THE PEACEFUL EATING WAY PODCAST
Wanting Out: Inside the Escape Trance
Transcript
Hosted by Everett Considine. Recorded live in a Parts Work Practice from The Peaceful Eating Way™. Participants' names have been removed. This transcript was generated automatically and lightly edited, so it may contain small errors.
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Everett: Welcome to The Peaceful Eating Way Podcast. This is Everett. This is a live session with my Peaceful Living community about the Escape Trance, and the two Parts behind it, the Isolator and the Oblivionator. You'll hear members share what they recognized in themselves.
Everett: And I'm gonna be talking about the Escape Food Trance, the Escape Food Trance. There's a moment many people recognize but don't fully understand. You feel the pressure of the day, the weight of responsibility, the ache of loneliness, the fog of exhaustion, or the quiet discomfort of being with yourself, and then something shifts. It doesn't always feel like a craving at first. It feels like a need to leave, a need to soften the edges, a need to make the moment stop asking so much of you. And in that moment, food can begin to feel less like nourishment and more like a doorway out. This is what we call the Escape Food Trance, and it's not random. What's happening underneath that moment is something deeply protective.
When your nervous system feels overwhelmed, trapped, emotionally flooded, or unable to find relief from the inside, a part of you may begin searching for the fastest way to change your state. Food can do that. It can shift sensation, attention, body chemistry, and mood. It can give you something to focus on besides the feeling you don't want to feel. It can create a temporary fog, a pause, a private room inside the day. For a little while, the pressure turns down. The discomfort moves into the background. You don't have to be quite so present. This is why the Escape Trance can feel so automatic in the moment. It's not simply a thought like, "I want food." It's a full body movement away from the present moment.
Your awareness narrows, your sense of choice fades, and the future consequences become less real than the immediate promise of relief. In that state, eating doesn't feel like self-sabotage. It feels like getting out. Until later, when the trance lifts and you find yourself back in the very life, body, feeling, or situation you were trying to escape, often with more shame, fog, or discouragement than before. From a Parts work perspective, this changes everything. The escape Part is not bad, weak, or broken. It's a part of you trying to protect you from something it believes is too much to stay with. It may be protecting you from overwhelm, grief, disappointment, pressure, loneliness, shame, or the feeling that no one is coming to help.
And when we begin to understand that, we can shift from shaming the Part that wants to disappear to getting curious about what it is trying to help us escape from. Because the path forward isn't more pressure. It's learning how to offer relief without abandoning yourself. The healing begins when the system discovers, "I don't have to leave myself to get relief." The Peaceful Eating Way, the Escape Trance. Numbing distraction in the Parts that need you to disappear. If the Escape Trance is your dominant pattern, it means a part of you learned to use food to numb and distract, to turn the volume down on whatever you're feeling so it can't be reached. The eating isn't about pleasure or comfort.
It's about not feeling The Parts you're gonna meet in this, presentation are the Oblivionator and the Isolator. What it actually is, it's not about wanting food. It's about wanting out. Sometimes you're barely aware it's happening, drifting, scrolling, eating without choosing. Other times, you're fully conscious of every bite, and you still can't stop because stopping would mean being present for something you're not ready to feel. Numbing and distraction, this is the function of this Food Trance. The food gives your brain something to process that isn't the pain. The promise, the lie, and the truth. Every trance offers a deal. Hear the deal first, the promise. You don't have to feel this. And it's compelling, right?
Because for a moment it works. For a moment it works. The lie. The lie. Leaving will save you, right? That's, that's... You've got that promise, and then you've got the lie. Leaving will save you. The exit slowly becomes a place you forget how to return from. The truth. Relief is allowed. Abandoning yourself is optional. These are two different things, and the work is separate from them, right? Relief is allowed. Since I've, since I've been working through this lens of the trances, I really am recognizing them, right? Like I'll, I'll really recognize like, oh, this is about comfort. I just wanna zhuzh up, zhuzh up the moment, with something good. And then, and then, oh, this is about escape, And the Escape Trance always calls on like the hard stuff, right?
