Why I Don't Call An Eating Disorder An "Eating Disorder"
Through personal explorations and through the support of plant medicine and nervous system work, I have come to understand that an eating disorder is not a disorder.
Having been in eating disorder recovery for 15 years, I haven’t yet found the right language of how to describe what an eating disorder is. For me, it doesn’t feel quite right to call it an eating disorder an “eating disorder”.
The eating disorder is not the disorder. It is someone in the process of trying to solve a problem (made up of behaviours, feelings, thoughts and beliefs).
The “disorder” is actually responding and representing an external environment that is dysregulated and disordered that has resulted in one’s individual nervous system to become dysregulated.
If we want to treat eating disorders, we need to reassess how our societies operate.
We have to look at eating patterns/“disorders” from this systemic vantage point because eating “disorders” are pointing us towards what we’re missing as a society, and what’s out of balance within these larger forces.
What is out of balance is a society that simply does not offer enough safety and acceptance for individual survival stress/trauma to be processed and digested.
When we experience something traumatic and don’t have someone safe around us to help us make sense of the event, stress survival energies of flight, fight, and freeze get trapped in our bodies.
Over time, these survival energies form a toxic soup in our bodies and cause havoc on our biological processes and our mental and emotional functioning. In an attempt to restore some form of internal balance, we may reach for food and body coping strategies. This is what an “eating disorder” is.
The eating disorder is pointing to the imbalances and the unprocessed trauma that is stored in an individual’s system due to the trauma that has been passed down through the collective.
At its core, an eating disorder is an attempt to try to restore balance to these micro and macro imbalances.
What we are missing within these larger networks are teachings that guide on how to track our own physiology, to listen to our inner cues, to resource and regulate in healthy ways, and to express emotions.
We are missing moments to slow down, co-regulate, and attune with others because our go-go society pushes us to override our own system, our authentic impulses, and erode our boundaries in order to keep up.
We’re missing trust between others and towards our own bodies because society and diet culture champions physical and emotional hardness, competition, and comparison.
We’re missing moments to rest and reflect and so we lose touch with the intuitive nudges from our bodies, and rely on external rules rather than internal, aligned cues and authentic, biological impulses.
We’re missing connection to the great Earth body because society is more concerned with extraction and consumption than reciprocity. The nourishment that we receive from the Earth is lost. The nourishment that we receive in taking care of the Earth is lost.
This results in a feeling of something is missing. A stomach that can never feel full. A spiritual starvation.
I have discovered that the eating disorder behaviours naturally fade when we learn how to regulate and balance the nervous system.
But -
This doesn’t address the larger systems that are inherently dysregulating, disconnecting, and disempowering, and that instill mistrust, not enoughness, comparison and smallness.
What will it take to create foundations that support a regulated society and the structures that uphold it that invites us into a befriending relationship with food and our bodies?
The eating disorder is not “wrong”. And the person navigating an eating disorder is not wrong either.
Eating disorders have wisdom and they are pointing all of us as a society to where the deepest healing and regeneration are possible.
And to also remember that an eating disorder is not only not a disorder, but it is not about the food either.
Eating disorders are the body’s attempt at communicating to us about how someone is experiencing and digesting life.
Rather than telling someone that they can no longer engage in the food behaviours, which can be shaming and pathologizing (and silences the body!), we can get compassionately curious about the behaviours instead, and ask what the body trying to communicate about how safe or unsafe the body feels, the level of regulation or dysregulation in the nervous system, and what the needs are that the body is trying to meet in the ways that it knows how.
As such, engaging with the eating disorder from this level requires a deep and sensitive listening to the body – and how the body is communicating.
And the body communicates in a different way – not talking, meaning-making or thought, but through sensation, 5 sense perception, and movement.
When we recongise that the eating disoder is the body’s way of communicating its needs, the organization of its attachment and defense system, and what it is yearning for to thrive, we need to speak directly to the body – and find ways to nourish and resource the body itself.
By resourcing the body, it can ultimately become an ally and a resource in the recovery process.
And this is the goal – for the body itself to a resource in the recovery process.
The body is not something to be feared or an enemy.
When listened to and collaborated with, trust develops between you and your body, opening the door for its wisdom to be shared.
And ultimately, you then become your own guide for the recovery journey ahead.
Photo by Jeremy Thomas on Unsplash