Joni Seeto, Melbourne (2025)

21/01/2023

They say that motherhood changes you, and while I’m not a mother yet it’s true that this pregnancy has already changed me in so many ways.

Starting with how I’ve been showing up on social media these past 6 months.

Pretty much from the moment I found out I was pregnant, I felt the need to pull back. Creation was happening inside me now, and I didn’t feel like I had anything left to outwardly give.

As someone who fell in love with sharing snippets of my life online when I got my first smartphone back in 2008, going from posting almost daily for the past 6 years to barely ever in the last 6 months has been... different.

But this gentle incubation period has given me some time and space to observe who I’m becoming, and I’m incredibly excited about how things are shaping up.

A few things will be changing around here though...

Firstly, I’m retiring as an Emotional Eating coach and will be broadening my professional focus towards Somatic Psychotherapy.

Healing my own issues with emotional eating and helping others overcome theirs has been life transforming, but the more interested I became in healing the root cause of emotional eating, the more I realised it had nothing to do with food and everything to do with emotional trauma that dates back to our early developmental years.

And it doesn’t just affect those of us who struggle with food — it’s all of us. Except most of us have no idea.

That’s why, secondly, I’ve decided to make the most of these last few months before bub arrives (and baby brain sets in) to extract everything I’ve learned about emotional healing out of my head and onto paper. I am finally writing my book, so if you’ve ever woken up and thought to yourself: “How do I stop feeling like this?” then watch this space.

Thirdly, I am going to continue to let this social media thing evolve naturally over the next few months. Will I want to post more as my creative energy returns? Will I have nothing else to give while caring for a newborn? I guess we’ll find out together.

In the meantime, thank you for being here. Thank you for your support, your encouragement. Thank you for being on this healing journey with me. I can’t wait to see what this next chapter will look like for all of us xx

16/11/2022

Have you ever experienced a moment where your emotional reaction to something was way more intense than the situation warranted?

My husband and I had a pretty trivial argument this morning after I made a joking comment about his inability to close our bedroom’s closet door.

After a few back-and-forths he walked away, mumbling: “anyway, this is a waste of my time.”

I felt an instant pang of rejection deep in my gut and instinctively retaliated, telling him to “f&*k off”. I could feel myself wanting to take my anger out even further by yelling and then being passive aggressive for the rest of the day.

But I didn’t.

Because as I soon as I recognised those feelings bubbling up, I saw her.

That little, innocent child within me who thought that when he said “this conversation is a waste of my time,” he meant: “you are a waste of my time”.

That little girl who, underneath all of that anger, was actually feeling deeply hurt.

I imagined holding her closely and affirmed: “You thought he said you’re a waste of his time and you’re feeling hurt.”

Instantly, as she felt heard and seen, she relaxed.

I continued holding her and we breathed through the waves of hurt and rejection moving through our body. It was over in minutes.

I walked over to Warren, sought comfort in his arms, and explained what happened. Then we laughed about how something so trivial could trigger such big feelings, and hugged it out.

———

When the magnitude of our feelings seem disproportionate to the event that triggered them, it’s almost always a sign we’ve stumbled across unintegrated trauma.

It means that those emotions we’re feeling today are echoes of the past.

They can’t be resolved through reasoning, or by trying to solve the event that triggered them in the present.

They have to be handled in a way that soothes and comforts the younger version of you that first experienced them many, many years ago.

The more we feel the emotions of the past, the more we feel free in the present.

With love,
Joni

08/11/2022

HOW TO VALIDATE SOMEONE’S EMOTIONS (AND WHY IT’S IMPORTANT)

Most of us shy away from unpleasant emotions.

We don’t know how to deal with them. We don’t know what to do when others share them. We want to fix them, but don’t know how. Because, as a society, this is not something we’ve ever really been taught.

Our instinct, when we encounter unpleasant emotions, is to want to make things better. We don’t like seeing others in pain, so we want to alleviate their hurt.

But, inadvertently, by trying to fix things, we often end up invalidating their emotions... which could leave them feeling even worse.

Think about it this way...

Have you ever felt upset about something and just wanted your friend or partner to listen to you rant about it... but rather than just hearing you out, they immediately started to make suggestions about how you could resolve the situation?

It doesn’t feel so good, does it?

