EMOTIONAL CANNIBALISM™

Posted on July 26, 2025 by Brad Stevenson, One of Thousands of Relationship Coaches on Noomii.

EMOTIONAL CANNIBALISM™

A quantum truth on what happens when someone feeds on your feelings and leaves you starving for your own.

Let me tell you something that no therapist, no preacher, no polished motivational speaker will say to your face:

Some people were never in a relationship with you.
They were in a relationship with your nervous system.
They didn’t love you—they loved how you made them feel.
And when your energy started to run dry,
when your soul started limping instead of sprinting,
they called you “cold,”
“distant,”
“too emotional,”
or “not who you used to be.”

But what really happened?

They lost their food supply.

They weren’t loving you—they were feeding off you.

Let me define it for you, crystal clear:

Emotional Cannibalism™ is when someone uses your emotions, presence, validation, or empathy as a meal,
while never offering their own in return.
They survive on your care but never give you a bite of theirs.
They digest your softness.
They chew through your safety.
And then they complain you’re too hard to swallow once you stop offering it for free.

This happens in families.
This happens in marriages.
This happens with so-called friends, churches, therapists, leaders.
Hell, it even happens in the mirror.

You can emotionally cannibalize yourself
when you keep asking your present self to keep performing for a system that’s already bleeding you dry.

Here’s what no one tells you:

Every time someone needs you to regulate their emotions before they’ll even consider hearing yours—
they are not loving you.
They’re feeding off your nervous system.

And when you’ve had enough and you say,
“I can’t do this anymore,”
they don’t get sad that you’re hurting.
They get angry that their meal plan just ended.

They guilt you.
They call you the selfish one.
They say,
“After all I’ve done for you?”
No. What they mean is:
“After all I’ve eaten from you?”

Let me say it like this:

If you were raised in a home where your parent only “loved” you when you were easy to digest,
you were groomed for emotional cannibalism.

If you were rewarded for smiling when you wanted to scream,
for helping when you were hurting,
for being the emotionally mature one
in a room full of grown-up children…

…you were fed a lie:

That your value is tied to how well you regulate the room,
not how well you’re held in your own mess.

That’s not love.
That’s performance-based survival.
That’s identity self-harvest.
That’s how a child becomes a feast for someone else’s unhealed pain.

Here’s the hard part:

You’ve probably been both the meal and the monster.

Because when you’re raised on emotional starvation,
you don’t know how to feed yourself—
so you go hunting for someone softer, someone safer,
someone who still thinks they can save you.

And when they stop?
You feel betrayed.
Abandoned.
Hungry.

But maybe what you really feel…
is exposed.

Because now you have to face the truth:

You never learned how to sit with your own emotions
without stealing someone else’s to do it.

But there is a way out.

It starts here:
1. Acknowledge the truth.
Admit where you’ve been a victim—and where you’ve been a perpetrator.
2. Reclaim your nervous system.
Your job is not to keep everyone else safe from their feelings.
Your job is to be safe in your own.
3. Stop serving your soul on a platter.
Let people earn access to your depth.
Emotional availability is not a buffet.
It’s a sacred offering.
4. Learn to feed yourself.
No one else is coming to save you.
But you—the real you—can rebuild the table you were never invited to.

Quantum Truth™:

When people say they “miss the old you,”
what they often mean is
they miss the version of you that fed them for free.

And if you’ve been feeding others while starving yourself—
If your empathy has become a currency that no one ever repays—
If your silence has become the meal,
and your boundaries the enemy—

Then let me say this as clear as I can:

You are not the villain.
You’re the recovery.
You’re the reckoning.
You’re the one that finally said…
“No more. I’m not feeding ghosts while I bleed out in the kitchen.”

It’s time to eat, not be eaten.

Your heart is not a buffet.
Your soul is not a sacrifice.

Welcome home.