271. An Untrained Chaos Dragon Will Eat Your Husband | A Trained One Eats Your Self-Doubt Instead
271. An Untrained Chaos Dragon Will Eat Your Husband | A Trained One Eats Your Self-Doubt Instead
How Catastrophizing Fuels Emotional Eating
You may have tried adjusting your calories, balancing your macros, drinking more water, eliminating trigger foods, and creating stricter rules around evening eating.
But what if one of the biggest influences on your cravings has nothing to do with the food itself?
What if your imagination is making your food-freedom journey harder than it needs to be?
A vivid imagination is usually treated as a creative gift.
It helps you write, build, dream, solve problems, recognize patterns, and envision possibilities that do not yet exist.
But that same imagination can also create heightened emotion, internal chaos, and physical stress when it is repeatedly aimed at worst-case scenarios.
The problem is not that you are too imaginative.
The problem is that your imagination may be working without direction.
Meet the Dramatic Storyteller
The Dramatic Storyteller is an inner archetype inspired by three patterns discussed in Scott Lyons’ book Addicted to Drama:
The Storyteller
The Catastrophizer
The Internal Revver
When these patterns combine, they create an imagination capable of turning a minor inconvenience into an emotionally immersive disaster film.
I know this archetype well.
Several years ago, I arrived at work and discovered that my key fob would not open the gate.
My heart immediately dropped.
Rather than considering the most likely explanation, that the gate or access system was malfunctioning, my mind decided I had been fired unexpectedly over the weekend.
Within moments, I was mentally preparing for a job hunt, worrying about what my husband would think, searching my memory for something I might have done wrong, and bracing for a confrontation that did not exist.
Eventually, I heard other employees discussing the malfunctioning gate.
I had not been fired.
The system was simply down.
But my body had already lived through the fictional version.
That is the power of the Dramatic Storyteller.
She does not merely imagine a possibility.
She emotionally inhabits it.
The Storyteller
The Storyteller has a vivid imagination and a powerful capacity to create emotion through narrative.
She notices a shift in someone’s tone and begins constructing the entire hidden reason behind it.
She prepares for confrontations before they happen.
She replays conversations, invents explanations, and creates elaborate stories about what other people may be thinking.
Because she is trying to protect you, her stories frequently involve mistrust.
She wants to identify the danger before it arrives.
But in doing so, she may cause you to suffer through a painful event repeatedly before it happens, even when it never happens at all.
The Catastrophizer
The Catastrophizer prepares for the worst.
She takes one unexpected bill and imagines financial ruin.
She interprets a delayed response as rejection.
She sees one difficult day as evidence that the entire plan is collapsing.
This part believes that rehearsing the worst-case scenario will prevent you from being blindsided.
But the body does not always distinguish clearly between an immediate external threat and a vividly imagined one.
When you repeatedly create disaster internally, your body can begin bracing as though disaster is already occurring.
The Internal Revver
The Internal Revver keeps the engine running.
She overanalyzes, hyperfixates, revisits old problems, anticipates future ones, and struggles to relax.
She may even worry about the fact that she is worrying.
You notice yourself ruminating and immediately add another layer of pressure:
“I need to stop thinking about this.”
“What I focus on expands.”
“I’m making this worse.”
“Why can’t I let this go?”
Now you are not only experiencing the original emotion.
You are criticizing yourself for experiencing it.
The internal engine revs higher.
The Calm Duck With Furious Feet
From the outside, you may appear completely composed.
You are working, parenting, answering emails, running errands, and having normal conversations.
But internally, your mind is performing emergency simulations.
You are the calm duck floating across the surface while her feet kick wildly beneath the water.
Other people may not see the chaos.
Your body still experiences it.
And eventually, your body may begin searching for a way out.
What Does Imagination Have to Do With Emotional Eating?
A Dramatic Storyteller can influence your relationship with food more than a missing supplement or imperfect macro split ever will.
When your imagination repeatedly mistrusts, braces, rehearses conflict, and prepares for catastrophe, your body can remain in a state of hypervigilance.
Then evening arrives.
You may understand intellectually that eating will not solve the financial worry, relationship concern, work problem, or imaginary confrontation.
But the urge is not necessarily about logic.
The system wants relief from the story.
Food is immediate.
