentice on the IoPT Professional Training (UK), led by Vivian Broughton, and a facilitator on the Introductory Course. Together with her friend and colleague Maria Green, she co-presented the workshop ‘Motherhood and Identity Development’ at the Munich conference ‘Trauma, Love & I’ in 2016. Lucy runs monthly workshops at her home in West Sussex (SE England), where she lives with her partner and their two children.

www.symbiosis-autonomy.com 
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Early Trauma and Thyroid Disease

Thyroid disease has a major impact on our metabolic functions and affects the entire organism. What has irritated the thyroid so much that it either works too little or too much, or is it possibly chronically inflamed? Can the lifetime in the womb be the source of “thyroid health and disease”? In the womb, we are under the influence of maternal hormones. If the mother is stressed and can’t regulate herself, she releases hormones or adrenaline in high doses permanently. Such stressful stimuli can harm the unborn child’s health and, among other things, be the foundation for a later thyroid disorder.

In my workshop, participants have the chance to look at the cause of their thyroid disease with the help of their own "sentence of intention". What can we do for ourselves and for our health, so that our organism no longer has to be in a traumatized state?

Manuela Specht, registered nurse, training in psychology, psychotherapy, voice dialogue, solution-oriented trauma work, training in identity-oriented psychotrauma theory and therapy, psychological counselor, trauma support, setting up the sentence of intent in private practice in Bad Tölz, co-author "Early Trauma".

www.systemische-beratungen-specht.de 
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