243. The Role “Enough” Has in our Food and Body Healing with Kimberly Ann Johnson

In her new book, Call of the Wild: How We Heal Trauma, Awaken our Own Power and Use it for Good, Kimberly Ann Johnson gives us the critical language to understand our nervous system and why this matters for us to heal trauma and feel enough.

An important part of trauma work is building our capacity to be with pleasure and satisfaction. In our interview, Kimberly shares her perspective on satiation, which is asking the question “What is enough?” and how this question is critical to how we eat and relate to our bodies. 

In this episode, we discuss:

1. Why satiation or “enoughness” in Kimberly’s words, matters to our nervous system
   
   
2. What safety feels like in your social nervous system, including thinking about who we eat with changes our experience of a meal
   
   
3. Weight struggles as a symbolic attempt at “having weight” in what we can create in our lives and for each other instead of being so “I” or “me” centered
   
   
4. Ideas of how to soothe your nervous system when you want to reach for food or social media
   
   
5. How being told to “calm down” or “let it go” when stressed can backfire and cause us to turn to sugar, overeat or binge
   
   
6. How good bodies depend on where you live and the body as an emergent process instead of something to judge