What does hunger mean to me?

• No one loves me
• My needs will not be met
• I am all alone

At some point this past year I realized that I was afraid of being hungry!  How strange!  It made me really nervous and panicky if I thought I was going to be or on the verge of being hungry.  How did this happen?  Well, because I will analyze every behavioral or emotional issue I can get my hands on, I traced this irrational fear back to the first 6 months of my life.  I lived in an orphanage, you know.  So what would a state orphanage have been like?  Would I have had one-on-one attention from a caregiver or would I have gotten a bottle and a diaper change at whatever time the work schedule called for it?  When I was hungry and cried, did anybody come?  My mom said that when she adopted me at 6 months old, I never cried and was on a very tight schedule - went to bed at 7:00 p.m. and stayed there all night with nary a peep.  Did I learn that if I cried no one would come?  When I was hungry, no one cared?

Of course, I have no idea if this scenario is anywhere remotely accurate and really, does it even matter.  I know Freud was all about those first few years of life but if you trace back every dysfunctional thought pattern or behavior it really just gives you an excuse to keep doing it.  My mother and father abandoned me so....I have an excuse for every bad thing I have ever done or will ever do.

To counteract some self-sabotaging thoughts that I have had, I practice speaking the following confirmations out loud several times a day:

• Hunger is never an emergency
• Hunger is only mildly uncomfortable.
• I can tolerate hunger.
• Hunger will come and go.

When my belly gets empty and starts to growl, it doesn't mean that no one loves me.  It just means that at some point in the near future, I need to eat.  No big!  Really wish I would have figured that one out before the age of 43!!!

I spent so many years of my life trying to figure out the psychology of me.  I don't know if it was necessary or not but I do know now that my needs are better served by focusing on the here and now and the future.

Joyce Meyer says that forgiveness is the beginning of all healing.  So maybe it is necessary to look back, examine the wounds, name them and forgive where necessary.  Then forge ahead.

Philippians 3:12-14 says

...but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me.  Brothers, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it.  But one thing I do: forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.