How Childhood Emotional Neglect and Abandonment Fuel Emotional Eating and Addiction in Adulthood

The Hidden Link Between Childhood Emotional Neglect, Abandonment, and Emotional Eating in Adulthood

Introduction

Many women in recovery wonder, “Why do I keep turning to food when I’m stressed or lonely?” The answer is often deeper than lack of willpower or poor eating habits. Emotional eating and addiction are symptoms—often rooted in unresolved childhood trauma, especially abandonment and emotional neglect.

Understanding the invisible wounds from childhood gives you power over the emotional cravings that feel out of control. This blog will explore how childhood abandonment and emotional neglect lay the groundwork for emotional eating, sugar addiction, bingeing, and other compulsive behaviors—and most importantly, how to begin healing.

What Is Childhood Emotional Neglect and Abandonment Trauma?

Childhood Emotional Neglect (CEN) happens when a child’s emotional needs—like comfort, attention, validation, and affection—are consistently overlooked. It’s not always abuse in the traditional sense. It’s often what didn’t happen: no one taught you how to feel safe, process emotions, or ask for what you need.

Abandonment trauma occurs when a caregiver leaves physically (divorce, death, or emotional unavailability) or emotionally withdraws (through addiction, narcissism, or mental illness). Even if your parents were physically present, they might have been emotionally absent.

Both forms of trauma teach a child one core belief: “My needs don’t matter.”

This belief becomes the emotional soil for addiction and emotional eating to grow in adulthood.

How Childhood Trauma Shows Up as Emotional Eating

When a child doesn’t feel safe expressing emotions like sadness, fear, or loneliness, those emotions don’t just disappear. They get internalized, stored in the nervous system, and often numbed through distractions or unhealthy coping mechanisms.

In adulthood, that stored pain can surface through emotional eating:

• You eat when you’re sad because no one taught you how to sit with sadness.

• You binge when you feel invisible because you learned early that food gives you comfort, even if people don’t.

• You crave sugar after conflict because sugar lights up the brain's reward center—temporarily masking the pain.

This pattern isn’t about a lack of discipline—it’s about survival. Emotional eating is often an unconscious way to regulate overwhelming feelings that you were never taught how to process.

The Brain’s Response to Neglect: Why Food Feels Like Love

From a neuroscience perspective, emotional neglect in childhood wires the brain for hyperarousal and emotional dysregulation. As a result:

• You may struggle with anxiety, overthinking, and hypervigilance.

• Your nervous system becomes stuck in “fight or flight” mode.

• You become more susceptible to dopamine-seeking behaviors—like sugar, junk food, alcohol, or compulsive scrolling.

Food—especially sugary, carb-rich comfort food—stimulates dopamine (the brain's “feel good” chemical), creating a sense of temporary safety and pleasure. For trauma survivors, this quick hit of comfort mimics the emotional support they lacked growing up.

But the relief is short-lived, leading to shame, guilt, and more craving—reinforcing the addiction loop.

Emotional Eating Is a Trauma Response—Not a Character Flaw

Let’s be clear: emotional eating is not about greed, gluttony, or laziness. It’s about soothing inner wounds with whatever’s available—because as a child, food may have been the only consistent source of comfort.

Maybe you:

• Were told to “stop crying” or “toughen up.”

• Were left alone to deal with hard feelings.

• Had a parent who only gave you attention when you performed or behaved.

In that environment, emotional repression becomes normal, and emotional intelligence becomes stunted. As adults, we then use external solutions for internal pain—like food, alcohol, shopping, or overworking.

The goal isn’t to shame these patterns but to recognize them as adaptive survival strategies that no longer serve you.

How Abandonment Trauma Triggers Addiction Later in Life

Abandonment trauma often leads to a deep-rooted fear of rejection, loss, and disconnection.

As adults, this shows up as:

• Clingy or avoidant relationships

• People-pleasing to avoid being left

• Chronic loneliness and low self-worth

• Addictions that fill the emotional void

Addictions aren’t just about substances or behaviors—they’re about attempting to control or escape pain. When you haven’t healed the pain of being emotionally or physically abandoned, your adult self may use emotional eating to numb the emptiness or distract from the fear of being unloved.

