Emotional Eating Therapy in Idaho
Are emotions controlling your eating habits?
Are you turning to food when stressed, sad, or anxious and feeling guilty afterward?
Does food seem like the only comfort when emotions become overwhelming?
You’re not the only one struggling—emotional eating is more common than you think, and it's NOT something to blame yourself for.
The Toll of Emotional Eating
Are you tired of using food to cope with emotions, only to feel worse afterward?
Do you feel stuck in a pattern of overeating, even when you’re not hungry?
Is the weight of guilt and shame around your eating habits wearing you down?
The Emotional Impact
Do you feel disconnected from your body, unsure of how to navigate your feelings without food?
Are you constantly battling the urge to eat when stressed or anxious and unsure how to stop?
Are you feeling exhausted from trying to manage your emotions and cravings at the same time?
Signs of Emotional Eating:
Grabbing snacks or sweets when stressed from work or family life.
Eating to feel better when sad or lonely, even if you're not hungry.
Eating a lot quickly and then feeling guilty or ashamed afterward.
Eating in secret to hide how much you're eating from others.
Turning to food to celebrate good news, even when you’re not hungry.
Eating to avoid dealing with difficult emotions or problems.
Eating at night when you’re bored, feeling anxious, or can’t sleep.
Weight fluctuations due to eating habits.
What is Emotional Eating?
Emotional eating is when you use food to manage or numb your emotions instead of to satisfy your hunger.
This can look like reaching for a bag of chips when stressed, a tub of ice cream when sad, or binging on your favorite comfort food to escape your feelings.
This might feel better at the time, but emotional eating is just a band-aid approach and doesn’t address your unresolved traumas.
Over time, emotional eating can lead to unhelpful eating patterns, low self-esteem, and negative body image.
How do I know if I’m an emotional eater?
Wondering if you might be an emotional eater? Identifying emotional eating can be challenging, but it's an important step toward more helpful habits.
Psychology Today offers a short quiz to help you understand your eating patterns and determine if emotions drive your food choices.
This quick assessment provides insights and can be a useful tool to start addressing emotional eating. Take the quiz here.
It’s Not Your Fault!
Emotional eating is not your fault—it’s a natural response to emotional pain, and it’s often connected to deeper, unresolved trauma.
There is a way out!
With emotional eating therapy, you can begin healing the pain underneath your eating habits and stop using food as a coping mechanism.
How Trauma Impacts Emotional Eating
For many women, emotional eating is tied to trauma. Past experiences, especially from childhood, can leave lasting emotional scars that shape how you handle stress and intense emotions. When your emotions feel too overwhelming to handle, food becomes a way to manage or numb the pain. This can lead to emotional eating patterns that can be difficult to break on your own.
As a trauma therapist, I understand how these patterns develop, and with emotional eating therapy, you can begin to heal, finding more helpful ways to cope with your emotions. By addressing the root cause—your past trauma—you can start to unravel the emotional triggers behind your eating habits. Emotional eating therapy isn’t just about changing how you eat; it’s about healing the pain that’s driving you to use food for comfort.
How Emotional Eating Therapy Can Help You Break the Cycle
Therapy is NOT about blaming you for your struggles. It's about HELPING you understand the connection between your emotions, past experiences, and current eating habits. In emotional eating therapy, we will:
Identify the emotional triggers behind your eating habits.
Process unresolved trauma that might be contributing to your emotional eating with EMDR therapy.
Develop healthier coping mechanisms that don’t rely on food.
Learn to eat intuitively, allowing your body to guide hunger and fullness, not your emotions.
Build a peaceful relationship with yourself and your body.
Emotional Eating Therapy Can Help
As a trauma therapist, I understand that emotional eating is more than just a bad habit—it’s a response to unresolved trauma.
You’re not responsible for this!
You’ve been doing your best to manage overwhelming emotions, and food has been a way to cope when life feels out of control.
Using EMDR therapy, I help you process the trauma at the root of your emotional eating. By working through past painful experiences, we can reduce the triggers that drive your urge to turn to food for comfort.
EMDR therapy helps your brain work through painful memories so they no longer have the same grip on your emotions. This gives you the freedom to break the cycle of emotional eating and find more supportive, compassionate ways to care for yourself.
I provide a warm, non-judgmental space where you can safely share your experiences and begin to heal.
Together, we’ll work on releasing the trauma that has kept you trapped in emotional eating and creating lasting change that brings peace and self-compassion.
I help clients:
Heal the trauma driving your emotional eating patterns.
Break the cycle of emotional eating by understanding the root causes of your eating habits.
Improve your self-worth and confidence so that food no longer controls how you feel about yourself.
Learn to manage your emotions without turning to food.
Develop the ability to eat intuitively, tuning into your body's natural hunger and fullness signals.
Build a healthier relationship with food, free from guilt, shame, or restriction.
Gain tools to cope with stress and difficult emotions without using food as a crutch.
Therapy for Disordered Eating & Body Image isn’t my only service at my Idaho online therapy practice. Other mental health services at Mountain River Therapy include Trauma Therapy for Moms, EMDR Therapy, and Therapy for Disordered Eating & Negative Body Image. Contact me to learn more about how I can help you overcome disordered eating and body image struggles and reclaim your life!
Questions before getting started? Get in touch.
You don’t have to live with the guilt and shame of not feeling in control of your eating or your body. Online therapy can help you heal from past trauma causing disordered eating and negative body image and help you find peace with food and your body. Mountain River Therapy in Idaho specializes in helping women heal from disordered eating and body image issues. To start your counseling journey, follow these simple steps:
Step 1
Contact Mountain River Therapy
Step 2
Meet with Jarae for an intake session.
Step 3
Rediscover the joy of eating foods guilt-free and finally feeling confident in your body.