Whatever that is for you, right? And, Especially if you're fighting it, like I've had been. I've had moments where in where I've decided to throw my abstinence out the window because the feelings were just so intense. I was like, "F it. I don't care. I gotta, I've gotta change this now." And even going like days or weeks of resisting it, right? Like, "No, I don't do that anymore. Nope." Until, yeah Too much. Signs you're in it. Recognition is half the work. What you might hear yourself say, "I just wanted to zone out. I didn't even care what it tasted like. I just needed something. I was standing in the pantry before I even realized it. It felt automatic. I wasn't even hungry." How the eating itself feels, fast, numb, foggy, automatic, urgent but not joyful, more about quantity than taste, more about checking out than enjoying.
If any of these landed, you're not broken. You're starting to see the pattern. The cycle, how the Escape Trance runs. First, there's a trigger. Something becomes too much. Overwhelm, exhaustion, an unspoken thing, right? And when you're really unraveling your Escape Trance, this is where once you're, once you'you've gotten to the points where the point where the trance is showing up, there are a lot of moments leading up to that, where perhaps you might have caught something early, or you might have reached out to a friend, right? One of the things we're, we're gonna talk about is how the Isolator is really, s-central to the Escape Trance. And I think the Isolator too is probably central to not allowing you to get the support that you could have had that got you there, that gets you there.
The trigger, something becomes too much, overwhelm, exhaustion, an unspoken thing. The promise. The p-the brain predicts relief from the food before any eating begins. This is the other thing about the trances that's, that I've been getting out of this personally, is this real awareness that the craving is the dopamine The craving is the dopamine. And, like early on when we're just starting to be mindful of what's going on for us with food, a lot of times there'we have this question like, "Is this physical hunger or not?" Right? And I didn't, I didn't understand that the hunger that you're feeling that's not physical is it's the dopaminergic system working. It's the dopamine is saying, "Hey, this worked before when you felt like this." So it's creating a craving for it, and that craving feels like hunger 'cause it's craving food, right?
What are, what are what's your body doing when you're hungry? It's craving food. And, The brain predicts relief from the food before any eating begins. So that's the dopamine. So I wanna invite you the next time you're feeling a craving to notice like, "Oh, that's dopamine." That's not real. That's not real hunger. That's the dopamine predicting that the food's gonna help. And then three, numbing. Eating provides enough noise that the emotional signal can't get through. And that's why, that's why in the Escape Trance we go for the hard stuff, right? Like, it's, it's designed to knock us out And then return, right? We eat, we act out, we eat, and, we binge. And then there's a point where we're done.
Hardcore bingers, maybe it's 'cause they physically can't eat anymore, and their bodies just feels like it's gonna burst. Or there's, there's, people that have been working on their food issues for a long time, call, relatively minor things feel like a binge now. You're like, "Oh my God, I ate a whole little bag of potato chips." Like, I haven't done that in six months. You feel like you're binging. And, So, I mean, so that's good. If that feels like revenge, that's, like, probably a good sign, right? The trance isn't the bite, it's the shift in consciousness before the bite. That's where the work begins. Your why this happens, your nervous system is doing what it was built to do. Memory fires, a trigger activates the emotional brain.
Memory says, "Food helped me not feel this before." Dopamine spikes, number two. Not when you eat before. The craving you feel is your brain predicting relief, not your body needing food. The craving you feel is your brain predicting relief, not your body needing food. And then three, consequences fade. The prefrontal cortex goes offline, so we stop thinking. No critical thought. The promise of relief gets louder, right? Anything that's, it's kind of like the Food Controller, that's fighting the craving starts to disappear, right? The Food Controller is the, is the mind, is the prefrontal cortex. And the promise of relief gets louder, and then the consequences get quieter. So that's, that is kind of the, What, how a trance works, right?
Like, there's a, there's a moment, you're sitting watching TV or you're driving along the street, driving around outside, and there's, a moment that the, I'd call this Part the Indulger, right? Shows up, and it basically is... When that Indulger shows up, it's basically saying, "You know, the next moment would be better with food." It would just be better with a food, with food And then the cravings start, and a lot of this is probably just, based on our habitual patterns, right? If you're sitting watching the TV, there's a certain craving for something that's gonna come up. If you're out driving around, there's a different kind of craving that might come up. And maybe even, now that you understand the trances, that's a moment when you can actually recognize the trance.
