Trauma & Emotional Eating, Detachment, Shutdown
Welcome to Mamahood After Trauma, a space created to support mothers as they heal from trauma, break generational cycles, and discover healthier ways of showing up for themselves and their families. Here, you’ll find honest conversations, practical tools, and encouragement to remind you that healing is possible, one step at a time.
Introduction
Sometimes, the hardest part of getting through the day is realizing that you haven't really been present for it. You can be caring for your children, making dinner, answering messages, and keeping up with responsibilities while feeling emotionally disconnected from everything around you. For some mothers, scrolling, eating for comfort, staying busy, or shutting down can become ways to manage overwhelming feelings. In this blog, Emily Cleghorn explores why these habits aren't necessarily character flaws, how coping strategies can outlast the situations that created them, and how small moments of awareness can help us reconnect with ourselves.
Table of Contents
The cookie isn’t a character test
Sometimes shutdown looks like nothing
The old strategy may still be doing its job
A pause, not a prohibition
A woman can be physically in the room and emotionally somewhere else. She can be making dinner, answering texts, caring for everyone, and still feel as if she has disappeared.
That kind of checking out doesn’t always look dramatic. It can look like scrolling long after the phone has stopped being interesting. It can look like eating for comfort, sleeping, cleaning, working, or simply feeling nothing at all.
In a recent episode of Motherhood After Trauma, host Emily Cleghorn describes these habits not as character flaws but as possible ways of managing overwhelm. The point isn’t that every distracted evening signals trauma. It’s that a repeated urge to escape a feeling may be worth noticing.
The cookie isn’t a character test
Emotional eating often arrives with its own verdict: weak, undisciplined, out of control. Cleghorn argues that the verdict can obscure the more useful question.
“Before you criticize yourself for what you ate, ask: What was I actually needing?”
The answer might be comfort, but it might also be loneliness, anger, exhaustion, grief, or a day with no space to yourself. Sometimes, as Cleghorn puts it, “you’re just frigging tired.”
Food, she says, can provide pleasure, routine, comfort or a sense of regulation. That doesn’t make every snack an escape, any more than every stretch of scrolling means something is wrong. The clue is the pattern: reaching for something again and again because a feeling seems too difficult to sit with.
The question is not whether a person should have the cookie. It’s whether the cookie has become the only available answer.
Sometimes shutdown looks like nothing
Trauma responses are often imagined as visible: panic, tears, flight, a fight. But Cleghorn describes another possibility: withdrawal.
“You don’t want to talk. You don’t want to make decisions. You don’t want to answer texts,” she says. “You don’t even know what you’re feeling. You just want everyone to leave you alone.”
That state can be difficult to recognize because it may resemble peace. After a lifetime of intense emotion, numbness can feel like relief. But Cleghorn draws a distinction:
“Peace still allows you to feel. Disconnection often doesn’t.”
A quiet afternoon on the couch is not automatically a trauma response. Context matters. But when shutting down repeatedly follows overwhelm, it may be a signal that the system has reached capacity, not proof of laziness or failure.
The old strategy may still be doing its job
The habits people later criticize themselves for often began as ways to get through something. Staying busy can keep hard thoughts at bay. Food can provide comfort when comfort is scarce. Disconnection can help someone endure what they cannot escape.
“Your brain wasn’t trying to ruin your life,” Cleghorn says. “It was trying to get you through something.”
That history matters. It changes the question from What’s wrong with me? to What am I trying to get away from? But a strategy that once helped can become limiting when it is the only strategy available.
“The problem isn’t that you coped,” she says. “The problem is when coping becomes your only option.”
The alternative is not to force every buried feeling into the open. Cleghorn is explicit: healing does not mean trying to feel everything at once. It means having enough safety to notice what is happening and gradually building more ways to respond.
A pause, not a prohibition
When the urge to disappear shows up, Cleghorn suggests pausing for ten seconds and asking two questions: What am I feeling? What do I need?
The answer doesn’t have to be a ban. A person can still eat the cookie, watch the show or scroll. But the pause can reveal what the habit is doing: “I’m overwhelmed,” or “I’m lonely,” or “I need comfort.”
That awareness creates room for another option: asking for help, taking a break before reaching exhaustion, moving the body, crying, journaling, or sitting somewhere quiet. Sometimes the right option will still be distraction. The point is choice.
“Can I feel? Can I pause? Can I distract? Can I reconnect? Can I return? That’s flexibility.”
For mothers who have learned to vanish into food, work, sleep, their phones or the needs of everyone around them, Cleghorn offers no demand to condemn the habit or to stop overnight.
“You don’t need to hate that part of yourself,” she says. “She’s trying to get you through something.”
The next step, then, may be small: not disappearing quite so automatically, and asking what would make it feel safe enough to stay.
Resources
Emily Cleghorn’s Free Quiz: “Find Your Next Step to Calm and Healing”.
If you’re a mama healing from trauma and seeking a new way forward, remember: You deserve support, your child deserves joy, and together, you can break cycles and build a brighter future.
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