How Psychedelics Can Increase Emotional Capacity in Eating Disorder Recovery
I’ve started to notice a pattern: when things start to feel good, I shut it down.
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Over this year, I have been paying attention to how much joy, love, pleasure, and laughter I allow into my life, and have observed the ways in which I restrict how much goodness I let in.
One of the functions of my eating disorder was to suppress good feelings. For many years, I got stuck in a pattern where I didn’t want to feel good, nor did I want anyone to see me in a good mood.
I felt protected in a numb, dark and moody state because it felt like no one could get near me.
Good feelings also somehow equated with me losing control; I believed that if I started to feel good about myself and life, I would relax and let go, and subsequently everything would spin out control.
And at the deepest core of it all, I believed that I didn’t deserve goodness in my life.
If I didn't deserve it, what was the point of feeling? So why feel at all?
During the years of puberty, at a critical stage of my life where my body was changing and making space for adulthood, I directed my life towards restricting not only my food, but how much I could allow myself to feel. By directing my life in this way during a developmental stage of rapid learning, change and transformation, the eating disorder imprinted itself in a very foundational way in my psyche, carving out deep grooves of habit.
The food became a symbol for all that I wanted but couldn't allow myself to have. The body became a site where I would punish myself for having desires and feelings.
My recovery has taken me on a path back to feeling, and it continues to be a path of improving my emotional bandwidth and increasing the upper limit of my emotional experience.
This has greatly been supported by sacred plant medicines - more on this below, so keep reading :)
I have been gently nudged to give myself permission to let joy and goodness in - and to feel more - which has meant developing my emotional resilience and increasing my tolerance to be with moments of discomfort rather than numbing away through reactive food or body strategies.
Indeed, recovery for me has been about moving out the numb and grey, and into a more colourful way of being and expressing, slowly developing capacity to hold myself more and more through challenging moments and in the uncertainty of change, as well as amidst the awe-inspiring beauty of life.
Increasing my emotional bandwidth has meant opening up to relationships rather than shutting away from them.
Increasing my emotional bandwidth has meant allowing myself to laugh and be happy in front of others.
Increasing my emotional bandwidth has meant becoming more adaptable in the face of change
Increasing my emotional bandwidth has meant trusting more in myself, what I can hold, what I can feel, and what I can transform within myself.
Increasing my emotional bandwidth has meant believing in my worth.
Many people navigating eating disorders experience a stuckness in how much and what they feel; there is a rigidity that is characteristic of an eating disorder that makes the daily ritualized food and body behaviours challenging to shift.
This is because eating disorders lack of plasticity, meaning the habitual thoughts and habitual emotions become deeply ingrained and are hard to change. Over time, it can feel like the eating disorder is who we are, or it seems almost impossible to imagine a life without the eating disorder, because the patterns become deeply entrenched and wedged into the psyche.
This is why it is so important to find ways to repattern the neuropathways that are associated with automatic, habitual disordered eating patterns.
And altered states, such as psychedelic experiences (but also including flow states, embodied movement, art-making, and nature immersions) can support that process of promoting plasticity, reopening windows of new learning, change and adaption.
When we enter a psychedelic experience (microdosing included), these unconscious patterns come to the surface, and we are able to see them in a new way.
The default mode network – the part of our brain that navigates life when are not consciously directing it – become quieter, and as such, so do the unconscious eating disorder patterns.
This means we diverge away from our standard way of operating patterns. Altered states that get us out of our heads and immersed in the present moment, move us out of our default reality and help recode our baseline of what we feel - and how we feel.
Because there is such a high level of daily rumination and need for control, especially around emotions, supporting people with eating disorders to be more adaptive in the face of change and shift from narrow focus to open focus will help the recovery process.
Starting to connect with more emotions, developing resilience to be with uncomfortable emotions, and giving ourselves permission to feel more in our bodies supports the process of deepening into embodiment – which is what recovery is all about.