9th Renewal: Adult Children Recovery and Trauma Conference
Las Vegas Hilton�February 23-26, 2005
You Can't Quit �Til You Know What's Eating You: Overcoming Overeating
Donna LeBlanc, MED (ACOA25-013)
LEBLANC: My name is Donna LeBlanc, and this is �Overcoming Overeating.� I wrote the book by that name. I've been a psychotherapist for about 20 years and have been the on-camera therapist for people like Montel Williams, Sally Jesse, Bill O'Reilly, MSNBC, Queen Latifa. I've just done an enormous amount of television, and guess what? Anybody in this room is qualified to do television if you've worked in psyche hospitals because absolutely the training that helped me do television was psyche hospital work. Why, you might ask? Because when you're backstage at Sally or Queen or Montel, they have flown in these families�think of the psyche ward, okay? Think of the room and you've got all of these different family members�and you're walking down the hall, and each family is in some kind of crisis. You know, they never fly families in because they're having no problems. You go down the hall, and each family has got a different family crisis; and if they've got the whole family there, you know that these families are not happy and you get the point. You've got to be really fast. Everybody's running around, very crisis oriented, and so that's basically how you get your training for it.
But beyond that, on a more serious note, I have been working as a psychotherapist doing intensives for many years, almost 20 years. It started with overeating specifically in my family, of course, because I was raised in an alcoholic home, and we were all...well, Dad was the alcoholic and the rest of us were compulsive eaters, and everybody ended up doing drugs and drinking later on.
How many of you were in this morning's? About ten? Okay. Very quickly, the story part that led to all of this is, I was raised...I wanted to save my own family. I was raised without the ability to read and thought I would never be able to go to college or anything like that. I had a high school teacher that was dying while I was in her class, and she started meeting with me and telling me that the tests were not true, that nobody knew what I was capable of and that I could do something unexpected with my life. She died at 41. What she gave me when she died was a claim to be a survivor. It took me many more years...I had six different therapists by the time I was 27 years old, and I had a raging compulsive eating disorder, and I had a family that all had raging compulsive eating disorders with drugs and alcohol. It was many, many years of working on myself, and not until I started combining traditional therapy with working with shaman and energy workers and people that work in the world in the invisible realms to help me figure out why I was actually overeating and why I was so depressed and why I couldn't get beyond some of the things I was doing. It was the combination of those worlds that actually helped me move my life forward in enormous ways and continue to this day.
In the last seven years...eight years, I have traveled around the world to sacred sites�to Egypt up the Nile three times, Bali, India, Tibet, Peru, England�and have done sacred ceremonies at the different sites there, praying for the earth and ourselves. It's actually been the combination of this journey that has made me become very sensitive to the idea and the goal of with our histories, how do we step out of these histories when we've been raised with all of these dysfunctions? As souls, how do we get beyond this?
Well, when I'm looking at the specific issue of compulsive eating, I noticed many, many years ago I was hired to be a staff psychologist on a fasting program. Do you remember when fasting was the rage many years ago, where they would completely take you off food, and they'd give you 400 calories and you'd do this doctor thing for a long time and you'd lose all of this weight? Well, I was staff psychologist on one of these, and what I began to see very, very quickly was all of the emotional issues that started just raging in the room. I mean, it's such an emotional psychological issue. Overeating is such an emotional psychological issue.
So all of these issues were surfacing in these clients, and one day one woman asked me if I would do the intensive that I do with her on this issue. That started this whole journey that ended in the publication, or one of the punctuations was the publication of my book, You Can't Quit �Til You Know What's Eating You . It's a bestseller. It's a very good reference book on this subject of things that help you create breakthroughs. The next book that's coming out, but it's coming out next February. It's called The Passion Principle: Deepening Relationships in My Flub and Work , and I'm going to be covering material in both of those books today.
I wanted to send around in case anybody's interested this mailing list information. If you would like me to send you information on the book, I'll give people discounts if they're interested in that. I'd be glad to do that when the book comes out, and there's also training coming out. If you want to be removed from the list, just tell me and I'll take you off. Not a problem.
What I started noticing in doing these intensives with clients dealing with this issue is that I started having breakthroughs. I had one woman who had been to the 30-Day Treatment Program twice, where they put you in for her bulimia. She stopped throwing up. A gentleman stopped throwing up. A woman stopped her massive overeating; another woman became peaceful with being at the weight she was at. I began to realize that once we got to the deep core function that the food and fat were serving in their lives and then did the psycho-spiritual processes that helped them get to the core and do some healing with family members that they needed to do and often put food in the chair, I started noticing some very strong results with people.
What's the typical overeater's profile? A lot of times individuals that overeat are caretakers. How many in this room consider yourself an overeater? The caretakers. The caretaker profile is generally an individual who was raised in an environment in which they were a caretaker from the time they were very small. How many of you were caretakers from the time you were small? I was a family counselor at ten. I got my training very young, and many, many people in this room have been family counselors since you've been very young.
So what happens in these families is that normally what will be going on in the family that people that are overeaters are raised in is that there's a couple of things. One is that we all know that in our society, food is used to nurture us. Every time a baby cries, a pacifier goes in their mouth. What's that nervous-system message? �Put something in your mouth when you're upset.� You can walk down the street, and watch the pacifier go in babies' mouths. But this has happened to all of us. So whatever they had they would put...the thumb, yes.
