Eating Issues

  • Do you overeat to soothe yourself when you are upset?
  • When you lose weight, do you always gain it back?
  • Is food the only love you get?
  • When you intend to eat just a couple cookies, do you finish the whole box?
  • Is most of your day spent obsessing about food?
  • Do you feel ashamed of yourself after binge eating?
  • Do you binge and purge?
  • Do you obsess about your body and weight?
This corresponds to the Indulger and Food Controller Patterns. Click each pattern for more information.
XThe Indulger Pattern involves overeating and often obsessing about food. Your overeating is driven by unconscious or unresolved emotional issues. Even if you love the taste of certain foods and revel in the sensuality of taste, overeating comes from a deeper psychological place. It is an attempt to soothe yourself, to meet needs for nurturing, or to distract or numb you so you won't feel painful emotions that are coming to the surface.

If you have the Indulger Pattern, you may be overweight and feel shame about the way you look. You may binge at times and obsess about food and weight. You may eat food that isn't good for you, or perhaps your eating dulls your energy.

XThe Food Controller tries to regulate your eating when it thinks it isn't good for you or might be dangerous. It believes that without its efforts, you will be out of control and ruin your life. This can result in being obsessed with food, worrying about your weight and your figure, feeling bad about your eating habits, going on diets, making resolutions, or feeling shame about lapses in meeting your eating goals.

The Food Controller may be rigid and punitive. It may have fixed and precise standards for how you should eat. The biggest problem with the Food Controller is that it may try to enforce these standards by attacking and shaming you when you fail to measure up to them. Even if the Food Controller wants what’s best for you, it often goes about this in a harsh, punitive way. It may have learned this strategy from the way your parents tried to control you as a child.


You can transform your Eating Issues
and develop healthy eating habits.

Self-Therapy Journey is an interactive online tool
for resolving psychological issues such as Eating Issues.
With Self-Therapy Journey, you can develop Conscious Consumption, which means you can...
  • Stop eating when you are full.
  • Know the difference between hunger and your other needs.
  • Eat a healthy diet.
  • Lose weight -- and keeping it off!
  • Be relaxed around food.
  • Nurture yourself in a loving way
  • Enjoy eating without overdoing it.
  • Give yourself caring and pleasure in a variety of ways.
This will ultimately lead to…
  • Feeling good about yourself
  • Feeling vibrant and attractive
  • Being healthy and fit
  • Feeling confident in social settings
Click here for more information.

You can create a personalized practice
for activating the Conscious Consumption Capacity in your life.

Learn How Self-Therapy Journey Works with the Indulger Pattern

Overeating Psychology Quiz
Click here to take a quiz to discover the underlying psychological dynamics behind your overeating.

Eating Issues Email Sequence
Click here to receive an email sequence on changing your eating dynamics and behavior. You will receive an email every few days describing a step in the change process for eating issues, illustrated with a person's story. 

What People Are Saying

Current weight-loss programs appeal to our fantasies about fast and easy change and don’t address the emotional, behavioral, and cognitive restructuring that is required to sustain your target weight. Dr. Jay Earley has created an online program, Self-Therapy Journey, to help us understand and modify common eating patterns, such as emotional eating to soothe ourselves, self-berating thoughts about overeating, and “zoning out” so that we aren’t aware of what we eat.  No other weight management program exists that even attempts to address these core psychological patterns.

The system includes an evidence-based psychotherapy called Internal Family Systems, which is user friendly and includes mindfulness and meditation. This makes Self-Therapy Journey a comprehensive interactive online tool for managing weight.  If you can’t afford individual therapy and want help on your own time-frame, this may be the journey for you.

--Denise Ray, MSW, LGSW

Eating Issues Webinar
Click here to get this two-hour webinar with Jay Earley and Bonnie Weiss. Learn about the underlying psychology behind Eating Issues. Do an IFS guided meditation on your Eating part. Jay also demonstrates how to use Self-Therapy Journey to transform Eating Issues. 