You're like, "Oh, this is how I feel now when it's..." I'm like, "Oh, it's happening." Like, "Oh, it's, it's happening right now," Like a Food Trance is showing up. And then the promise shows up. And then if you're, if you're not mindful, like if you don't, if you're not kind of able to notice the trance, well then you just start to slip into the trance and this whole process takes place. And if you're able to interrupt the trance, you can, wake up from it. That's kind of how I, what I feel happens. And that is what we do in a trance, right? We can wake up. Someone can throw some cold water on your face, like, "Wake up." The consequences fade. The prefrontal cortex goes offline. The promise of relief gets louder.
The consequences get quieter. Meet your Parts. So the Parts, right? So a trance is essentially what happens when you blend with a Part, and this is my personal definition that I'm teaching here. It's not a... People involved in IFS don't think of trances in this way, but it, but it really fits. So because what is it that happens when you blend with a Part? You take on that Part's feelings. You take on that Part's emotions, and, the Part takes over, right? And you're in a, you're in a trance. So the Oblivionator, the Binger, right? Make it stop. Make it all stop. What it does, uses food to numb and distract your attention, your senses, your bandwidth, so the pain can't get through. What it needs, to know there are other ways to numb and distract, to feel its years of protecting you are acknowledged, right?
How to respond. Think it, then ask, "What am I trying to not feel right now?" Name the real thing the food is numbing you from. Name the real thing the food is numbing you from. A cold shower can wake you up out of a trance. If you think of, like, what do you need in the... Where you're feeling, you're emotionally bad enough that the Escape Trance shows up. Like, what is, what is it, what is it that's got enough oomph for you to change your state? Now, ideally, you just don't let it get to that point. You handle it way early. You start to notice when the overwhelm, you start to notice when the Parts, the feelings are getting too much, too intense. What it does, what it needs to know there are other ways to numb and distract, and to feel its years of protecting you are acknowledged.
This is a really This is a really powerful... This is a protector that does the heavy lifting, right? This is a protector that shows up when you are in extreme duress, and it's one of those protectors that doesn't get any love, 'cause the rest of your system typically hates it and wants to get rid of it. And, so this is one of those Parts when you're doing Parts work that if you can really acknowledge it, sometimes a Part, it can be really touching for a protector that's really never been acknowledged for the, for the hard work that it's doing, for you to, like, let this Part know you appreciate its intentions. This is also a Part to ask how old they think you are Because, many times they think you're young.
And if you think of, I don't, I don't know, binge binging is so infantile, right? It, the Part probably thinks you're really young, So you're, it's just like shoving a big bottle in your mouth to try and calm down the, to keep you from crying. Now, the other Part that really is part of the a big part of the Escape Trance is the Isolator, right? When have you ever binged in front of someone else? It doesn't, it doesn't happen, does it? Right? Like, I mean, I can imagine, you might, someone might have a an intimate partner, and they're just, But I think most of us hide that, and that's the Isolator. That's the Isolator. So many people who do secret eating, they wait for their partner to leave.
They can be plotting the whole day, their Indulger plotting the whole day of what they're gonna eat and how they're gonna do, and just, like, waiting for the house to be empty, right? I did a session once with someone, and we were working with their secret eating Part. And I just, I just had this vision of this Part being, like, Mission Impossible, right? Just like a spy that was, like, calculating all the best ways to get everything that they want, all without being found out, right? 'Cause then if you eat that, you're gonna have to replace it. You're gonna have to go later and buy it and bring it back and replace it and yeah. Our Parts can be crazy. So the Isolator finds somewhere nobody can see.