What happens is that we're not getting the actual nurturing or the support that we need through these momentary things that kids go through, but we are getting something that actually soothes the nervous system, which is food or a pacifier.
So we begin from a very young age to get the message that �when I'm upset, put something in my mouth.� There's also a message that happens at a very young age that the compulsive eater had to generally give up their needs to help take care of someone else. It could be things like �My mother is jealous of me,� or �My sisters are jealous of me,� or �My mother is very emotionally disturbed, and I have to take care of everybody.� Or it could be that �My mother is a vamp, and she pulls. She pulls and pulls and pulls, and I have to end up taking care of...� When I say that, does everybody kind of know instinctively what I mean, somebody that pulls? I call that the �psychic vampire� or the �energy vampire.� They pull.
The person that is the savior is often the individual who has a lot of vamps around them. They were raised with a lot of vamps around them, a lot of people, a lot of people that have that wound where they didn't have their needs met, so they pull for you to take care of them. The other thing is having a parental figure in which you had to give up your needs. In other words, I had one man who was a brilliant composer. But while he wanted to go play baseball when he was ten years old, his mother would never allow him to leave the piano. So his friends are out there playing ball, and he's playing piano. So he misses his entire childhood. So as a grownup, he's a brilliant composer but he's also very pissed off.
So here's the deal: Inside a lot of compulsive eaters, they are compliant on the surface and defiant underneath. What does that mean? That means, �I do what I have to do now or to your face, but I will do the opposite of what you're asking of me as an adult.� So that's why whenever you have a compulsive eater and they're wanting to lose weight, what's the number-one mistake if you engage with these people that you could make? Say it again? Tell them to lose weight or threaten to take their food away, because what do they do? They go and gorge because they're so afraid that they're going to be deprived.
This individual when they were raised had so much of their needs deprived that they have a terrible fear of being deprived when they're grown up. So on the one hand they can be very, very� take care of other people, give up their needs, do all of the things. They endure suffering. They're tremendous at enduring suffering. And then after they've endured the suffering, they will go home, unplug the phone, pull out the Hagen Daaz, and eat it at 10:00 at night, or whatever the food of choice is. But this is the individual that to others, they're very responsible often. They're very good caretakers, but they actually don't know when it's okay to say no. They don't know what their point is, like �How am I supposed to feel?� because they never did feel good in the home growing up. So they don't really know, �How do I take care of myself? I don't know how to do that.� So what will end up happening is they'll end up overeating to take care of themselves because they're drained and fatigued.
When this individual goes into a room of people, they can pick up the toxic energy of others. They can read other people. Anybody know what I mean when I'm talking about that? You can read other people. I don't care what you want to call it; you can get what's going on with them. Have you ever had a client leave the office or after you've been on the phone with a friend that's complaining for two hours, and either the client's leaving or the friend is getting off the phone, and they're going, �I feel great!� and you're like, �I feel like shit!� What's happening is this particular type is like a sponge on the drain board. There's water on the drain board, and that's the toxic stuff off somebody else. You put the thing down, put the sponge in it, they pick it up, and then they go home with it. You see the problem.
So their body becomes a receptacle because they don't know how to clear their energy. The body becomes a receptacle for everybody else's toxic energy. So when that happens, the individual walks around, and now you've dealt with your mother and you've had ten clients and you've done all of this stuff. So what will happen to this individual is that as they endure, they just start walking heavier and heavier. They start slouching more. They start slowing down and get more tired, and then they're even more susceptible to eating. Do you get the cycle? It's a very, very clear cycle. There probably isn't a type; and in the seminar I talked about earlier, I talked about the five layers of defense that are going to be in the next book coming out, but this one type that I'm talking about is in the first book and some of the other, too, but this is the one that's so susceptible to getting fat. You can see why because if you could see in an invisible way what they look like, they're walking along and they're collecting up all of this invisible stuff, and they get heavier and heavier and heavier as they're walking along.
But they don't have...it's all invisible. What do you do about the invisible stuff? They don't even realize it's happening. That's why it's very, very important if you are this type that you have some techniques to clear your energy. In the other realms, in the world of shamanism and stuff like that, they do deeper work�energy healers�they do deeper work to clear deeper fields within you, areas of concern that you have.
Another thing that starts happening is where they call it body armor. Our nervous system, we've had these emotional blows growing up. So the body starts collecting up this armoring because it's an energetic system, and it starts collecting up armor�armoring. If you've had a lot of emotional blows�blows to the sexual energy, violation, there's going to be armoring around your whole sexual area; the abdomen, the hips. If there's been a lot of emotional blows, heart blows, there will be armoring around the entire abdominal area.
So when that individual tries to lose weight, the energy system itself isn't interested in losing that armoring. So that's why there's always something that pushes back. They want to lose weight, but then there's a part of their system that starts pushing back hard, or they'll start feeling really, really, really deprived. And when you feel deprived, that doesn't work. It drives...you've got to make up for what you're being deprived of because this child, this being as a small child, was deprived. So there's this terrible, terrible fear of being deprived.
Another opening might be fear of being thin. If there's been an issues of sexual violation, jealously, or competition with the mother, or maybe the dad was coming on to you when you were growing up or you didn't feel safe in the environment, then what will happen is the individual begins to need the body blockages in order to be safe in the world. This particular type has an enormous fear often of being exposed and publicly humiliated. So if I've got a fear of being exposed, and as a result I'm hiding or I'm trying to hide, it's incredible when you think about all of the focus of being overweight causes and how much the other side of the person will fight this, but they're actually trying to hide by being overweight.