Signs You May Be Emotionally Eating Due to Trauma

If you resonate with any of these, emotional eating may be tied to childhood trauma:

• You feel anxious, guilty, or out of control after eating.

• You eat when you’re not physically hungry.

• You feel emotionally “full” after eating but still unsatisfied.

• You hide food or eat in secret.

• You crave sugar, carbs, or binge foods during stress or loneliness.

• You fear being abandoned and use food to self-soothe.

Why Traditional Diets Don’t Work for Trauma Survivors

If you’ve tried every diet and nothing sticks, you’re not alone. Most meal plans and weight loss programs don’t address the root emotional cause of overeating. They treat symptoms—calories, carbs, and willpower—but ignore the trauma that created the behavior.

Until you address the emotional hunger underneath the physical hunger, no diet will work long-term.

The Path to Healing: Reparenting, Self-Compassion, and Emotional Safety

Healing emotional eating starts with reparenting yourself—becoming the nurturing presence you didn’t have growing up.

Here are foundational steps:

1. Name the Wound

Acknowledge that your emotional eating has roots in real emotional pain. Journaling, therapy, or trauma-informed coaching can help uncover the earliest experiences of neglect or abandonment.

2. Practice Self-Compassion

Start speaking to yourself like you would a child: “It’s okay to feel this way,” or “You are safe now.” Replacing shame with kindness helps rewire your emotional response.

3. Learn to Feel Your Feelings

Use tools like breathwork, mindfulness, or somatic practices to stay present with uncomfortable emotions instead of numbing them.

4. Create Emotional Safety

Build routines that ground your nervous system—like a calming bedtime ritual, daily check-ins, or boundaries that protect your peace.

5. Redefine Nourishment

Shift from using food to numb your pain to choosing meals that nourish your body and honor your emotional needs.

Final Thoughts: Your Trauma Is Not Your Fault, But Healing Is Your Responsibility

If you grew up emotionally neglected or abandoned, it’s not surprising that food became a form of comfort. But now, as an adult woman in recovery, you have the power to heal, reclaim your body, and break the cycle.

By recognizing how trauma shaped your relationship with food, you can stop fighting yourself and start caring for yourself—from the inside out.

If you’re tired of yo-yo dieting, sugar binges, and emotional eating that feels out of control, it’s time to go deeper. At Spiced Life Conversation, we help women in recovery heal their relationship with food, rebuild emotional safety, and create sustainable, trauma-informed wellness routines.

✨ Book a free Life Audit Consultation today and take the first step toward a nourishing, sugar-free lifestyle in recovery.

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Need Help Developing A Plan For Self-Care

Do you want help developing a self-care plan that works for your busy schedule? Do you want accountability in implementing a self-care plan? If you or someone you love is struggling to maintain optimal mental and emotional health, consider reaching out to Spiced Life Conversation Art Wellness Studio and Botanica. We are a Metro Atlanta, Conyers Georgia area. We are a coaching and counseling practice with empathetic, skilled counselors and recovery coaches who can help you set goals, develop a self-care routine, and move forward to build a more fulfilling life. Our team would be happy to work with you either just for a couple of sessions to develop and implement a Self-care plan or longer term to work toward overall better mental health within our membership site or other programs.

Dr. Nikki LeToya White

About The Author:

Dr. Nikki LeToya White MSEd-TL, Ph.D. RHN is the founder, director, and full-time board-certified trauma-informed nutritionist, folk herbalist, and wellness consultant at Spiced Life Conversation Art Wellness Studio and Botanica. She created Spiced Life Conversation, LLC

Art Wellness Studio and Botanica to provide the Metro Atlanta area with counseling and coaching services where clients are carefully matched with the right program for healing abandonment and childhood emotional neglect trauma that cause codependency, emotional eating, financial stress, and imposter syndrome as it relates to fear of success and being abandon. We help you begin your emotional healing journey with ease. Recently, we have expanded to include an online membership site so we now provide support to people living all over the world. All of our recovery coaches provide at least one evidence-based treatment to assist in your recovery. Dr. White is a big proponent of self-care and helping people live a fulfilling life! She has been in full remission with both codependency and emotional binge eating disorder since 2016. In living a life in recovery from sugar addiction. Loving her low-sugar balance lifestyle.

Best Regards

Dr. Nikki LeToya White