What it does creates the private conditions the numbing requires. Finds the late night kitchen, the car between errands, the locked room. What it needs to know you don't have to perform 24/7, that you're allowed to have needs without hiding them. How to respond? Notice when you're seeking isolation before eating. Ask, "Do I need to be alone or do I need to be seen?" So this is the Isolator, right? Isolator, the Isolator is really a big part of addiction, big part of the system of addiction. And, maybe not early on when, before we're, before we're trying to control it or heal it, But, there's a fair amount of shame that we feel around binging, and it can be a lot. The cycle that can start is something happens or you're feeling some kind of overwhelm or some sort of strong emotion shows up, and then the Oblivionator shows up, and the Escape Trance starts.
And then once you get into the Escape Trance and the, and the binge really gets going, then the Food Controller, the punisher, just like a manager that's trying to control the Binger will show up and just start shaming you because of it. And then that shame, sometimes that shame is actually more than the original pain that started it. And so now it's become a self-contained system, a vicious circle where the manager's shaming you, creating more and more shame, which is driving the Binger, the Oblivionator, to eat more and more, which is causing it to shame more and more. But it shows how strong the shame can be. And the Isolator minimizes the shame by making sure no one else knows about it. I mean, we'll shame ourselves, but it is kind of interesting.
In my system, with my addictive habits when I was younger, if no one knew about it, I didn't really feel shame. It was, it was like it was okay. It wasn't hurting anyone else. And it's, it's a twisted logic, right? But it was why my Isolator isolated me, It... I could tolerate... I... You know what it is I could... I think what it is when you're alone, you can be in denial because there's no one challenging it, right? There's... If you're... If someone's with you, and they're judging you can't really be in denial about that, right? So the Isolator is a big part of the... So if you have the Escape Trance, then your... The Parts work to do is the Isolator and the Oblivionator Oh, yes. The numbing only works without an audience.
The Isolator first creates the privacy, finds the moment when no one is watching, the conditions the numbing needs to actually work. Then the Oblivionator reaches for the food, numbs and distracts until the emotional signal can no longer reach you. They look like solo acts. They're not. They're a sequence, and once you can see it, you can interrupt it. Again, so much of this is recognition, is liberation. The wake-up question, the interrupt, the question to ask yourself: What is this food promising me right now? In the Escape Trance, the answer is almost always to make this feeling stop The interrupt, to say to yourself, "I don't have to leave myself to get relief. Relief is allowed. Abandoning yourself is optional." I don't have to leave myself, right?
Can I nourish? Nourishing instead of numbing and, so like so much of Parts Part, a lot of the benefit of Parts work comes after you've done the Parts work session, right? Let's say you have a relapse and then you do a Parts work session and you work with your Oblivionator and you work with your, Isolator and you build relationships with them. That's what we do in Parts work. When we're doing a Parts work session is we're building relationships with these Parts. So the more Parts work you can do with your Oblivionator and your Isolator, the more you're gonna be able to interact with them when they show up in real time So we do the Part, we do the Parts work sessions to get to know the Parts so that we can then, Notice them, dialogue with them, have a different outcome.
So Self-leadership, the skill that changes everything. So step one, pause. Notice that a trance is beginning before it takes over Right? Name it. Identify which trance is active and what it's promising you in this moment. And then three, choose from self. Respond from your Authentic Self instead of reacting from a Part. Yeah, Self-leadership So that is my presentation on the Escape Trance
Participant: Oh, this is a hard one here. This, I guess, like, the voices that come to me are that, when you say it's about the dopamine, it's the thought, the ahead of the actual doing of having the food, that just, and to think that, I'm looking for the relief of the pain that I'm feeling, the grief I'm feeling, the, intense feelings. Mm-hmm. And so my thought is, "Ah, what do I do with that then if I don't use the food?" Right. Then, that's, that's the gut feeling like, well, how do I find relief if I don't, if I don't use the food? I don't even know. I, it's like, how do I nurture myself in other ways? That's, that's what's coming up for me. It's like, it's, ah, it's too intense to think. I just need to ponder on it more come up with a better answer. I don't know.