Self Therapy Journey is a unique tool, giving you the power to take charge of disordered eating. You can be confident of getting to the root of the issue, not just dealing with the symptom—excessive weight gain—but the emotional roots.  You are not judged but rather given a sense of hope. Anyone who has struggled to gain control of their eating will recognize the different patterns involved—the Indulger, the Food Controller, and particularly the Foggy Pattern, which seem to be conspire against us being able to tackle eating issues. With Self-Therapy Journey, you can be confident that no stone will be left unturned. You will see the dynamics of the different parts and their roles in your internal struggle. With this understanding, you can have true hope of finally regaining a healthy relationship with food.
--Alison Watson, BA Hons Counseling, MBACP

I felt like the scale was never going to budge from 207.  Overeating and my battle with the scales has been with me since grade school and I just turned 61.  I knew in my heart that the issues were emotional.  I felt compelled to eat in order to quell pain, anger, and loneliness. Then I started with Internal Family Systems Therapy (IFS).  After two significant unburdenings and the support found through a phone class, my whole attitude toward food changed. I am now able to pass by tables loaded with yummies and not give them a second thought. Food is now a way to fuel my body, not a way to silence the internal screams. This morning I weighed in at 171, a weight I haven’t reached in over 25 years.
--L.M.

Self-Therapy Journey is a powerful tool
for transforming your Indulger Pattern
and cultivating your Conscious Consumption Capacity.

But that's not all!
It works with many other psychological issues as well. It will help you work through a wide variety of patterns and develop many different capacities.

You Can...

  • Take command of your personal growth
  • Work at your own pace in your own time
  • Heal your emotional wounds
  • Gain self-confidence and courage
  • Open to intimacy and love
  • Feel hope and optimism about your life
    - each and every day
Discover how the powerful inner process of Self-Therapy Journey can change your life. It is an interactive web application that includes...

  • Check lists for understanding behavior, feelings, and motivations
  • Stories
  • Guided meditations for healing emotional wounds
  • Journaling
  • Customized reports
  • Personalized homework practices for behavior change
  • An online community for support
  • Systematic tracking of your progress
  • And much more

You can have the life you have always dreamed of,
at a tiny fraction of the cost of therapy.

Learn How Self-Therapy Journey Works with the Indulger Pattern

Self-Therapy Journey is brilliant. It's been an absolutely great experience to use it. Every time I had a thought like, "What about this?" there was something in the online system to handle it.

-- Athena Murphy


I think Self-Therapy Journey is immensely helpful. You can go as deep as you want.

-- Elizabeth Moulton,
Clinical Psychologist


It is impressive that this tool was so helpful to me considering that I have done ample self-work for over 25 years.

-- Faith Curtin, MA
Clinical Psychology

Working with Self-Therapy Journey will help you:

  • Dramatically increase your self-awareness
  • Understand your partner's behavior (and that of other people close to you)
  • Recognize when you are caught in self-defeating patterns - and change them to positive actions - right in the moment
  • Significantly lower your level of stress and reactivity
  • Be free of the constricting hold of old emotional wounds
  • Work through your fears so you can live authentically and courageously
  • Become emotionally stable and healthy, leading to peace and satisfaction
  • Enhance your ability for love, creativity, personal power, and living a life of purpose

Hi,

I have been a psychotherapist for 40 years. I have helped hundreds of therapy clients to resolve troubling psychological issues and find love, success, and peace. And hundreds more people have used Self-Therapy Journey to make similar changes. My self-published book Self-Therapy has sold nearly 20,000 copies, and I constantly get emails from readers telling me how much the book has changed their lives.

I created Self-Therapy Journey as a place for you to do your own inner work. I want to make psychological healing available to a wide range of people. When you enroll, I will be personally available to support you in using it. I hold free teleseminars and webinars regularly on Self-Therapy Journey. Please join me.

Try Self-Therapy Journey so you can experience how powerful it is and how easy it is to use.

Jay Earley, PHD

Introductory Video with Jay Earley

Learn How Self-Therapy Journey Works with the Indulger Pattern

Self-Therapy Journey is based on
two comprehensive and powerful systems!



Click here to see a larger version of this chart.

1. The Pattern System®

The Pattern System is a breakthrough in understanding personality, a Periodic Table for psychology, created by Jay Earley, PhD.

