Generational denied guilt can manifest in a myriad of ways.  One example is a mother named Sally in a retirement home.  Sally has excess body fat and she’s found sneaking and hording candy bars.  Her diet habits from childhood are still wreaking havoc on her life and health, decades later.  Sally’s mother had an undiagnosed eating disorder with obsessive/compulsive behaviors.  Could Sally be eating sweets to give herself the sweetness of love to counter her feelings of emptiness?

• Picture the adult child in the grip of guilt that eats away at her core. She’s in the trash finding the crumbed cookies she just bought and threw away hoping she could stop eating them.  She can’t stop and, yet, is obsessed with weight loss.

• The adult daughter is now a mother of two daughters six and eight years old.  She tells them both how bad ice cream and refined sugar is for them.  She does everything from making homemade birthday cakes with fruit as sweetening, to never once going to McDonalds.  This mother is repeating the cycle of obsessive/restrictive behaviors towards sugar laden and fattening foods down to the last crumb of a cookie. There is no balance or middle ground just extremes.

Take a guess what might happen when her daughters visit a friend’s house where there are cookies and candy?  Or what do you think happens when her daughters reach their teens with money in their pockets and they’re out with peers?  One of two things can happen to these daughters.

1.  They may use obsessive/compulsive behaviors to restrict their food, experience extreme weight loss, and become like their mother, with an undiagnosed eating disorder.
2.  Or they may overeat and become out of control with their food intake and gain excess body fat.

Either one is devastating to a daughter’s mind/body/and spirit. What’s unique about Dr. Fuller’s approach is that objective viewing is used to access the problem, not blame. The objective here is to see the effects that a mother’s beliefs about food can have on her children and the generations to come.
 Go ahead and review the following list of behaviors to determine where you might be.  Then look at where you want to be and the steps to get there.
Where Might You Be On the Obsessive Compulsive Behavior Eating Cycle?

Note Where You Are using check marks:

Mother’s repressed or denied guilt can cause her to have obsessive/compulsive behaviors.  As role models mothers’ behaviors show their daughters what to do and how to do it.  Many daughters with this type of mother seem to internalize their own guilt and frustration learned from their mother’s behavior by developing eating disorders which revolve around attempts to control weight loss and body fat.