Everett: Yeah. Well, I, this is the whole reason to become resourced, right? Of doing our, doing our inner work, doing our healing work, tracking, bringing balance into our life, right? Again, you may not have the Self-energy to transform it in the moment when it's happening, but later you can do Parts work on it. And if you do Parts work with the Parts that showed up, you're gonna start building relationships with them. And a, and a lot, and-... I think a lot of times, With the Escape Trance, sometimes we just really are in that place, of that, like that's kind of what's up for us. But sometimes it's, the Parts, sometimes the Parts are overreacting. They're using very old strategies, and they think you're very young, and so they're like, "Okay, we're just gonna, we're gonna do that thing where we would eat a whole box of Twinkies." Right?
Yeah. And when you do the session and they realize like, "Oh, you're an adult. Oh, you've been through therapy. Oh, you can tolerate your feelings," Right? Then you can start to maybe work your way out of it, when it's happening.
Participant: Yeah. It's definitely a journal prompt for my future journaling, definitely. Thank you.
Participant: Great questions, Everett. Oh my gosh, you're already in the trance. The trance has taken over. So when I'm, when the takes over, I'm already in front of the food that I've chosen. And it's, it... I know. I thought the other two were the Comfort and the Rebel were more me, but hey, this is equally me. All three are equally me. And it offers the actual food is offering me the joy of crunch. Crunch is a really important... I need to know I'm eating the food, so the crunch is there. I'm not choosing flour-and-sugar food, though sometimes it's ultra-processed, which is not one of the two main things, but I have a problem with fat and, crunch, so you know where that leads to. And I'm aware. I have this other pleasurable sensation, which I'm not, I don't feel in connection with a lot of my emotions in a body form, but in the moment I've got this lovely sensation of crunch, this activity that totally distracts me from where I was the moment before in a difficult...
You, the, this, the, this is so true. And, My body knows what to choose and how to chew. I don't have to think about it. It just knows where to go. They're not there. Offline. When you say offline, I get it. And the voice says, "Atta girl. Isn't this sensation wonderful? Am I so grateful that I've got teeth, that I've got this love of crunch? Now you feel better. Now let's find, see if we've got something else to follow it up with." Which leads into the ongoing... But this makes, this whole trance resonates deeply. I get it.
Everett: Yeah. It's, it's, And isn't it interesting how there can be one aspect of eating that really turns someone on, like- is really the thing, And there, and it's different, for each of us.
Participant: And it could be healthy food. But it's for the wrong reason. For the-
Participant: Well, I'd like, maybe some prompts or something. I feel loneliness and boredom, and I'm a night owl. And what I really realized is there's nobody that I could talk to when I have more alertness and more need. And those are the two feelings that I feel when I can't really connect with anybody because my time zone is too far afield. Well, that's what helps me, I mean, prompts me to get into some of these escape mechanisms
Everett: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Well, the good news is you're clear about it. Right, I mean, it sounds like you haven't solved it.
Participant: Well, I'm glad to be able to... Really glad to be able to know what my game is. Now just what to do about it.
Everett: Yeah, that is the thing, Maybe journaling, maybe some deep thinking, maybe talking about it with your friends, And 'cause I do notice that, I don't know. I feel like we're, we're so. There's, there's something they say about addiction that like, in, with addiction your life becomes all about one thing, right? And then without addiction, your life is about lots of things. And I, and I have noticed that sometimes when people are talking about their one thing, that, they're kind of trapped in it. Like, they can't, they can't, they can't cast their thinking out beyond it, 'cause they've been doing it so long. They can't even imagine maybe there's something else out there, Or maybe, because the thing you're doing lights you up so much that nothing else seems In comparison, nothing else seems as good. So the, so the ideas they come up with are like, "No, that's not as good." But yeah, maybe journaling, right? Maybe journaling or,
Participant: Well, I have noticed that I'm doing reruns of some things on Netflix. I really get a kick out of Grace and Frankie, series on Netflix. So I guess that is so entertaining, and the lines are so clever in it that I've got a sort of a new amusement for late night viewing. Yeah. But I think it would be... I will- I'm challenged to think of something besides TV. But that's too easy a thing to get focused on. Well,
Everett: If it works, it works.
Participant: It's working, but it'll come to an end, so thank you. I guess it's good to know exactly what my problem is and to keep searching for people in California or some other place where the time zones are more accommodating to my need on the East Coast when I... I wake up at night. That's when I feel more alert, and there's also more less, fewer disruptions, so, under my circumstances. So thanks. I'm glad to see there are so many people online today.