Because in those moments of emotional turmoil, we don’t want others to fix our problems, we don’t want them to tell us to think positively, or that everything will be ok.

All we want to hear is “I can see why that upset you, that must be so hard. I’m sorry you’re going through this right now.”

This makes us feel seen and heard, it makes us feel like our feelings are valid and we’re allowed to feel this way, and it makes us feel safe enough to have those feelings so that we can stay with them and move through them. And then once we move through the feelings, we’re ready and able to find a solution to the problem.

Unfortunately, most of us were never taught how to do this. Our parents and grandparents were never taught how to do this. Which is why so many of us have learned to push our feelings down and escape them through substances and other behaviours like food, booze, binge watching tv and endless social media scrolling because we don’t know how to face them head on.

But learning to validate your own feelings (and those of others) is the first step to changing those patterns.

So, next time someone comes to you and expresses their unpleasant emotions to you, resist the urge to offer advice, and instead just listen. Let them know that you see them and empathise with whatever they are going through. Feeling validated like this will feel like the warm hug they didn’t even know they needed.

With love,
Joni

06/10/2022

HOW TO STOP EMOTIONAL EATING

If you’re emotional eating, it’s a sign that at some point you experienced an emotion that was too overwhelming (probably because you never learned how to properly cope with your emotions).

Instead, you learned to turn to food to disconnect from that emotion so you wouldn’t have to feel it.

To stop emotional eating we need to reconnect to our emotions and learn to feel again.

The more you learn to reconnect to your emotions, the less you need food to escape them.

With love,
Joni

03/10/2022

🤩

22/09/2022

Time does not heal all wounds.

Our conscious mind may forget.
But our nervous system doesn’t.

When you find yourself standing in the kitchen eating handfuls of cereal straight out of the box for no apparent reason, you may not know why you’re doing it. Your nervous system, on the other hand, does.

Something triggered it.

Perhaps it was the thought of having to go to work tomorrow and having to present in front of a group of strangers.

Perhaps it was a passing comment from a friend that made you feel judged.

It takes you right back to being a 5-year old child, when the kids at school made fun of you and you experienced an overwhelming feeling of shame.

Whenever we experience feelings today, they typically have very little to do with today’s events.

They go back years, decades.

That’s why, in the moment, we often don’t understand why we’re eating.

Our conscious mind can’t recognise a current event that warrants us feeling this level of shame or overwhelm, so we dismiss the feeling.

But, once triggered, our body is experiencing the emotion all over again as if we were still 5 years old. And if we don’t have the tools to cope with our emotions in those moments, food provides a welcome escape.

This is why the journey to overcoming emotional eating will always need to include some aspect of healing the past and learning new tools to soothe the nervous system.

Any programs or solutions that promise success without addressing these vital components (eg. all those diets you’ve tried over the years) are likely to be quick-fixes that will fail to deliver permanent results.

DM me if you want to find out more but don’t know where to start xx

13/09/2022

I may have been accused of doing this 😂😅

08/09/2022

In my work, I tend to come across two types of women:

First of all, there’s those who know that they’ve experienced childhood trauma because they remember being physically, sexually or verbally abused.

And then there’s those who don’t know they’ve experienced childhood trauma because they grew up in a loving home, with all their material needs met, and by all accounts had a happy childhood.

Yet, even though they intellectually knew their parents loved them, they may not always have been able to feel that love, because some days that love felt conditional. And whenever they didn’t meet those conditions, deep within they started to develop a belief that they weren’t good enough, that they needed to do better, be better, in order to earn their parents’ love.

For little kids who come into this world expecting unlimited and unconditional love, ANY experience in which they feel unloved, unworthy, helpless or powerless can feel intensely traumatic to them — no matter whether this experience was the result of physical abuse or the simple inability of a parent to support their child emotionally and make them feel loved unconditionally.

If you’ve ever felt like you weren’t good enough or aren’t worthy of love as you are, you’ve likely experienced childhood trauma.

And in my experience, it’s when those traumatic childhood experiences get re-triggered in our current day adulthood, that we tend to turn to food to soothe and comfort ourselves, because we were never taught how to deal with those emotions in a healthy way.