This is why in my intensives that people have been flying in for years to do, what we've done is gotten to all of these complex layers. Imagine that you've got sub-personalities, although please don't use it in that clinical term. Just sub-parts of self, and they've all got different intentions. And then you've got all of these parts of you with different intentions, and they're not going together, and now you have a real problem.
I'm going to go over this briefly because it definitely applies to...this is the information that I talked about that's coming up in the next book. Imagine that we have a core and on top of that we have layers. The first layer is what we call the escapist. These are childhood layers of wounding...sorry, they're defense layers that go on top of negative feelings because we get emotionally wounded and don't get our needs met. So when we have a not-too-great time in the womb, maybe we weren't wanted or maybe there was a lot of stress or crisis around the pregnancy, we may become the escapist. When we're in our soul alignment, we're the prophet.
The next layer up is the vamp. The relationship that the escapist will have with food is not much of a relationship. They won't eat a lot of food because they're really not in their bodies. So these people are going to be very waist-like, very sunken-in chest. By the way, you can have percentages of all of these. So you might have some of the escapist in you, but you're not fully that.
The next one is the vamp. The vamp is between zero and two, and that's when there was inadequate childhood...the breast-feeding phase, it wasn't done adequately. It wasn't done adequately. There wasn't enough nurturing or nurturance. The mother was disturbed or distraught. Something wasn't right. So this individual is often going to be a smoker, or like they do their eating disorder by not eating or eating and then not eating, they tend to control their nurturing by having it but then not eating it.
The next level up is the savior. The savior is the little family counselor, and they tended to be living in a home in which they could feel stuff was wrong in this house. Nobody's talking about what's wrong in the house, but you're just kind of eating. In a lot of homes right now, you can see it with obesity as big as it is in this country right now. Food has just become something you just do and you just do it. You know, the families sit around miserable together and everybody's just doing it. Nobody knows what else to do. So this individual tends to be the hoarder. They tend to �I get the thing of Oreos, and I need to eat. I'm afraid I'll be deprived. If I go to the cookie counter and it's Wednesday and I eat the cookie. If I don't eat the cookie, I fear that I'm going to miss the opportunity or be deprived of the opportunity of eating that,� versus another type would look at that and they would think no, they're not deprived by not eating it. They're thinking good of themselves for not eating it, but this type feels deprived. If I go to the Christmas party and I don't sample everything, I've missed the opportunity. I've been deprived of something. That's why one of the binge-busting techniques that I strongly suggest to a compulsive eater is if you know you are this and you have a really, really strong deprivation button, don't even go there. Your best bet is to give it to yourself in a single serving, but you don't buy a bag of anything. If you can get the craving, if you can get yourself to let go of the craving, great. But you know when you're doing it because you start this thing...you know, it's just this thing about how �I'm being deprived of that thing,� whatever that thing is.
Another thing I tell people to do is when you go and you order from a salad bar or something that's got lots of food items is that you go ahead�because that part of you is going to go crazy�you go ahead and get some of everything you think you've got to have, but you do a little taster. The compulsive eater, because of the hoarding thing, often eats what they don't like on the plate and saves the best for last. That causes them to overeat. If you can go straight to what it is you like, what you do is you get the plate, and you taste�you go, and you taste. Taste the different things. And if it's what you like, then you eat that first. You must give yourself permission to start putting it in the waste can instead of the waist. You must. Do you know that thing about �clean your plate�? Again, this is the savior-type issue because �If I throw it away, well...� If it's just turning to fat on your body, it's not feeding Ethiopians anyway.
The vamp is zero to two. It's a nurturing wound that gets sunken in there. The person is addicted to yearning. So this person when it comes to food is going to be a smoker actually more often; and when it comes to food, they may also be an overeater, but they're also going to tend to, �I've got it, but I'm not going to eat it. I've got it; I'm not going to eat it.� They're going to be push and go.
This savior is going to be between three and six or so�it could be later�and the savior is looking at the issue of �If I don't, I'm being deprived.� So they're always worried about being deprived of something. So they're the ones that are likely to, �If I don't clean that plate right now, then I'm being deprived of something.�
The next one, the conqueror, can also be an overeater. This is between six and twelve. This is an individual who had a family environment in which they felt it was not safe somehow. They might have felt that their parent�it could have been an opposite-sex parent so it could have been your father or if you're a female... if you're a male, it would have been your mother�but where you somehow felt sexualized or sexually inappropriate or there was some sexual energy or maybe it was a raging alcoholic, but you did not feel safe as an individual in those times of your life. Or maybe you were beat up on the grounds with the kids. That happens to a lot of guys where they get beaten up a lot growing up.
So the conqueror starts putting on padding. Now again, how do we put on padding? We put on padding through this big eating. The conqueror goes out there and conquers the world, and they tend to not pay attention to taking care of their health because they give up all of their needs to go conquer and go achieve all of these things so �After I've saved the world and I've achieved all of these things, then I'm going to have some value.� What that does is it sets the individual up where they could be also big eaters. They're going to go and have a big plate of Mexican food at lunch. It's going to end up getting you kind of the pot-belly syndrome, especially if you've got a mixture of conqueror and the savior.
