Who flips that switch?

“You think he's gone? He's not gone. That's the whole point! He's never gone!” Dr. Leo Marvin speaking of his patient, Bob Wiley in “What About Bob?”

Lately I’ve been observing what’s behind that switch. You know the one. Maybe. For me, it connects to two things, blind rage or compulsive eating. There’s a match made in hell, eh?

The overwhelmingly tired soap opera about this phenomenon stars me as myself, whomever that is at the moment, usually a woman on the outside but a disgruntled toddler within. I look as if I’m going about my life doing ‘the next right thing.’ Could be something quite mundane, like catching a nap, even.

My experience is that I go from whatever to waking up in this overwhelming urge to yell my head off or, less belligerently toward passers by, eat anything not nailed down (“Katy bar the door,” as my father might say.) All reason goes flying out the window, and in the case of overeating, I can’t honestly recall at those times why I ever wanted to do anything but eat my way through my kitchen, my neighborhood, my country, and this planet (and not necessarily in that order, either).

In OA, some say this is all the proof we need of Step 1, that we are powerless over food and our lives are unmanageable, if not in and of itself, then as a result. In Zen, we speak of these moments as the experience of becoming identified with a regressed part of ourselves, sometimes referred to as a subpersonality.

For me, it’s the real reason I stick out any self-improvement program. I’ve been haunted by this feeling my whole life and at times I feel like it owns me. Because I get there and see only all the food I can possibly eat my way through along with this unstoppable feeling that I must eat it.

I can buy into the notion that it’s a small, needy part of me confused as to what’s needed to feel taken care of. But not when I’m under its spell. Then it’s just me needing to eat and eat and eat until she’s done. I can blame some tangible things like making my hunger wait too long, or eating a triggering food like wheat thins with just enough of a hint of sweetness to feel an overeating switch inside engage. But there are other factors to, before it comes on, completely unknown to me except for what I infer by how I feel when I’m done overeating.

In Zen we meditate to that we can cultivate the mind of sitting still and seeing without judgment what arises. This compulsion is so perfect for this kind of observation, I know, although I feel blindsided every single time. It is a very counter-intuitive process of in essence waiting for the disturbance to happen so you can watch how it comes about. By disturbance I mean that which takes place mentally and extremely discreetly, to result in a landslide of emotion that did not exist but 5 minutes or 5 seconds before.

"A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone." Henry David Thoreau