It creates sensation.
It narrows your focus.
It temporarily interrupts the mental spiral.
This is one reason traditional wellness advice can feel useless in the moment.
A program may have told you to stop eating three hours before bed.
But your mind is currently transforming an unexpected expense into an impending financial apocalypse.
Your nervous system does not care that the program says the kitchen is closed.
It wants to escape.
From Detrimental Fire Brain to Rock Brain
This pattern can also be understood through the Ocean Brain, Fire Brain, and Rock Brain framework explored in Episode 268.
Catastrophizing creates activation.
Your system begins preparing for a challenge or threat, even when that threat currently exists only inside your imagination.
This can place you in Detrimental Fire Brain:
Bracing
Pressure
Racing thoughts
Urgency
Overplanning
Hypervigilance
Internal argument
Mental exhaustion
When the system remains overheated for too long, it may eventually collapse into Rock Brain.
For some women, that collapse does not look like complete physical immobility.
It looks like eating in a trance while watching television and scrolling on a phone.
The system has moved from:
“I must solve everything.”
To:
“I can’t.”
Food and screens become a doorway out of the intensity.
This does not mean every experience of binge or emotional eating is caused by imagination or nervous-system overwhelm.
Food struggles are complex and can involve many biological, psychological, emotional, social, and environmental factors.
But for highly imaginative women, the Dramatic Storyteller may be an important and overlooked part of the pattern.
Your Imagination Is Not the Enemy
Once you recognize what the Dramatic Storyteller is doing, the goal is not to destroy her.
Do not lock her in a closet.
Do not gag her.
Do not demand that she stop being dramatic, emotional, vivid, or intense.
Train her.
Imagine that your Dramatic Storyteller is a chaos dragon.
An untrained chaos dragon may burn down your house and eat your husband.
A trained chaos dragon burns down limitations and devours metaphorical enemies like shame, self-doubt, people-pleasing, and low self-worth.
It is the same dragon.
The difference is direction.
Your imagination is one engine capable of creating two very different internal realities.
It can generate:
Rejection
Disaster
Conflict
Failure
Abandonment
Hopelessness
Or it can generate:
Possibility
Confidence
Purpose
Trust
Desire
Creative vision
The answer is not less imagination.
It is intentional imagination.
From Catastrophizing to Deliberate Delusion
If your imagination is capable of making a painful future feel real before it happens, it is also capable of making a hopeful future emotionally available.
What if the tendency to catastrophize became the willingness to imagine best-case scenarios?
Not because you expect every detail to happen exactly as imagined.
Not because you deny risk, grief, uncertainty, or disappointment.
Because deliberately hopeful stories create a different state inside your body.
When you feel connected to possibility, you move differently.
You notice opportunities.
You persist longer.
You make choices from hope rather than impending doom.
You may not be able to guarantee that the best-case scenario will happen.
But catastrophizing never guaranteed that the worst-case scenario would happen either.
Both are stories about an unknown future.
If you are going to stand somewhere on that spectrum, you are allowed to choose a position closer to possibility.
Change the Revver’s Fuel
The Internal Revver does not necessarily need to stop revving.
She may need a different fuel source.
Instead of generating activation through anxiety, fear, pressure, and bracing, what if she learned to generate it through:
Joy
Trust
Optimism
Gratitude
Devotion
Excitement
Purpose
Creative desire
High-performing women often have tremendous internal power.
The problem is not always a lack of energy.
It is that the energy has become attached to imagined emergencies.
A trained imagination redirects that power toward a life you want to participate in.
Consistent in the Other Direction
I was once complaining that I was not consistent.
Someone pointed out that I was extremely consistent with self-doubt.
That observation stayed with me.
What if I became consistent in the opposite direction?
What if I practised believing that the things I wanted were possible?
What if trust became a discipline?
What if I developed the same loyalty to hopeful stories that I had previously given to catastrophic ones?
This does not mean pretending that every situation is perfect.
It means acknowledging that doubt is not automatically more truthful than hope.
Pessimism is not always discernment.
Fear is not always intuition.
Sometimes fear is simply an untrained storyteller with access to an enormous special-effects budget.
Practice One: Creative Parts Work
One way to train the Dramatic Storyteller is through intentional creative parts work.