So this individual can overeat because they're not used to taking care of themselves. Adult children of alcoholics or adult children of narcissists or adult children of dysfunctional homes were raised often with food as the mother. Food is how they nurtured themselves. Food is how the family came together. Food is the friend. Food is the lover. Food is the protector from the affair the person wants to have because if they're fat and ugly, they're not screwing around. You see, there are all kinds of elements that make this really, really tricky. Then they see some gorgeous girl or guy and go, �Oh, I want to look like that,� but the deep psyche is very complicated...very, very complicated.
Then the next level is the perfectionist. The perfectionist is between twelve and eighteen, or into the teenage years. Basically, this is the defense layer that develops connected to putting on that ego mask of perfection. So I put on this mask, �I'm going to look good. I'm going to be good. I'm going to do the right thing. I'm going to do good in school. I'm going to achieve. I'm going to follow the rules,� and all of that is to cover up what is missing from my history, what I didn't get from my history. So this individual often has a very balanced-looking body�very balanced, very healthy. They can follow the diet to a T. They can do...when they say no-carb diet, by golly, there's not a carb on their plate! However, if you say to a savior �no-carb diet,� what are they going to do? Every carb in the book. They have to eat more, so you have to be very careful because they're wired in reversal. You cannot take anything away from them outright. You have to get into their deep psyche to heal it or address it.
There's a handout that you have on your table, and it's �The Functions of Food and Fat.� I would like you to just take two minutes, and just from what I brought up...just from what I brought up, I'd like you to real quickly to see if you can come up with five different functions of food and fat served in your life.
The escapist when it comes to food generally doesn't over eat; they're out of body. They have disassociated from their body. I don't necessarily mean that in the clinical way; they're just very frail looking and they just forget to eat. I'm talking about when these people grow up. When everybody is grown up. When all of the layers are intact, and you're a grown-up person. So if you'll just do this for two minutes.
Who would be willing to tell me a few? Okay, go ahead, and say it loud. Okay. <Audience comments inaudible.> If your mom wasn't physically or emotionally there, is food your mom to you? Is food the way you nurture yourself? Good! Food is time alone. This is very important for the savior because often the minute they engage with people, it's about helping them...everybody. The only time they have their time is when they're alone and they're cleaning out the refrigerator while they're doing it. It covers sexuality. So are you aware of, �I feel like...I'm afraid I would be somebody else if I didn't have this?� The inner hope?
AUDIENCE: I'm signing up for your weekend!
LEBLANC: <Laughing.> Come on down! You'd love it. You're not a threat to other women. Very key thing here. I had four sisters that were angry at me, and I deliberately put on weight�I remember it�so that I would stop being hated. So this is a big issue with some women about this, not being a threat...losing being a threat. It helps me feel big enough to carry what I must. The thing she is saying, broaden this to your own life because this type feels but it goes way back, that they must carry. Hear it? They are the endurer, and they don't know how to stop it because there's never been anybody to say, �Well, wait a minute! You don't have to do that!� You know? Or they tend to carry and worry and carry all of the family baggage�or whomever's baggage�and try to help and save.
This would be like the water buffalo. You know, the <grueling, grunting sound>. This is the endurer, okay? Only the thing that's very key about this is if they're doing it, why isn't the next person right next to them doing it the same way? It's the way they filter the world. It's not necessary; they just don't know because it's gone back so young...so, so young.
Oh, excellent! She said it's unfinished business. �If I take care of this issue, I might feel too good.� Very key because anybody that's been raised in a dysfunctional home, your nervous system gets afraid if you feel too good because remember, it's not a value system; it's an imprinting system. Whatever it imprints on, it believes that that's safety because you did survive that. It makes sense, right? So if you make yourself just a little bit miserable, then you're safe. The other area is�and this is one that I've had bad�is survivor guilt. I got away from my family, and there was just so much pain. My brother committed suicide�overdosed�three years ago. My dad died, the results of all of his self-destruction on the anniversary seven years earlier. Suicidal siblings...there has just been a lot, and the guilt that I have felt for getting out. Yes. So I would notice myself, if I was having too much good stuff, I would start to feel just something I can't describe. Just some kind of uneasy feeling. How many know what I'm talking about just from your family stuff? If you come out of these family situations...
Do you remember that movie, The Mission ? Do you remember him, because he killed his brother he's carrying this thing? He's dragging this thing, and he drags it and he drags it and he drags it. That's the thing with people that climb out of the...when you climb out of these very dark places, and you know there are people left behind. It has blown my mind many people have flown in to wherever I live to see me and do work with me, but I haven't been able to save my family. Has anybody been able to save your family? It's like, �What the hell is that? Come on!� We all carry some part of this, and it's a way we make ourselves feel bad as part of the group, kind of a way of taking away a little bit of my pleasure, a little bit of my joy, a little bit of my good. So I don't feel guilty for having survived it or gotten out of it while they're there suffering. Yes? There was a man in blue over here, and then I'll let you go.
AUDIENCE: The sensation of the good taste fills an emptiness.
LEBLANC: Yes, the sensation of the good taste fills an emptiness. The reason that that is so key is that the savior or endurer has an emptiness because all of their energy is spent taking care of outside of self, and they haven't explored themselves, like �What do I like? What do I want? What brings me joy?�
When I work with these individuals, all of these have a positive�this is all of the wounded aspects, and each one of them has a positive side�you know, like when they've done their work, so the savior becomes the creator.
