I got on zoom with a man who booked a discovery call with me
He was eating a plain piece of bread.
I asked him why there was nothing on it.
He told me he's lactose intolerant. I asked what that’s like and then the list came out. A whole range of foods his body won't accept and is allergic to.
I said: dinner time when you were young must have been very painful.
He went quiet, surprised and asked how I knew.
His parents would fight at the table. It would escalate. His mother screaming. His father hitting her. And he would sit there, a small boy, terrified and completely alone, with food in front of him.
The body learned. Every time he sat down to eat, the threat arrived. After enough repetitions, the food became the threat. His nervous system didn't distinguish between the two. Pavlov didn't just work on dogs.
I asked him about one food he wished he could eat again. Tomato.
We found the memory. We found the boy sitting at that table. We did the work. He took a breath.
On our next call he was eating bread with tomatoes completely fine.
That's one way trauma shows up. Most people never connect it to food because it doesn't look like trauma. It looks like a sensitivity. An intolerance. A quirk of the body.
But it also shows up as triggers you can't explain. Overwhelm that comes from nowhere. Anger that arrives too fast and stays too long. Fear in situations that shouldn't be frightening. The body keeps the record of what happened, and it doesn't forget until someone goes back and updates it.
You don't have to live like this.
You can eat normally again.
Now replace ‘live’ with ‘eat’ in the previous sentence.