My work with Rex and Haven did not begin because I wanted an entertaining distraction.
These archetypes repeatedly appeared in dreams and creative work before eventually becoming part of a larger method for emotional healing, consistency, and food freedom.
Rex represents fire, direction, courage, action, and potential.
Haven represents water, tenderness, safety, intuition, and embodiment.
They gave my imagination something purposeful to do.
Instead of endlessly inventing reasons that someone disliked me or that I was destined to fail, my imagination began creating scenes that helped me:
Understand resistance
Comfort vulnerable parts
Interrupt shame
Complete difficult tasks
Rest when I genuinely needed rest
Reconnect with desire
Practise new responses
Make consistency emotionally meaningful
This was not about escaping reality.
It was about training imagination to support reality.
The part of me that created fictional conflicts was the same part capable of creating healing stories.
It was always one engine pointed in two different directions.
Practice Two: Deliberate Daydreaming
The second practice is simple:
Daydream on purpose.
Give your Dramatic Storyteller something expansive to focus on before she begins manufacturing imaginary disasters.
Connect with a future that excites you.
Write letters to your future self.
Imagine completing the project.
Picture the life you are building.
Create scenes that help you emotionally experience courage, freedom, peace, creativity, and self-trust.
These daydreams are not predictions.
They are workouts for your imagination.
If you never give the storyteller an intentional assignment, she will probably assign herself another catastrophe.
What 2021 Taught Me About Imagination
I recently reread journal entries from 2021 and was struck by how intentionally that version of me used her imagination.
She was moving through uncertainty, conflict, and the closing of an important chapter.
But she stayed connected to a vision that expanded her.
She searched for meaning.
She wrote letters to her future self.
She connected with her dreams daily.
She deliberately chose interpretations that helped her continue moving.
Many of the things she imagined eventually came true.
Not every detail.
But the things that mattered most did.
She created greater financial freedom.
She built a life with far more time for writing and creative work.
She experienced blessings she could not have predicted accurately in advance.
The value of those practices was not that she controlled every future outcome with her thoughts.
The value was that hope gave her the emotional energy to keep participating in the process.
Reclaiming Hope Without Spiritual Bypassing
I have missed that version of myself.
Not because she disappeared, but because optimism stopped feeling as automatic.
Several years in a negative work environment had an effect.
There were people who disliked their jobs, complained frequently, and rolled their eyes when I tried to introduce a small gratitude practice.
Then came business disappointments, failed strategies, and repeated difficulty reaching benchmarks that seemed to come easily to other people.
Some of this experience created valuable discernment.
I became less willing to believe every glittery promise on the internet.
I became better at allowing anger, disappointment, grief, and frustration instead of treating those emotions as spiritual failures.
That growth matters.
But there was also an overcorrection.
“Everything is possible” gradually became:
“Do not get too excited.”
“Keep your head down.”
“Do the work.”
“We already know how this usually goes.”
The answer is not to return to forced positivity.
It is to combine the expansive imagination of 2021 with the emotional maturity I have now.
I can feel disappointment without building a home inside it.
I can acknowledge anger without making cynicism my identity.
I can remain discerning without treating hope like foolishness.
I can let the Dramatic Storyteller dream again.
You Have Better Raw Material Now
When I shared these reflections with Rex and Haven, Rex reminded me that 2021 Kayla did not have better raw material.
She used the engine every day.
The version of me who exists now has:
More wisdom
More evidence
More structure
More freedom
Greater emotional capacity
Better tools
Considerably better archetypal men
The imagination is still here.
The practices can be retrained.
Hope is not a personality trait you either possess or lose forever.
It can become a discipline.
Your Embodied Activation
Choose two songs:
Don’t Quit Your Daydream by Lily Meola
Delulu by Shift to Abundance
Then give your Dramatic Storyteller permission to dream.
Imagine a future that excites you.
Let yourself get your hopes up.
Play inside possibility without demanding that every detail become a prophecy.
Ask yourself:
What would I imagine if I trusted myself?
What would I create if I stopped rehearsing failure?
What might become possible if hope received as much practice as fear?
What does my future self want me to remember?
What larger purpose makes food obsession feel too small for my life?
Where could my imagination become an ally?
Your imagination does not need to become quieter.