When they're the savior, I remember about eight years ago, maybe nine, I went on my first trip to Egypt . Actually, my life was nothing but clients. Even my friends were my clients. Everything was about solving somebody's damn problem. Everything! Every conversation. �So how do you feel? Really? And what happened? Uh-huh. I'll bet that made you feel really bad. Uh-huh.� I mean, I just want to commit kamikaze when I think about how I used to be. It was just disgusting. So I'd be on the phone with my best girlfriend two hours at night listening after I'd just done it for six hours with clients all day. It was just disaster. So finally I had this woman, she flew in�she was a compulsive eater�and she did the intensive, and she went through this huge�she was an attorney�and she went through this huge awakening.
She started meditating eight hours a day and filling journals with information that she was getting when she was meditating. One day she comes in and says, �Donna, why has that plant overgrown its pot and dying in the corner of your room?� She said, �What have you overgrown, Donna?� I was like, �Oh, shit! You're my client.� <Laughter> That was bad. That was very, very bad! Anyway, my exposure, I was exposed immediately. It actually started...she said, �I got two people's names for you,� and she gave them to me. Those two people�I didn't know who they were�called four months later, and they were going on a trip to Egypt . That was my first journey of the world in which I started getting focused on what, as a soul...you know, we're all coming from these histories of this stuff and we're dealing with all of these clients with this stuff, but if you look at it as if I am a soul that came in...for example, I had a very difficult relationship with my father, but what if my father was my master teacher? Actually, my relationship with him is the reason I am here today doing what I do. So oftentimes the things that burn us often are also the things that galvanize us in our greatness and in our gifts in the world.
The point is, how do you get yourself from that wounded self into that freer, open self? How do you get your nervous system open again so that it's not just a reactive child with those childhood wounds that happened 30 years ago? You have to do things through experiential learning to get the nervous system open so that you are not just primarily run by these defenses.
For example, the savior, which is the overeater, when I published my first book, You Can't Stop �Til You Know What's Eating You , in �90, the first that happened to me was that I was on big stages with people, lots and lots of people. I was not ready for that at all because of the self-hatred I still had. This savior often has a self-hatred core because they came from homes that lots of stuff was going on. So they never got the esteem they needed, so they ended up having self-hatred and that fear of exposure.
So I was standing in front of all of these people�I hate to say this to you all; it's time for the confession�I'm at a Health Communications conference somewhere, and there are hundreds of people in the audience, and I felt so exposed and so much self-hatred because who was I to be standing up there?�survivor guilt�when all of my family, all of the stuff, that I went straight back to my room, ate from the bar and smoked. Ate and smoked, ate and smoked!
The point is, we can just be incredible to deal with ourselves! <Laughing.> Don't you think? Anyway, me and this whole world of conferences was a disaster, so I stopped doing anything like that and I went into seclusion because of my fear of exposure, my humiliation, and my survivor guilt.
On top of that, a whole lot of family members who are looking at me and going, �Hey, Donna...��because I did a lot of television, and I may end up doing it again with my second book, but I did an enormous amount of it before�they're like, �When are you going to become a millionaire, Donna, so you can come take care of us?� I just got that call the other day again. Finally, I said, �I can't save you. I can't even save myself. I've just got my life here, and it's time for us to lay down that mantle. I cannot save you.� �I'm not going to...I think you're going to make it in television, Donna. So I'm going to hold out hope for that.� But this particular type is the savior; that's how everybody sees it, and it's a real challenge to get this stuff off of you�all of this stuff you're carrying!
One thing is that the nervous system is an experiential learning system. That's why if you have just had talk therapy, that's not enough, not by a long shot. You have got to, as the healer, because you cannot take someone where you haven't gone. Ain't going to happen! Can I take you through the mountains of the Himalayas if I've never been on the trek at all? Nope. Now it doesn't mean you have to have done every circumstance a person approaches you with, but you have to have fearlessly gone into yourself so that there aren't uncovered areas within you. And as you open up and you go into all of these uncovered areas, it's like you're exploring all of your inner rooms. You begin to see when somebody's sitting in front of you how everything they say can actually be organized.
This system that's coming out in this book, The Passion Principle , is an organizing principle, meaning everything they approach you with, you can organize it and you can begin to see what are the issues around what they're talking about. What are the imprints, and how do you address that?
For example, if you know about the savior and you know about the types and the association, then the minute someone is talking to you about their overeating or their eating disorder, you immediately know that underneath there they are what also? Afraid of exposure. So if you take their food away, they're going to get scared half to death because it's like the water draining out of a bathtub if they haven't dealt with that issue. Learning how to deal with psychic energy boundaries, this particular type is so physically open that everything just pours right into them. Also, if they're imprinted for savior guilt...they have savior guilt. See, there are all of these layers that you can get to just by knowing what you're dealing with in a person, just by a defense structure.
How many of you have questions? Let me spend five more minutes doing a little thing on this, and then I'm going to open to questions, okay?
