This episode and article contain discussions around emotional eating, coping behaviours, alcohol, trauma, nervous system dysregulation and mental health. Please engage gently. This content is educational in nature and reflects personal experience and clinical perspective. It is not intended to replace medical, psychological, or mental health support. If you are struggling, please reach out to a qualified healthcare professional or contact an eating disorder support service in your region.
What are we actually starving for underneath our coping behaviours?
That is the question at the heart of this conversation. Because the behaviour, whatever form it takes, was never really the point. It was always just the thing that worked. The fastest available exit when the pressure got too high and there was nowhere else for it to go.
Melissa Beaton is a clinical and forensic psychologist, breathwork practitioner and founder of Zenso House. She is known for going to the places other therapists won't. The shadows. The parts we avoid and cover up. Her work blends deep psychodynamic therapy, nervous system work and breathwork to help people stop performing and start actually living.
This conversation goes deep. It gets personal. And I think it is one of the most honest conversations I have had on this podcast.
Why Insight Alone Is Never Enough
Melissa came into clinical work the way many of us do, through traditional training that gave her an excellent intellectual map of the psyche and very few tools for actually moving anything. She could help people understand their patterns. She could not always help them change them.
What she noticed, and what drew her toward a more body based approach, was the gap. The woman who could articulate her entire history, trace every pattern back to its origin, explain exactly why she did what she did, and still find herself doing it anyway. Insight alone does not change behaviour. Something else has to happen.
What she found, and what has become the foundation of her work, is that the body is always communicating something. Every session, every moment, there is data available about where the anxiety is at, what the person is defending against, what is trying to surface and what is being avoided. Learning to read that, and bring it into the work, was where things started to shift.
The Pathway From Feeling to Behaviour
One of the most clarifying things Melissa explains in this conversation is the pathway. The actual sequence of events that leads from a feeling to a coping behaviour.
It goes like this. A feeling rises, often something like anger or grief or fear in relationship. Before it can be fully felt, anxiety kicks in. The anxiety is the body's response to the perceived danger of having that feeling. Then a coping behaviour arrives to manage the anxiety and distance from the feeling.
The crucial thing is that most of this happens below conscious awareness. The person does not experience themselves as feeling angry, becoming anxious, and then reaching for food. They just feel vaguely yuck, and then they reach for something. The pathway is invisible until you start to look for it.
And this is why addressing the behaviour alone never works. The behaviour is the last step in a much longer sequence. Removing it without addressing what comes before just means the pressure finds another exit.
The Body as Data
Melissa distinguishes between two levels of anxiety in the body, and I think this is genuinely useful to understand.
The first is anxiety that discharges in the voluntary muscles. Sighing, muscular tension, a general sense of the system contracting. This is a sign that feelings are rising and the nervous system is within a manageable range. At this level, body based practices like grounding, body scans or progressive muscle relaxation can be helpful. But often what is needed most is simply to slow down and notice what the body is communicating.
The second is anxiety that discharges into the involuntary muscles. This is a higher level of activation, and it shows up as things like digestive symptoms, reflux, a racing heart, shaking. This is the body in a fear response to emotional material. At this level, regulation needs to come first, through something like an ice pack, intense physical movement, or the dive reflex, before any deeper work can happen. Pushing into processing at this level of activation without regulating first can actually worsen symptoms over time.
This is the piece that gets missed constantly, in therapy rooms and in everyday life. We try to think our way through when we are in a physiological state that simply cannot process in that way.
What We Are Actually Starving For
When I asked Melissa what she thinks people are actually hungry for underneath their coping behaviours, she spoke about hyperindependence. The woman who carries everything alone. Who cannot receive. Who will find a way to manage without asking for help, even when help is available and genuinely needed.
This, she says, is almost always rooted in an early learning that people will not be there. That closeness is risky. That receiving opens you up to hurt. So the system adapts. It becomes extraordinarily capable of self-sufficiency and extraordinarily defended against the vulnerability of needing anyone.
The healing, she says, is not intellectual. You cannot think your way into being able to receive. You have to practice it. In small ways, with safe people, letting the anxiety rise and staying with it. Letting the nervous system learn, through repeated experience, that receiving is not dangerous. That closeness does not always end in hurt. That you are allowed to need things and have them.
Melissa shared something from a recent retreat in Bali that stopped me. She found herself genuinely leaning on her co-facilitators in a way she had never let herself do before. She cried at the end of the night receiving the care from the people she was working alongside. She called it one of the most healing experiences of her life. Not a breakthrough in a session. Just someone letting themselves be held for once.
The Good Girl Template and What Gets Mistaken for Compliance
Something Melissa said that has stayed with me is this. She used to mistake her clients' compliance for a good working relationship. The woman who said yes to everything, who was the perfect client, who never pushed back, who did exactly what was asked. Melissa eventually realised she had done the same thing herself in her own life, in therapy, in friendships, with educators. And that what looked like agreeableness was actually anxiety.
The good girl learns early that compliance keeps her safe. That expressing disagreement or having needs or taking up too much space risks the connection she depends on. So she becomes agreeable. And then she becomes a very agreeable client. And therapy, instead of disrupting the pattern, can inadvertently reinforce it if the therapist does not notice.
Owning the Shadow
We talked for a long time about the parts of ourselves we have been taught to disown. The angry part. The competitive part. The part that sometimes wants to say something unkind. The part that is jealous, or selfish, or scared, or petty.
Melissa is honest about her own shadow. About reactions she has had that she did not fully understand until someone reflected them back to her. About the process of being able to hold those parts with the same care she holds the traditionally nice ones. About jealousy showing up more recently in her life and being willing to sit with it and ask what it is actually showing her.
This, she says, is what shadow work is. Not becoming a worse person by acknowledging the darker parts. Becoming more whole by stopping the war against them. Because the energy that goes into suppressing and disowning those parts is enormous. And when it is freed up, something else becomes possible.
In IFS terms, this is the work of unburdening. When a part no longer has to hold what it has been carrying, it gets to be something different. The part that was protecting through anger becomes the part that knows how to hold a boundary. The part that was protecting through compliance gets to actually choose when to say yes and when to say no.
Connection Is the Cure
Melissa talks about connection as the cure, and she means it in the fullest sense. Connection to self. Connection to others. Connection to purpose.
What strikes me about how she talks about it is that it is not abstract. It is not a concept or a framework. It is the actual lived experience of being in relationship with yourself and with other people in a way that is honest and embodied and real. It is the moment she let her co-facilitators hold her. It is the small stretch of asking a friend for a favour and letting the anxiety be there without running from it. It is being willing to be seen in the parts you have always kept hidden and finding out that the connection survives.
This is what is on the other side of the coping behaviours. Not the absence of struggle. A different relationship with it. One where you are not alone in it. Where you do not have to manage it all by yourself anymore. Where the pressure that has been building quietly for years finally has somewhere real to go.
Find Melissa at www.zensohouse.com or on Instagram at @melissabeaton.psychologist
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