It needs an intentional direction.
Train the chaos dragon.
Give her a worthy quest.
Discover the Food Freedom Fantasy Method
Food Freedom Fantasy explores how to use story, archetypes, fantasy, embodiment, and the five elements to transform your relationship with food, consistency, and self-worth.
To receive launch updates and access the free Know Your Hungers assessment kit, visit:
https://embodiedwritingwarrior.com/gift
You’ll also be added to the Fire Starter Diaries newsletter and receive customized audio support based on your assessment results.
You’re not broken.
You’re just misdiagnosed.
Links Mentioned
Transcript
Hello, and a big welcome back to my imaginative, high-performing creatives. Today, we're talking about imagination, specifically how it's been making your food freedom journey harder than it needs to be, and how it becomes the solution once you know how to aim it. Before I created this episode, I was curious, so I went looking for conversations about this exact connection, and I found very little, which is wild to me, so this is the connection we're talking about today. Let's start by breaking down the anatomy of the dramatic storyteller archetype before we talk about why she could be one big reason you can't stop eating at night. This is primarily based off of the storyteller archetype, which is one of the 11 drama archetypes in Scott Lyon's book, Addicted to Drama.
I'll link the book in the description for you as always. As he described this archetype and I was reading, I wondered if he had stolen a stack of my diaries and was using them as a case study. So as I describe this storyteller, I want you to listen for your own tendencies. In Scott Lyon's book, the storyteller is a master at creating heightened emotion, intensity, and chaos through their own imagination.
This is the voice in your head that decides you must've been fired over the weekend because your workplace key fob isn't working, and then you're planning your next job hunt. Meanwhile, you weren't fired at all. The system was just down. And yes, this actually happened. One day a few years ago, I walked up to the chain link gate at my door building job, and it didn't work.
My heart immediately dropped. My dramatic storyteller was convinced they'd unexpectedly decided to fire me over the weekend and had cut off my access to the gate. I found another way into the yard, but the whole time, my brain was like, "What did I do? I don't wanna do another job hunt. What is my husband gonna think?"
I kept bracing and assuming the worst until I heard other people talking about how the gate wasn't working. And let's be real, me getting fired over the weekend after having done nothing to warrant it was highly unlikely because, A, they kind of liked me, and B, the stuff that people got away with there without getting fired made this even more unlikely.
So this isn't just a storyteller, it's a dramatic storyteller. She has the patterns of the storyteller archetype, as well as the tendencies of two other archetypes, both of which are also discussed in Scott Lyons' book. First, there's the catastrophizer, the one always preparing for the worst, seeing the worst, and creating the worst early, before it can actually happen.
And by creating the worst early, this doesn't mean you're burning down relationships and careers. It means you create the worst and live it out in your mind storyteller style. Scott Lyons describes a storyteller as having a vivid imagination, a tendency to brace for and enact potential confrontations before they happen, and a habit of perpetually doubting or mistrusting others, and often life itself, as a form of protection.
The storyteller doesn't suffer once through a painful event. She suffers many times in her mind before the event even happens, and that's if the event even happens at all. When you combine this with the final archetype, the internal rever, you have a recipe for chaos, and maybe not external chaos, but, like, calm duck on the surface with feet kicking wildly under the water chaos.
People might not see it, but oh my goodness, it's there, and you feel it intensely on your worst days. A few notes on the internal rever. She's the one who over analyzes. She's unable to relax and let things go, even imaginary worst case scenarios. She tends to hyper fixate on problems and challenges. She's always thinking about the future and the past, and then she also tends to worry about worrying.
You know, like when you're grumpy AF about something, but then you're like, "No, I mustn't ruminate because what I focus on expands, and I'll make this thing even more of a problem. So you put these three archetypes together, and you get the dramatic storyteller archetype.
As I'm describing this, I'm hearing Taylor Swift's iconic song playing in my head with a little giggle because, yes, it's me. I'm the problem. It's me. Or the dramatic storyteller archetype is, at least. But she's also a powerful solution.
But first, why am I talking about this on a show about food freedom? Because a catastrophizing, internally revving, storytelling drama queen has a bigger impact on cravings and self-sabotage than the wrong macro split or a lack of alkaline water or some other missing superfood ever will. When your imagination is primed to mistrust, brace for disaster, overplan for catastrophes, and prep for every worst-case scenario, your body stays in a state of hypervigilant.