Everett: Yeah. Me too. It's fun.
Participant: Good crowd.
Participant: I have a lot of work to do in this space, especially around the, Oblivionator. I looked at the questions there, to ask, what am I trying not to feel right now and name the real thing the food is numbing me from. I have to tell you honestly, that scares me. Like, the tears are right there. The word that came up was unwantedness. So I don't know where that comes from. But food is always there. It's always a comfort. Though it's not necessarily Bright Line food It's where I've always gone because it was always there. It never questioned anything. So I really need to sit with this. It's, it's a really tough one. Yeah. I think of all three, this is the toughest one.
Everett: It makes sense, right? Yeah. This is the one that for... Forces you to flee, right? The feelings are But you have a name-
Participant: Know that you're already, you're already in it before you even realize it. So how are you to go and go back and say, "What the hell just happened?" Like, it got me there. That's the Part where I lose. I get a lot of darkness, a lot of, shadows, a lot of fear. How do you go to there to be able to start working forward again? This is where this work is so beautiful, but it's very scary
Everett: Takes courage. Absolutely.
Participant: Yeah. So that's where I'm at right now.
Everett: Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you for articulating that so well
Participant: This was really profound for me, and I realized a couple things One is, nighttime eating is my place, but I realize it's not just nighttime eating, it's nighttime anything except going to sleep, and I've had that since I was tiny. Like, I didn't wanna go to sleep, I didn't wanna go to sleep. And so one of the thoughts that I had when I was doing this is that if I try to pause it for myself, oh, instead of nighttime eating, I'm gonna like sit and see what feelings I'm avoiding. Like, my nighttime self is probably like not the person to give that job to. Like, that's just making it twice as hard. Like, not only am I gonna not eat, but I'm gonna sit and face these feelings I've been avoiding since I was three?
Like, probably not a good idea. So, I just made some notes like, stop having this formulation. Like, it's like, "Don't eat something, exercise." I'm like, no, it's hard enough to not eat something. I should also exercise? And so just realizing like that's the moment where I have to be like so gentle to myself because whatever this dynamic I've had since I was really tiny of being like, just afraid to go to sleep. Just really afraid to go to sleep, and I've always had it. And so, I can do crafts projects till three in the morning. I could be doing a lot of things. I might not even be eating. But that's one is I recognize like that's the moment to actually offer maybe a better quality comfort than like a psychotherapy session, to myself.
And so actually, before you even offered the prompt, I started writing a note to myself, like what not to do and why not to do it as like a love note from my like, right in this moment, I have Self-energy, and I could leave myself a note that I'I know where I'm gonna be tonight at nine o'clock, right? I know where I could leave a note like that and just like, "Here's what not to do, and here's why not to do it," 'cause that just goes out the window because I think that the feelings that get unmasked at night, like they're kinda there all the time. It's not like some crazy new thoughts come in like, "Oh, it doesn't matter," And it's not crazy new thoughts. It's the deep feeling of agitation that's there.
So leaving myself a note, like some- someone knew you were gonna be in difficulty, and she left you a note. Yeah. Somebody knew you were gonna have trouble. And my last thing I'll just say is that I sometimes, like in those moments, I don't know how to make it better, but in those moments, I forget that I do know how to make it worse. And if I just left myself a note, okay, but you know that this will just make it worse, right? So if you don't know how to make it better, like get in bed and watch Netflix, which I never do. Like just do that. That's okay. But don't do this 'cause this is just gonna make it worse. So really helpful. Thank you.
Everett: Note to evening self, don't make it worse. Oh, boy. Talk about a trance, right? Like that late night persona, right? And I feel, and those of us that have, intimate partners, like, don't you, don't you see your partner's late night persona in kind of a kind of detail that they don't see? Right? Like. But yeah, like that person that goes to sleep is not the same one that wakes up, I think for most all of us. And, yeah. Maybe that's, boy, that could be a whole... Maybe I'll do a teaching on the late night self trance, Parts trance. Yeah.