To find out how to break this cycle, join my upcoming live workshop on How to Stop Self-Sabotaging with Food: https://joniseeto.com/workshop

05/09/2022

3 SIGNS YOU MAY HAVE AN UNHEALTHY RELATIONSHIP WITH FOOD

1️⃣ You feel guilty or ashamed after eating too much food and feel like you need to make up for it by eating less the next day or working it off in the gym

2️⃣ Sometimes you eat in secret and hide the empty wrappers at the bottom of the bin so no one will find them

3️⃣ You have emotional attachments to food which stops you from being able to have a healthy relationship with food since you rely on food to be your main coping mechanism whenever you’re stressed or something bad happens

Which ones do you experience?

01/09/2022

EMOTIONAL EATING IS A SIGN OF CHILDHOOD TRAUMA

Emotional eating is when we use food as a coping mechanism to escape uncomfortable and painful emotions — and it’s much more common than you might think because, let’s be honest, not many of us were ever taught how to properly handle our emotions.

Most of us were taught to repress or escape any painful feelings, and we do this either by using substances like food, drugs or alcohol, or by scrolling through Instagram for 3 hours or ordering 7 pairs of shoes that we don’t need. There are lots of different ways we distract ourselves from our emotions, and emotional eating is one of them.

But for those of us for whom emotional eating is our main coping mechanism, it’s nearly always a sign that we experienced some form of emotional distress at an early age and had to find a way to self-soothe.

In those early childhood years, there weren’t that many options. We’re too young to turn to drugs or alcohol, there’s no gambling or retail therapy — it’s pretty much just food, TV and toys. Thus, if emotional eating is the thing that brings you the most comfort whenever you are upset, overwhelmed or anxious today, it’s very likely that this is actually a strategy you adopted many years ago.

This doesn’t necessarily mean you had an unhappy childhood or experienced intense trauma. It just means that at some point you felt unloved, unworthy, powerless or hopeless, and there was no one there to comfort you, which forced you to find creative ways to self-soothe.

And emotional eating is a fantastic way to do just that.

But while emotional eating is an excellent tool when we don’t know how else to handle our emotions, it’s a temporary one. It only kicks the problem further down the road.

While it temporarily allows us to escape those uncomfortable feelings, when that last bite of food crosses our lips, the feelings are still there. At which point we’ve either got to eat more, or finally face the shadow.

31/08/2022

3 THINGS THAT WILL STOP YOU FROM BEING ABLE TO “EAT LIKE A NORMAL PERSON”

When I ask women how they’d love to be able to eat, they always tell me:

“I just want to be able to eat like a ‘normal’ person”

You know, eat when you’re hungry, stop when you’re full, and being able to graze on some chips or chocolate here and there without feeling guilty or losing control.

I believe that most of us already know how to eat like this.

In fact, I’m sure you’ve already had some days where eating feels easy and food isn’t constantly on your mind.

But there are 3 things that will stop you from feeling “normal” around food

1️⃣ Having moral rules around food e.g. good vs. bad foods, never eat carbs after 4pm etc. which will trigger rebellion

2️⃣ Being too “in your head” about food, making decisions based on calorie counting, macros etc. which means you’re not listening to what your body wants

3️⃣ Being in a dysregulated nervous system state: experiencing stress or being emotionally triggered which means you need food for comfort

Which one do you experience most?

29/08/2022

This is your Monday reminder to dream big.

I see too many women hold themselves back out of fear of what others may think of them.

I often ask them this question: “If today was your last day on Earth, is there anything you regret having missed out on because of the way you felt about yourself?”

The answer is almost always “yes”.

They regret all the times they said no to spending time with loved ones because they felt too self-conscious about their weight.

They regret not speaking up for themselves because they didn’t feel they were good enough.

And they regret saying yes to things they didn’t really want to do because they didn’t want to upset others (but as a result missed out on doing the things they actually wanted to do).

So... go on.

Go do that thing you’ve always wanted to do but have felt too afraid to.

Forget about what anyone else may think of you.

Feel the fear but do it anyway.

It will be worth it, I promise.

With love,
Joni

Joni Seeto

21/01/2023

16/11/2022

08/11/2022

06/10/2022

03/10/2022

22/09/2022

13/09/2022

08/09/2022

05/09/2022

01/09/2022

31/08/2022

29/08/2022

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