Understanding Codependency and Grief: I Used Health to Avoid Grief

Nikki White
Jan 4
4 min read

Not to Feel Better, but to Feel Less

Grief & Mental Health

There’s a version of the story where I became “healthy.”Where I started eating clean, moving my body, tracking my sleep, optimizing my routines.

Where I looked disciplined, committed, even admirable from the outside.

But that’s not the real story.

The real story is that I used health to avoid grief.

I didn’t chase wellness because I wanted to feel better.I chased it because I wanted to feel less.

Grief is loud. It takes up space. It rearranges the furniture in your mind without asking. And when it first arrived in my life, I didn’t know how to sit with it. I didn’t know how to let it speak. I didn’t know how to let myself break.

So I reached for the things that made me feel in control.

A perfectly portioned meal.A long run that left no room for thought.A routine so rigid it became a shield.A body so disciplined it could double as armor.

People praised the transformation.They saw strength.They saw resilience.They saw “healthy.”

What they didn’t see was the grief I had stuffed into the spaces between my habits.The sorrow I outran.The ache I starved.The memories I buried under reps and rituals.

Avoidance can look a lot like discipline.Numbness can look a lot like self‑improvement.And sometimes the world applauds what is actually a quiet collapse.

It took me a long time to understand that healing isn’t the same as hiding.That feeling less isn’t the same as feeling whole.That grief doesn’t disappear just because you’ve built a life sturdy enough to contain it.

Eventually, the body keeps the score.Eventually, the grief asks to be heard.Eventually, the numbness cracks.

I’m learning now — slowly, clumsily — that health isn’t about shrinking my emotions to fit inside a routine. It’s about expanding my capacity to hold them. To let grief sit beside me without needing to outrun it. To feel more, not less.

And maybe that’s the real transformation.Not the one people can see, but the one I can finally feel. The simple act og working through my feelings of loss, feeling the pain instead of numbing and avoiding it.

What Self‑Abandonment and Binge Eating Look Like

Before I ever understood the language of grief, I learned the language of self‑abandonment.

Self‑abandonment isn’t dramatic. It doesn’t announce itself. It’s quiet, almost polite. It looks like dismissing your own needs because someone else’s seem more urgent. It looks like silencing your emotions because they feel inconvenient. It looks like telling yourself “I’m fine” so many times that you start to believe numbness is a personality trait.

It’s choosing productivity over rest.It’s choosing perfection over presence.It’s choosing control over compassion.

And for me, it often looked like binge eating.

People think binge eating is about food, but it’s rarely about hunger. It’s about escape. It’s about creating a feeling so big and overwhelming that it drowns out the feelings you’re terrified to face. It’s a temporary doorway out of your own mind.

Binge eating looks like eating fast so you don’t have to think.It looks like eating alone so no one sees the unraveling.It looks like reaching for food not because you want pleasure, but because you want distance — distance from grief, from fear, from the parts of yourself you don’t know how to sit with.

It’s a moment where you abandon yourself in the name of relief.A moment where you trade long‑term peace for short‑term quiet.A moment where you choose numbness over nourishment.

And afterward, the shame arrives — not because of the food, but because you know you left yourself behind again. You know you walked away from the version of you that needed gentleness, not punishment. Comfort, not chaos.

Understanding this didn’t fix everything. But it gave me language. And sometimes language is the first step toward coming home to yourself.

If this article hit home, that’s your intuition nudging you.

Inside Coming Home to You and the Gutty Girl Letters, I guide women through reconnecting to themselves, understanding emotional disconnection, and breaking patterns of self-abandonment — without shame, pressure, or quick fixes.

It’s space to feel, reflect, and reconnect to your authentic self. Ready for a deep dive?

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I Can Help in Developing A Plan For Self Care

Do you want help developing a self-care plan that works for your own 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.

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 the 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. I love my low-sugar balanced lifestyle.

Best Regards

Dr. Nikki LeToya White