If we talk about the gifts, the creator must find what their gifts are. The creator often is in two's�things show up in two's, opportunities in two's�and they have enormous bursts of creativity or thought, and then they drop off and so they have terrible trouble with completion. The creator looks at a drain board; and if there's an open space on it, it's a place to put something down. The perfectionist looks at a drain board, and if there's something in the space, they feel agitated. They want to clean it up. The vamp sees a drain board, but guess what? They're not home long enough to notice the roaches crawling on it because they don't exist when they're alone. So they may not even have pictures on the walls or anything because all they're about is connecting, connecting, connecting, connecting to people because they're stuck like a little baby. Can you leave a baby in a room by themselves? No. They won't stay; they won't be by themselves. They might not even have their house decorated. So you've got to get them to pull in, be by themselves, begin to nurture and take care of themselves.
The vamp becomes the lover. When they're the vamp, they're very needy and they're always getting abandoned. They're always getting abandoned because their nervous system is actually attracted to yearning, not fulfillment. Does that make sense? If your mother withheld what you needed, you imprinted on having what you need withheld. So this is the person that with their conscious intention is always looking for love, and with their unconscious intention, anything that shows up, �Oh, not good enough.� They make anything that shows up not good enough, so they always nix anything that shows up.
They have a terrible fear of abandonment so they're so needy that they drive you away because they attach onto you like a tree frog. I had one couple come in, and the woman, who's a creator, was with a vamp. They weren't in their healed aspects, so she was a savior and he was a vamp. She talked about wanting to jump out of the car, and all he talked about was �I just want you to talk to me, just process with me, just ...� You know, they just want to constantly connect...connect, connect, connect. They just want to connect to the point that you just want to die. They just won't give you a moment of breathing room or space.
So these are often attracted to each other; and when that happens, if you can get them over here into their healed aspects, the vamp, after they learn how to stand on their own two feet, is the teacher of intimacy. They teach others how to be intimate. They make enormous healers, artists, channels, psychics, all kinds of things in those areas; but their relationship, their connection, they know how to give and receive energy abundantly. They're very generous, they're very nurturing, but whatever you do, you like to work with them because the relationship you're having with them is what's most important to them.
Then moving up, the conqueror becomes the warrior. This individual begins to learn, as they've gone through their healing�and this healing takes years...you know, one step forward, two steps forward and a half a step back...we open and we close; it's not just a thing�but what you learn is they begin to be tremendous leaders, but they lead with humility. They have an enormous personal courage, and they get an enormous amount of respect because of how they are as human beings. They have great mental abilities, so generally a lot of the things they see can actually be very right and good to follow.
The creator is really good at getting into everybody's skin on an issue. They've been doing it since they were very young. So the creator is the one...that's why they make good counselors or world negotiators, because of the fact that they do have the ability to get into everybody's skin.
The perfectionist becomes the visionary. This is the positive-thinking individual, but when they're the perfectionist, they manufacture how they feel. You know, the person that's always positive? That phase that's almost all good? Ugh! They have a desperate need to get real, okay? The perfectionist is cut off from their core, so they they're not actually feeling what they're feeling, so they manufacturer how they feel. Well, you can't actually have intimacy with them. What are they doing with food? They're probably eating incorrectly, and they don't have much of a juicy life. One of the things that's needed for this individual is to help them lower their own bar and start to allow themselves to have some experiences, have some feelings, get into the real world of their own shame, their own connecting.
When they heal that, as they heal that, they move into the visionary. The visionary can open the mind. They are also leaders. They can open the mind of other people into the highest possibility in whatever it is. These buildings were all built by the floor plans of visionaries. Anything that's laid out for the whole system of everyone, the good of everyone, is going to be visionary. Also, the warrior/conqueror, they also can have these abilities, but they're going to be more like leaders of the people�anybody that stands up and they're real leaders; they take on a cause.
Michael Moore, like him or hate him, he is a serious combination, warrior/creator. Notice how he's obese and he's taken on the cause, no matter what anybody says. He has his courage no matter what you think about him. People like Tony Robbins, that's a visionary. When we're not healed, the visionary, everything they're doing is to get the mask validated; but when they're healed, it's for the masses. It's for the good of all. So these individuals can be very, very tremendous. Do you know JFK Junior, when he died and they talked about this whole thing that he donated all of this money to, but it was never in the public. That's an example of an evolved visionary, where he was doing what he was doing because it's the right thing to do, not because he wanted to pull for validation.
So the goal of this work, if you've got your ego mask here, and the ego mask is what you put on after you've got all of these layers, and then if you've got a food issue going on�with each layer a different food issue�here's life trying to come in and affect you...an original moment. And unless you break through and get into some of these core things, then you tend to just recycle, and it hits your defense layer going out. That's why life keeps being the same. If you never learn how to break through that deprivation issue, then you tend to recycle life. What questions do you have? Loud! I don't hear anything you're saying. So you were deprived of your food by your mother?
AUDIENCE: Yes.
LEBLANC: And then give me the bottom line so I can...
AUDIENCE: <Inaudible comment.>
LEBLANC: Stop arguing with your mother because there's no need to have a conversation with your mother, okay? Yes, a lot of people have these deprivation issues because...was it a male doctor? When the doctoring that relates to children and childbirth and all of that left the midwives and was handed over to the hands of men�men�I'm not saying anything negative here�but you don't do them. Do you know what I mean? I think there's an enormous amount...we've got a whole culture that's got some wounding when childbirth left the hands of the women. Your mom doesn't know this, and you're not a child, and your child part of your psyche is trying to go back to her and get the validation. She tried to do the right thing. Your mother probably has perfectionist, and what you're doing is making her not right, and she will fight you to the end of her days, even to her deathbed, about being right because the perfectionist cannot be made to be not right. So just drop that and know yourself�but that happened with a lot of kids. For example, some of the most intense brain growth, supposedly [] cells and all kinds of things, explosive right after birth. Well, I know myself and almost everybody I know was put into a nursery right after birth. In the old world, they would bring you in to your mother. There wasn't a baby alive that needed to be separated from their mother and put into a nursery and then brought in for feedings. Hello! All of this is deprivation. And then the drugging and everything, that's why we have this society right now where we have all of these people on drugs.
