“Feeling guilty for eating when you're hungry is like feeling guilty for breathing when your lungs need oxygen. We've literally been taught to be ashamed of our basic human needs. Refuse to feel the shame. You are allowed to eat.”
-Anonymous
I want to stop, but I can’t
Of course you can’t.
When eating or not eating helps you feel comfort, agency, acceptance, power, love, and control… giving it up feels unbearable.
At Embodied Refrain we do it a little differently:
Here we believe that disordered eating is a symptom of unbearable pain. Simply trying to “change the behavior” isn’t going to get to the root of the problem: why you needed an eating disorder in the first place.
We’ve seen it time and again in eating disorder care: client is given “tools” to change their eating behaviors, only to relapse or switch to a new maladaptive behavior.
It’s because your brain and body are smart (or as we like to say: smart-dumb). It knows you need protection from an emotional pain that threatens to tear you apart. So if you take away food as the pain medicine… your brain will choose something else.
Addiction, substances, alcohol, self harm, cutting, OCD, destructive relationships, excessive exercising… will clamor to be chosen. And if a new medicine doesn’t work you’re left feeling out of options.
There is hope.
Using a mix of trauma therapies, attachment therapy, somatic, and depth psychology we can heal the root of the issue.
EMDR, Somatic, or ART (Accelerated Resolution Therapy) are excellent ways to get past all the intellectualizing straight to where the body stores your trauma.
Attachment therapy has been shown to be more effective for eating disorders than many of the standard methods. Often eating disorders are the symptom of deep relational wounding. And our attachment to food can often mimic our attachment templates we built in childhood.
Depth Psychology allows us to reach the unconscious through metaphors, dreams, and symbols, allowing us to see what lies in our shadows.