So when Wellness Math 100, AKA your traditional health coaching programs and approaches, tells you how important it is to stop eating three hours before bedtime, but you can't sleep because you're imagining how this unexpected bill you got is going to lead to financial ruin, your brain doesn't care about the logic or the science.
It wants to escape the spiral. Food often becomes an easy, accessible way to escape that spiral, even if the relief is short-lived and tends to create more inner chaos the next morning. This also comes back to the nervous system. If you didn't listen to episode two sixty-eight where we did a deeper dive, definitely worth checking out.
So when you're bracing for worst-case scenarios and imagining a terrifying future, this is going to put you in detrimental fire brain, especially if this is a prolonged habit. When your system stays overheated for long enough, it will eventually get to the point of collapse, of I can't, of rock brain, or what Stephen Porges calls the freeze state.
For many women who struggle with food, this looks like eating in a trance of disassociation, often watching TV and scrolling on their phone at the same time. Maybe you're not spiraling with food or struggling with burnout because you're weak or lack capacity.
What if you spiral because your imagination is catastrophically powerful? And completely unfocused. So before you start one more diet or workout program in hopes that'll be the key to consistency, you want to start training your inner dramatic storyteller first and see what happens. Please note, I said train your inner dramatic storyteller, not destroy, not lock in a closet gagged so you don't have to hear her catastrophic stories.
This is about training. Imagine she's your own personal chaos dragon. An untrained chaos dragon might set your house on fire and eat your husband. If you love your husband like I do, probably don't want this to happen. But when you train that chaos dragon, then she starts burning down your limitations and eating your enemies instead.
Metaphorical enemies, not real people. Things like self-doubt, shame, people-pleasing, low self-worth. We do not want her eating real people. So this looks like becoming intentional about where you direct your imagination. This is one of your biggest power reclamations as a high-performing, imaginative, creative woman.
Think about it. What if the tendency to catastrophize became the tendency to be deliberately delulu about best case scenarios? And not because you expect every best case scenario to happen exactly as you imagine. That is not the point. The point is about choosing scenarios that create states of confidence, trust, and joy.
This is one of the dramatic storyteller's greatest superpowers when aimed. I once got roasted because I was going around saying I wasn't consistent, and I was told I was consistent as hell about my self-doubt. And it got me thinking, what if I became consistent in the other direction?
Consistent with the absolute delulu self-belief that everything I want is inevitable. And the reason you could make a case for doing this is because it feels so much better. If you have hope in a bright future and in yourself, you'll move differently, which makes food freedom and consistency so much easier this is a work in progress for me in my current season, and it's admittedly a bit overly simplistic and can turn into spiritual bypassing if you're not careful.
But as I reflected in my journal the other morning, I thought, you know, catastrophizing and delulu positivity are two opposite sides of a spectrum, and if I had to choose which side I wanted to be closer to, I would choose the delulu side every time. Now, what about the internal revver? Now, the original archetype revs himself up with pressure, anxiety, fear, and bracing.
But you have the choice to change the fuel source. What if you were like, "No, I'm good on that. I'm choosing to rev myself up with joy, and trust, and optimism, and gratitude"? And you do this by telling different stories. You do this by realizing what an absolute force your imagination is, and use it in ways that move you in the direction you want to go.
A trained imagination is the difference between imagining the rest of your life as a binge eater versus imagining the version of you who has a relationship with food, and consistency that she wants for herself. So there's two ways you can start to do this. This is not an exhaustive list, just two of my favorites.
You can employ your own dramatic storyteller to help you come up with your own ideas as well. First, creative parts work with intention. Yes, we're talking about the Food Freedom Fantasy method because I didn't start doing this Rex and Haven archetypal work because I was bored one day.
Before they were ever podcast co-hosts and muses, they were characters that showed up regularly in dreams. And one day, because I was frustrated beyond belief about my recurring struggles with emotional eating, I did something wildly imaginative with these archetypes that's been more effective than anything else I've ever tried, and this was never about escapism.
