Therapy for Eating Disorders: Blooming from the Trauma and Into Health
Rediscovering your weird self without the shaming, controlling food police in your head.
Eating disorders suck.
Spending 90% of your brain energy thinking about food and your body sucks.
Never feeling good enough sucks.
Comparing yourself to the world and never measuring up sucks.
You don't have to feel stuck in this place your whole life. Your brain doesn't have to argue and yell at you all of the time. I know it doesn't feel like it, but you're actually in the driver's seat of your own life. You get to determine who you are and how you want to live.
Eating disorder therapy can help you break through cycles of shame, overcome your self-criticism, and find balance with food and body.
Therapy to help eating disorders transform into freedom
The rigidity and perfectionism that go hand in hand with an eating disorder can be transformed into not only freedom with food but into authentic self-expression and the ability to heal deep wounds.
Look, I get it, I’ve stood in front of the mirror (fridge, closet, etc.) and cried. I don't want you to feel like you're alone in that feeling. We will work together to look at you as a complex whole, integrating both the practical matters and emotional aspects of eating disorder recovery.
To create real, sustainable change and emotional well-being, we will work together to:
-
Reconnect with your body
-
Stabilize Your Eating Patterns
-
Deconstruct Harmful Cultural Ideals
-
discover your emotional triggers
-
work towards self-compassion
-
heal your body image
It's not just about the food, really;
it never was.
All eating disorders, regardless of presentation, at their core are not about food.
They are fundamentally about identity, worthiness, control, and unmet needs.
The eating disorder became your coping skill but it doesn't work in your life anymore. Maybe you eat to give yourself a food hug; maybe you eat to quiet your overthinking brain; maybe you feel like the ED voice is your best friend who has been the only stable thing in your entire life. Regardless of the reasons it became a given in your life, it's causing problems now. It probably feels really scary that suddenly it will all be gone. We won’t just take it all away without adding something in its place. It may not feel quite as comforting, but we have to start somewhere.
In the wide world of eating disorders, there are several different diagnoses, but again the underlying premise is the same; it's the behaviors that differ.
I like to think about it as an umbrella term because so many people actually move between them over the life of their eating disorder.
As a reminder, a diagnosis is a classification system that should be taken with a grain of salt. Definitions change as more research is understood, and they are used as symptomatic shorthand for professionals. And since you “must be a pirate for the pirate's code to apply, and you're not...the code is more what you’d call guidelines than actual rules.” (Captain Barbossa from Pirates of the Caribbean)
-
BED is the most common eating disorder. It shows itself as eating an abnormally large amount of food in a short period of time. Still, beneath that exterior, it is really a cycle of an emotional trigger followed by secrecy, ritual, a high that feels like a calm exhale, and then shame. Lots of shame.
-
Anorexia is primarily the restriction of food. It can look like severely counting calories to meet a daily “goal”, challenging yourself to go as long as you can without eating, or only eating one small meal a day. Most diets are actually anorexia with a fancy name made up by a marketing team. Basically, the diet industry makes 72 billion (yes, with a B, not including makeup, clothes, hair removal, or GLP-1s), finding ways to cover shit with glitter and sell it back to us. Despite the cultural perception, anorexia does not have a body type. In fact, less than 6% of people with eating disorders are medically diagnosed as “underweight”, which means that most people with eating disorders live in straight-sized or larger bodies.
ED behaviors that are concerning in someone in a smaller body tend to be praised by those in larger bodies, leading to a ton of shame around even admitting that there may be something wrong.
-
Bulimia is most commonly understood as a cycle of eating and purging. In reality, the diagnosis of bulimia is applied to ANY compensatory behavior. That can look like throwing up, of course, but it can also look like restricting or skipping food the next day, overexercising to “work off” what you ate, taking diet pills or laxatives, and even cleanses.
-
Orthorexia was coined in 1997 to mean having an obsession with “healthy” eating. Finding nourishment isn't the issue; it becomes a problem when you are damaging your own physical health or well-being. Western culture is quite orthorexic in and of itself. It has assigned morality to food, vilifies different food groups, and deems superiority and intolerance over others' varying food/health beliefs. This same culture has created a social media environment with an obsession over having a healthy lifestyle and selling products to reinforce that thinness is equal to “health”, “success”, and “happiness”.
-
Avoidant or restrictive food intake disorder (ARFID) goes beyond picky eating. It is a condition where a person severely limits the types of food they eat, but not because of body image concerns, making it unlike other eating disorders. The limitations placed on food are associated primarily with sensory aversions, low interest, or fear of negative consequences. In my experience, these symptoms are usually associated with trauma or neurodivergence. For example, sensory aversions are about food textures, smells, tastes, or colors, which is very common for people with autism. Low interest is associated with forgetting to eat, having a poor appetite, or caring very little about food, which sounds a lot like ADHD and Autism traits. Fear of negative consequences looks like worrying over choking, the possibility of vomiting, or having stomach pain after eating, which can also be associated with anxiety or reactions to trauma.