Next person? I did talk about the prophet. I said that they don't eat. Oh, the escapist evolves into the prophet? I see. What I mean by that is that they are the spiritual teacher. These are the people that because of whatever happened while they were growing up, they didn't fully come in so they maintained access to the other side. So sometimes these people can be psychics, they can be computer geniuses. They can communicate from their basement to the world. They always feel that they have something to bring, but they have a terrible fear of annihilation. In the work that you can do, if you have the intention that you want to go in and break down these layers, the experiences, the childhood woundings that hold these layers in place, often there are other techniques. Like someone brought up EMDR. I was trained in EMDR. That can be good, but I have also found that it doesn't take the place of an intensive because it can go into so many areas at once and create all kinds of expansion and growth. So you can use intensive work to go into these core areas.
The reason I gave you the mailing list, I'm going to be putting up on my Web site and sending out information that is connected to a phone training series on these defenses, and the book is coming out in February and how it relates to all of these issues. Also, I will be having a once-a-month training. So if you're interested in that sort of thing, make sure that you leave your information. I also do phone coaching and that sort of thing. Is there any other question?
I think that the anorexic is going to be more escapist/vamp/perfectionist. That's the combo right there. If they're the escapist, number one, they don't have contact with their body. It's a very disconnected-from-the-body state anyway so they tend to not feed the body. That can lead to anorexia. The individual that is the perfectionist, they are going to be phobic so they cannot be anything but perfect. That's going to lead to the anorexic. If they're the savior, that's the thing about deprivation. �If you take my food away, I'm being deprived.� So that's the tipping point that causes the swing. They do that to themselves, but they put it in a different way. So they could have the savior�they're probably going to have percentages of all of them�but they could have the savior, but they have a different way of depriving themselves; they just don't have it connected to food outside. The vamp does a thing where they control their nurturing by not eating because what they needed was withheld, so they can control their nurturing by not eating. It sounds twisted, but it actually works if you think about it.
Another question? Closure, probably because 75 percent of the time they say in research people report feeling sedated, soothed, comforted after eating. So after you've had a stressed-out day and you eat that meal, you feel sedated; soothed; if you're with a friend you feel comradery; you feel connection; you feel all of this stuff by being together doing the food.
Oh, I'm in New York City , and I do intensives in New York City . I do weekend intensives, and I also do individual intensives. If you have any interest, you can call me no charge; I would be glad to talk to you about it and kind of see if it's what could be of assistance. I also do a lot of phone coaching if you need some help dealing with a client. My book, You Can't Quit �til You Know What's Eating You , has been a bestseller. I strongly recommend it for dealing with this issue and telling clients about it. I also have a six-tape compulsive-eating album that many people have ordered afterward to help them with this, and you can use it in conjunction with working with people. Like you can be running a group and you can follow along with the book or the album. Every week have them do a piece of it, and then process the material from that.
Yes? It's called You Can't Quit �Til You Know What's Eating You . I have a lot of cases, but I haven't done the research. I've just been doing my practice. So what I have at this point is a lot of individuals who if people want to call and talk to them, that's what I do, I pass it around that way. What I actually look for is�I don't use the word �recovered,� number one�I look for measurable results. So let's just look at it this way: The way I would have you look at it is have you stand in the middle of your life like you're standing in the middle of a donut hole, okay�oh, oh, wrong word for compulsive eaters! <Laughter> So you're going to look at the area first of your actually physical life. Like your relationships, how are they going? Do you have what you want in your relationships? Are you fulfilled? Are you creating what you want? Turn to your money. Are you creating what you want in your money and in that area of your life? Turn to career. Are you creating what you want in that area of your life? Turn to your spirituality. Do you have what you want? Relationship, by the way, includes love. If you do not have what you're looking for in these areas and that's causing a problem for you, that's when you could do intensive work. Then as you notice these things start to change, that's your visible evidence.
At some point, you need, and you might need to do this in more than one way, you've got to realize the creator or the savior, when they're the savior, since they are the endurer when they are the savior, they deprive themselves in such complex ways, and it's invisible to them. So you get conscious about yourself in increments. Because, let's just take money, they have very bazaar money habits. They'll be stingy. They won't have money for therapy, and then all of the sudden they'll bulge spend on something. I had somebody in one of the Southern states who was a physician who didn't have money for therapy but then put in an entire new landscaping. So see, they do this. They do these things where they don't have money for this, or this for that.
Actually, since I'm putting together a training program, if there are a number of therapists interested, I will do one specifically for therapists. So the first thing I have to do is know that I have at least five or seven or ten that are interested in that; and if you are interested in that, please let me know.