This was about giving my imagination something magical to play with so she stopped finding proof that people hated her, that she was doomed to failure and struggle forever, and that the world was a scary, unforgiving place instead of letting my imagination continue to tell stories about how that coworker must hate me because he said hi in a lower voice than usual, I finally began using my imagination as a force for good. I spent the last year creating an entire fanfic-coded method for healing your relationship with food in a way that trains your imagination.
These were never two different capacities. It was always one engine, one chaos dragon pointed in two different directions, and I was sick of my engine getting pointed in the direction of imaginary beefs with Chad in the next apartment over. So I figured out how to aim it, then wrote a book about it. Side note: there is no Chad.
Chad is hypothetical
The second way to train your dramatic storytelling dragon is using your imagination to daydream. Not create catastrophic nightmares, daydream. Use your imagination to stay connected to a bigger vision that moves you towards something that excites you. Make these your mini workouts for your dramatic storyteller.
If you don't give her something to focus on, she'll probably focus on imaginary disasters instead. This changes everything, and I can speak from experience. I was recently rereading some of my journal entries from 2021, and I was blown away by how she used her imagination as this lightning rod. The dramatic storyteller held her through some big things back then. She was in the middle of a big chapter closing, there was conflict in some of her most beloved relationships, and she was walking into an era of uncertainty. And she stayed connected to a vision that expanded her. She chose the meaning of what was happening with so much intention.
She found the lessons and the blessings in the mud. She wrote letters to her future self almost every day. She connected to her bigger vision on a daily basis. And you know what? So much of what she wrote down came true
Not all of it, but the stuff that mattered most. Financial freedom a life where she got to spend her time writing and creating, even some unexpected blessings that turned out better than she could have predicted. And I'll be honest, this year especially, I've missed that version of me.
Not because she's fully gone. The same capacity and perspectives can be retrained and re-accessed, but that level of delulu positivity and optimism is not as second nature anymore. And I think this is twofold. First, as much as I loved my last job for so many reasons, it was an environment where there was a significant amount of negativity.
A lot of people hated their jobs, a lot of people had a lot to complain about, so four years in that environment did have an impact. Near the end of my time there, one of my coworkers was even like, "You used to be so happy.
What happened?" Then there was everything else that happened after 2021. So the first attempt at building a business in 2022 being an absolute disaster. Repeated failures to achieve any of the business benchmarks everyone around me seemed to reach with ease. All of this led to discernment. I also think I became less available to bypass real emotion, and I stopped trusting every glittery promise that came through on Instagram ads.
That wisdom and growth has been valuable, and I think my dramatic storyteller has been subdued in a not so great way. It's become this overcorrection from, "Everything is possible and the universe is arranging it all," into something closer to, "Don't get too excited. Keep your head down and do the work, but honestly, we know how this goes."
So the answer isn't to fully go back to spiritually bypassing emotions like anger and disappointment, but it is about going back to the disciplines and training that served 2021 Kayla so well, with the added benefit of more emotional maturity and the capacity to hold all emotions. Not just trying to be happy all the time because being sad or angry felt like too much.
When journaling, I shared these reflections with Rex and Haven. And yes, they had thoughts. Rex says, "2021 Kayla did not have better raw material than you. She used the engine every day. You have more wisdom now, more evidence, more structure, more freedom, and considerably better men." Haven lifts his head and says, "Considerably." And no, they are not throwing shade at my husband. Anytime Chris appears in one of our conversations, they practically bow down to the king. They are talking about their earlier prototypes that showed up in my fictional books, so Jason and Todd from The Pleasure Seekers, and Tyson and Austin from the Pacific Heat trilogy.
If you really wanna hear what happens when my imagination gets completely unhinged, you can listen to episode 194, It's Not Food, It's Men. I share the whole wild, magical lineage of these characters and how they kept appearing in different forms across more than a decade. Link will be in the description.
Still one of my favorite episodes. Your embodied activation for this episode is to listen to two songs, Don't Quit Your Daydream by Lily Meola, and then Delulu by Shift to Abundance. And let yourself dream again. Get your hopes up again. Play in this realm of possibility. When you have a big creative vision for yourself, you're gonna be in this energy of, "I don't have time, I don't have energy to waste on things like food obsession, binge eating, or inconsistency. I have a purpose to live out." Now, go train your dramatic storyteller. Happy chaos dragon taming.
