You were never broken. You were biological. I'm Sonja Irina Johansen, and for decades, I believed my struggle with food was a character flaw, until I learned the science that said otherwise. This is Turn Down the Noise, the show about why we really reach for food and the gentler way through. Keep your plan. Keep your practitioner. Keep your medication. This is company, and not instead.
You Can't Numb Just the Hard Parts.
I want to start with a word we usually say with a little shame in our voice: numbing. I was numbing out. I ate to numb. We say it like a confession, like it's the worst thing we did, and I want to turn that word over in my hands today and show you the other side of it, because I think we've had it backwards.
Here's what numbing actually was. There were feelings too big to hold, grief nobody helped you carry, fear with nowhere to go, a loneliness that would have swallowed you whole, and food, the soothing kind, could take all of that and tuck it into a corner quietly so you could get through the day, so you could function, so you could survive things you had no other way to survive.
I'll tell you mine. There was a long stretch of my working life when I was carrying a lot, and I could do my job. I could show up and perform and get it all done because of food. Food was holding the parts of me that had no other place to go. That was not weakness. That's mercy. Your body found a way to keep you going when nothing else would.
So before we say one more word about it, I'd love for you to do something with me. Think back to a season when food carried you through, and just say in your head or out loud, "Thank you," not for the mess, for the carrying.
Now, here's the cost, and it's a quiet one, and it's heartbreaking. You can't numb just the hard parts.
The same mercy that tucked the grief into the corner dimmed the rest of the room too. The joy got quieter. The pleasure got quieter, and the smallest, most important signals got turned down right along with them. I'm hungry. I'm full. This is what my body actually needs. This is what I want. We didn't just lose the ability to feel the hard things. We lost the ability to feel, period.
I remember the day after my divorce, I mean the literal day after. I stood in my house, and it was finally mine, and I asked myself a simple question, "What do I want?" And I had no idea, none, not for dinner, not for the afternoon, not for my life. The signal had been turned down so long I couldn't hear it at all.
If you've ever stood in front of an open refrigerator with no idea what you're hungry for or whether you're hungry at all, that's this. This is not a broken body. That's a body that's been on mute.
Now, here's the part almost nobody tells you, and it may shift how you see your own last few years. When people try to stop numbing, they usually do it by taking the soothing food away, a plan, a list, rules, and they expect to feel calmer, cleaner, finally in control.
But think about what actually happens. The food was the thing tucking the feelings into the corner. Take the food away, and every one of those feelings comes roaring back at once. On a strict plan, you're not numbed. You're flooded.
And look at what that plan asks of you, right in the middle of the flood: weigh it, measure it, time it, track it, resist it, hold the line. The stress of that alone is enormous. So now you've got the whole backlog of feelings rushing in and a full-time job of vigilance stacked on top of it. No wonder it felt unbearable. No wonder you couldn't hold it. Anyone would struggle under that.
And there's one more layer here, and I think it's the most tender one. Most of us numbed for years. I numbed for decades. And when you numb that long, you never get to practice feeling. You never build the muscle. So when the feelings finally come back, they don't come back gently, one at a time with instructions. They come all at once with no training and no practice. And we look at ourselves and say, "I can't handle my emotions."
But that was never true. You can. You just never got the practice. That's not a character flaw. It's a skill you haven't built yet, and skills can be built. In a lot of ways, you might be a toddler at this, and I mean that with so much tenderness. It's all new. A toddler isn't ashamed of falling down while she learns to walk. She's just early. You're early. That's all.
So what do we do? Do we rip the soothing away and white-knuckle through the flood? No.
Here's the sentence I most want you to carry out of this episode, so I'm going to say it twice. We don't take the comfort away. We widen what can provide it. We don't take the comfort away. We widen what can provide it.
Food has been doing an enormous job all by itself. It regulated you when you were dysregulated. It helped you step away from what you didn't have the tools to face. It distracted you when a feeling got too close. That's not one crutch. That's a whole nervous system's worth of tools, and food was doing all of them at once. Of course it was hard to put down.
So the work is slowly bringing in the other things nature meant to share that job: a walk, a real conversation with someone who gets it, a few minutes of quiet, a hand on your own heart, or, if you're my neighbor at four in the morning, me belting Whitney Houston at full volume, which is my own personal form of joy, and I make no apologies.
One at a time, small, bird by bird, as Anne Lamott would say. And here's what happens as the shelf fills up. Food doesn't have to carry it all anymore. The pull eases, not because you fought it, but because it finally has some help. And slowly, the volume comes back up. The joy comes back. The pleasure comes back. And one day, you'll be standing in your kitchen, and you'll hear it, quiet but clear. I'm actually full. Or, I'm not hungry. I'm tired. That's the signal coming back online. That's you coming back.
So if you're in the flood right now, if you set some foods down and the feelings came in like weather, I want you to hear this. Nothing is wrong with you. This is what it looks like when a body that's been on mute starts to feel again. It's loud because it's new. It won't always be this loud, and you don't have to learn it alone. Feeling is a skill we learn in company. That's what the rooms are for. That's what we're doing here.
You were never broken. You were biological. You were carrying a lot for a long time with only one tool. Now we get to add some more.
Thank you for being here. Thank you for listening to me.
Thanks for walking with me today. Everything I make lives at transformwithsonja.com. Until next time, with love and light, Sonja.