Intensives, she needs a definition. I do two types of intensives. When it's an individual intensive, it is three hours alone with me...three hours a day for five days. The first seven hours are spent mapping the layers of the imprints in every area of your life�money, sex, marriage, career, self-esteem�and that's done through food, if you're in there for food...whatever your issues are. That's done through: You write your life's story, you look at your earliest worst and best memories, you look at fairy-tale growing up, you look at Mom and Dad's spoken, behavior, and feeling messages on several different things. This is about seven or eight hours that go together to map out�this is very complex. Plus, you have to have some pretty extreme intuition to do these with a lot of that intuitive gift to map out how this all went into the subconscious.
Then the second half is a psycho-spiritual type of Gestalt process with the mom and the dad. Now, I talked about this this morning, but I'll talk about it briefly now. In the psycho-spiritual process, I take Gestalt to a whole different level because in the spiritual work I've done, I came to the deep realization that we are really connected to each other beyond time and space. So if I didn't get what I needed from my mom and dad growing up, it's not actually too late because we can set a spiritual intention, put them in the chair, and the higher self, or bring them from the other side of the vale and put them in the chair. This sounds weird, but I've had ranchers and attorneys and doctors and housewives and very religious people, and I have had them do this, put their parent in the chair, and then I've asked them, �Now I want you to open a hole in the top of your head, and I want you to imagine that you can bring the higher self of your parent...� the parent they will join with when it's time for them to leave this world, the part of themselves.
I had a very difficult, like I said, relationship with my father, but the night before he died, several years before he died, I started going to him to talk to him because I wanted to understand what the heck was the deal! So I started several times; several times he almost died, so I went to his deathbed and had these conversations with him several times. One of the things that he said to me was that he realized the night before he died that he'd been a very bad man, and that because of that, God had never given him anything. This is a good-ole boy from Houston , Texas , folks. I mean, for him to be this enlightened is like wow! �I think that God didn't give me anything because I would have given you kids the rope to hang yourselves with.� Well, my brother did die on the anniversary of his death three years later.
But the point is that I began to really understand that as he was preparing to leave this world, his whole view was getting bigger. He was getting a perspective on what he had done, and he started saying, �You know, I wish I had been there for you kids, but it's too late now.� I've had many people put that aspect of their parent if their parent is still alive, I say, �You may not be able to have your physical parent in this life have this conversation with you, and that's okay. My goal with you is to get you to the point where you're seeing the wounded child inside your parent. You're going to where the healing is available to you. The healing is available to you on the other side of the vale and through healers that can channel it. So you go where it's available so that you can get what you didn't get growing up. Then you stop going around in the world with that wound, that gaping painful, aching wound, that �I'm just an adult child.� You're no longer an adult child. You begin to have the power to step outside in this family into who you were born to be. Who are you as a larger being? What is your soul destiny? What is your plan? What are you as an original signature, what are you here for, and how has all of that history been right what it needed to be to set you up for who you are today, the gifts you have, what you bring to this world?
Some of the most enormous humanitarians, the most gifted healers, almost every one of them has had the craziest life growing up you can come up with. So, finishing that business so that you then get free to use all of those tools in your freedom. I have them put the person in the chair, and I say to them, �Imagine that your legs become their legs, your body and torso become their body and torso, and your mind and thoughts move over and give them the chance to come through you.� I lead them through a conversation in which I give the lead sentences. I say, �Tell your mom or dad how you felt growing up with them. Tell them what the wounding was,� and I lead them through a conversation. Then I have them sit in the other chair, and I have them breathe in, see that person, open the hole in the top of their head, breathe that person in. Then I ask them what their name is, and they say, �Harry,� and I say, �Harry, tell your son or daughter how you feel now that you can see better what you would like them to know, now that you see them suffering.� I have never had a circumstance, no matter how crazy their parent was in life or still is in life, I have never had a circumstance in which that person just didn't flood with �I am sorry. I didn't know better. This is what my mom or dad did to me. If I had known better, I would have done better, but I'm so proud of you for whom you've become in spite of who I was to you, and I want better for you.�
Then these individuals get up from that chair, and they're the ones that have spoken, do you use? This isn't me. This is them. I am saying the first half sentences, and they are saying it back to themselves. They get up out of this chair time and time again and say, �Oh, my God! I have been needing that my entire life.� See, that's a different level than awareness therapy. That's where you're getting to freedom because when I get it, I can move on. And when I don't get it, I'm constantly going back to Mom and having conversations with her trying to get those thing she never gave me. And that is a black hole going nowhere because they didn't get it. They can't give it.
So the other thing, anybody that's in this world as an ACoA, I strongly recommend if you haven't started it is to start journeying. I almost took a group to Egypt last summer, and then my book contract came through. But start journeying around the world if you haven't started it. Find the adventurer in you. Start taking risks. Get out of the freaking box because everybody that works with other people needs soul food, and that's one of the ways to do it. I'm doing a music CD; that's my soul food. You've got to find yours. What's your soul food? Are you a painter? Are you an artist? And then begin to really find places that replenish you. Find friends. Ask for a turn. Tell your friends, �Honey, I love you, but I have been listening to people all day long. Could I have a turn?� �What does that mean?� �That means everything that I'm going to talk about, everything stays on me. I need to have a turn. Sometimes when I talk to you, I know you don't mean this, but accidentally if I'm talking to you, you end up turning the focus back on you. Then I feel like I'm in my role as a counselor again, and I'm trying to be nice, but it makes me not feel safe like I want to talk to you.� So the savior needs to ask those that love them for a turn. You give and take turns. Very infantile sounding, but we all need it.
Okay, I think we're over...<Applause.>
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