It is a systematic approach to understanding your personality oriented toward psychological healing and personal growth, Self-Therapy Journey contains about 25 patterns, which are ways of behaving and feeling that you might want to change, such as people-pleasing, perfectionism, self-criticism, or avoiding intimacy.

Self-Therapy Journey helps you transform each pattern into a healthy capacity, such as assertiveness, ease, self-esteem, or cooperation. It also allows you to heal 14 different emotional wounds from childhood, such as being deprived or judged or feeling unlovable.

Everyone is unique! And the Pattern System recognizes this. You aren't put into a box. You get to understand the details of your particular personality.

The Pattern System provides the psychological content and IFS provides the therapy process.

Click here to learn more about Pattern System.

2. Internal Family Systems Therapy

Internal Family Systems Therapy (IFS) is on the cutting edge of psychotherapy. It allows you to understand your psyche in a new way and create deep, powerful healing of old emotional wounds and trauma. IFS is a recognized, proven method for individual psychotherapy with a robust training program and thousands of certified therapists.

IFS enables you to understand each of the parts of your psyche, sometimes called sub-personalities. You can think of them as little people inside you. Each has its own perspective, feelings, memories, goals, and motivations. For example, one part of you might be trying to lose weight, and another part might want to eat whatever you want.

We all have many different parts, and we each have a spiritual center, the Self, which is compassionate, understanding, and grounded. Through IFS you can learn to stay in Self, develop a relationship with each of your parts, and heal them.

The key is that the your healing comes from you! This means that you can do IFS on your own, without a therapist, which is what makes Self-Therapy Journey possible.

Click here to watch an interview of Jay Earley on IFS by Tami Simon of Sounds True.

Support and Witnessing

You can work on Self-Therapy Journey completely on your own, or you can find a buddy or mentor from our online community to witness your work and support you in making changes in your life. You can also find a therapist guide from our list of professionals who will guide you in using Self-Therapy Journey and provide additional therapy if you want it.

In our online community, you can join a group of people who are dealing with the same issue. You can share with them your progress in your Self-Therapy Journey work and get answers to questions.

Learn How Self-Therapy Journey Works with the Indulger Pattern

I was amazed with the ease of use of STJ and how quickly it helped to identify areas in which I was having difficulty. The guided mediations helped me understand the underlying intention behind my pattern. The homework practice turned out beautifully, allowing me to be more cooperative with others. I learned to re-state confusing feelings in an accepting and loving way. I can now let go of those parts that are no longer serving me.

-- Colleen A.


The greatest benefit of Self-Therapy Journey is its ability to reveal the hidden motivations behind our limiting patterns. I recommend it highly.

-- Nick Lal,
Personal Development
Practitioner


The problems that I worked on using Self-Therapy Journey have been resolved. The Pattern System has jump-started a lot of my clients in understanding their issues at the beginning of their work.

-- Cathy Duke
Licensed Counselor

Have other issues you need help with?
Wondering if Self-Therapy Journey deals with them?
Click here to find out
Are you a therapist, coach, or other professional,
wondering about using Self-Therapy Journey with you clients?
Click here for all the information you need

Learn How Self-Therapy Journey Works with the Indulger Pattern


XWith the Conscious Consumption Capacity, you have the ability to stay grounded in your body and maintain awareness of your process of eating. You are aware of the bodily cues that you need something, and you can sense what you need. If you are hungry, you can tell what you are hungry for. You aren't conflicted about satisfying your need, and you can tell when you are full. 

Therefore, you can make appropriate choices about healthy eating and nourish yourself in a loving ways without being overly concerned about food. You don't eat when you're not hungry, you don't overeat, and you choose mostly healthy foods.

You believe that you have the right to take care of yourself and to give yourself pleasure in healthy ways. You know that you deserve to be nurtured and taken care of. You approach eating and other forms of self-care with open anticipation. You are responsive to stimulation through all of your senses--looking at, smelling, cooking or eating food. You also enjoy other forms of pleasure such as listening to music, being outdoors, being gently touched, stretching your body, athletics, dancing, and sexuality. 

Because you can fully take in and enjoy pleasure, you don't have to engage in it impulsively or overdo it. Your needs get satisfied in a natural, sensuous way and then your attention moves on to other things.