Participant: Well, every- I sort of feel is this one is, doesn't relate to me that much I've always felt, and I... You did, your initial, segment on the trances I found so fascinating, and then I did your quiz, and actually took your quiz, your original quiz a couple of times, and I still go back to Comfort. So I but actually all of it's very relative. And one of the other things, too, it's not necessarily always food. It can be other things. And for me, I have a feeling that for comfort, and maybe then there is a verge of escapism, is I go to, I go and buy something online. So, but I was trying to figure out if the escapism could be with shopping, but I didn't really think it was either. So I've been really working on it, and your questions are... But I thought your questions are relative to, I think, all of the trances
Everett: Oh, yeah. Yeah, and I mean, the, we all have lots of ways that we escape, comfort and rebel, It was interesting. I was on, I was asking, one of the AI systems, like, if I were to focus on another addiction that's, like, really close to food, right? As a way of, using the same system to help other people. And the one that they felt was the closest was, shopping addiction. Was shopping. It just, like, everything would just trans- translate over really easily. With the Indulger, the control, all of it. And, So yeah. Yeah, and it makes sense to me that not everyone would have, I mean, you might be able to find moments, of intensity. But, I don't necessarily think everyone yeah, I think people have a dominant trance. You know?
Participant: See, I don't, I don't feel that I get lost in it. I am, I'm now really, I'm very much aware, and I thought your 90-second, three-minute thing if you're, if you do go to the fridge, it is really useful. And so I don't go into a trance of just binge eating per se or escapism. I'm, I'm checking myself- very quickly. Like, okay, if I feel I'm going off-kilter-
Everett: Yeah. No, that's good. You've got an internal,
Participant: But is that my manager?
Everett: Your what?
Participant: It's a very strong manager. I think I have a very strong manager.
Everett: Yeah. Yeah, that's, that's interesting, right? Like The manager-driven versus firefighter-driven you know, how it might relate, like who, So all right. Well, thank you.
Participant: Okay. Yeah, I definitely have this trance, and it's a I think it's a firefighter trance for me. Because I was telling myself, "It doesn't matter. I don't care about the food plan. I need this now." This now. So those are the thoughts that, and I comforted myself by saying, "I'll get back to the plan later," Which was absolutely true, and I had done that. But, I'm very familiar with this Part, and I don't know how to, And I don't even feel the need to overcome it because it only comes up once in a while. And it's usually when I really need something.
Everett: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, that is the other way to manage it, right? If it's something that happens occasionally, and it, and it helps, yeah, maybe it's not something that, you have to worry about.
Participant: Well, it's a very, scary kind of Part because I... There's no logic that gets to it. So I'm really not sure of how to interrupt it.
Everett: Yeah. Yeah, that's, that's probably work you're gonna do not while you're in it, not while you're,
Participant: I don't know if this is considered a healthy way to escape or not so healthy, but I was, last night I was, watching some YouTube video, like travel videos from around the world, and it just felt like escape. And I was like, "Well, maybe that's a healthier way than other ways to numb out, to escape and leave." And, so anyway, I just-
Everett: That, thanks for sharing that. 'Cause I've been, like in these conversations I've been, wanting to pick up like tips and, but I think, I think watching like that desire to escape, also, who might like that is your Rebel, right? Like your Rebel that's feeling like hemmed in and trapped.
Participant: So what would you say if I'm watching, Hallmark romantic movies every... What's your take on that one?
Everett: That's escape, for sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, and if you, and if you like those, then you like their formula, I'm sure they're, I'm sure they're crafted very intentionally.
Participant: Oh, no, they're so bad.
Everett: That's part of their charm, right? So Hallmark, rom-coms, right? And travel shows. Escape without calories.
Participant: Netflix, funny comedians, female comedians on Netflix- is pretty good. Laughter is pretty good.
Everett: Laughter's good, right? And like, and like laughter with like some truth bombs, some irony, right? Like, yeah
Thank you for listening to The Peaceful Eating Way Podcast. If something landed for you today, take a minute to write it down before you move on. You'll find a free one-page practice sheet for every episode and the free Food Trance quiz at peacefuleatingway.com/companion.
