An interesting article written by ‘The healing nest’ – While we still have a long way to go in terms of understanding Eating disorders, I believe we have progressed. 
Many of us get that “Eating disorders aren’t about food or weight” because it’s the number one phrase that gets shouted from the rooftops by Eating disorder sufferers & Eating disorder support organisations (for good reason) it was/is such a damaging misconception. But what many people still don’t understand, is what they ARE actually about. 

I feel like people avoid talking about what Eating disorders are about because they are SO complex, there are often many, many layers, an accumulation of different factors. It gets complicated. The most common phrase I hear…“I know that Eating disorders aren’t about food or weight…it’s about control.” Yeah. Often this is the case, the desire for control is hugely common but it’s a terribly over simplified explanation. The reasons behind the disorder are as individual as the sufferer him/herself, so it’s risky territory listing possible causes…But I’m writing this in the hope that it helps to broaden understanding of this illness and to shed some light into some of the darker, less spoken about underlying issues.

It’s not about food or weight…It’s about feeling unsafe in the world. It’s about feeling like we can’t trust anyone, not even ourselves. The Eating Disorder becomes “the reliable one”.

It’s about the feelings we can’t verbalize, that can’t be expressed through words so we try to “say” it with our bodies.

It’s about an extreme, intense feeling of being inadequate.  Like nothing we do or say or feel is “right”. “Not thin enough” often means something more painful to admit. That we are not enough. full stop.

It’s about feeling overwhelmed by life. Like nothing makes sense. Nothing is simple. The Eating Disorder gives us a sense of calm…to an outsider our life may look like it is in absolute chaos but it gives us the false sense of security we so desperately need. Problems that seem too big and complicated to deal with, feelings that are uncomfortable to sit with; the Eating Disorder provides us with simple, concrete answers to our distress. Our bodies are the problem and we need to fix the problem by losing weight.

It’s about needing to feel loved and comforted but feeling unworthy of real love and comfort. It’s about hating having needs and desires. For some of us, needs make us feel greedy and selfish. For some of us, having needs means we can easily get hurt if those needs are not met. For some of us, we don’t believe we deserve to have our needs met. We try to convince ourselves that we don’t need anything by avoiding food, one of our greatest primal needs.

It’s about having low self esteem. It’s about more than that, it’s about self hatred. A self hatred that could be there for another huge list of reasons. Our trust may have been broken by a loved one, we may have been abused: emotionally, physically, sexually. We may have done things we deeply regret. We may blame ourselves for painful experiences that have happened in our lives. We may not even know why that self hatred is there but we feel it in our core. It’s something so deep down, something in us that we believe to be dark, dangerous and disgustingly horrible. We believe we are “bad” people and deserve to be punished. We starve, purge, binge and excessively exercise because we feel like we deserve to die a slow and painful death. We deserve this miserable life.

It’s about debilitating anxiety and/or depression that we struggle to deal with so we use the Eating Disorder to cope. Some of us spend years swinging between depression and the Eating Disorder, when one gets better, the other gets worse.

It’s about being paralysed by perfectionism. In every sense of the word. Many of us have obsessive compulsive personalities and expectations that are so high we constantly feel like we are failing. We put ridiculous amounts of pressure on ourselves to be “the best”. We compare ourselves to everyone around us and constantly feel like we are falling behind.

It’s about the disgust we have for our bodies. Some of us have been teased and shamed for our weight by kids in the school yard, brothers or sisters, mothers or fathers. Some of us feel embarrassed by our changing bodies as we go through puberty. Some of us blame our bodies for acts of violation committed against us. Somehow, our bodies have betrayed us.

It’s about the environment we grew up in. Some of us grew up witnessing the messy divorce of our parents, some of us experienced the death of an important loved one, some of us were foster children, moved from household to household. Some of us were bullied for being poor or bullied for being rich. Some of us grew up in chaotic households. For some of us, our parents were distant, for others our parents were overbearing and overprotective.

It’s about secrecy and silence. We are all silently screaming for something. Love, help, escape, forgiveness, support, comfort. We use our bodies and behaviours to communicate instead of our voices.

It’s about fear. We are afraid of growing up, afraid of staying young. Afraid of our future, afraid of our past. Some of us are afraid of failure, some of us are afraid of success. Afraid of being too much or not enough. Some of us are scared we will not be brilliant or amazing or unique or rich or famous or inspiring or important or seen…or LOVED. We are afraid we will never find someone who will love us, unconditionally and some of us are afraid we will. Some of us are afraid of both. It’s these contradictions that can make life so confusing and scary and difficult to deal with.

It’s about holding onto something that gives us an identity. We are afraid that without the Eating Disorder, we are nothing. In some weird way, we think it makes us strong. We believe our Eating Disorder masks our fear, our shame, our vulnerability. The things, we believe, make us weak.

It’s about painful feelings and our belief that we are unable to deal with them so we use the Eating Disorder to numb the sadness, anger, hurt, shame, guilt, hopelessness, fear etc.

It’s about being an extremely sensitive soul. We feel things deeply and intensely. We are effected by others emotions easily and often take on their pain. Others feelings and problems become ours. We are emotionally reactive, we cry at the drop of a hat, the daily news makes our heart hurt and our mood plummet. We take things personally and over think E V E R Y T H I N G. We feel the weight of the world on our shoulders, like it is our responsibility to save it (the world).

It’s about subconsciously internalising the “Western Beauty Ideal” we are faced with day in day out. It’s about being bombarded with advertising that is constantly telling us we are not good enough.

It’s about loneliness. Like we don’t fit in or belong anywhere. Like no one understands us. Like we are somehow completely different to the rest of the human population. It doesn’t matter how many friends or family we have around us, this is a loneliness, an emptiness that we believe cannot be filled.

It’s about survival. It helped us to survive and cope with some horrific and painful life experiences.

It’s about being passive. Many of us, put others first at a huge cost to our own health and happiness. We say yes when we mean no and no when we mean yes. We struggle with being assertive and as a result often get taken advantage of. This only feeds into our unworthiness.

It’s about privacy, having something that is ours and only ours. Something no one else can touch.

It’s not about weight, but for some of us, it is. However, not in the way you’d think. Some of us want to shrink so that we become invisible. We want to become as small as we feel. We want to hide away. Our shrinking body becomes a metaphor for our shrinking soul. Some of us, want to become bigger so we can hide behind our weight. So that our body fat becomes our protection. So we become “undesirable” to men or women. So we don’t have to face relationships or intimacy or our sexuality. Things that terrify us. Our bodies reflect how we feel about ourselves on the INSIDE. What drains our spirit, drains our body.

It’s about being in so much emotional pain that you can’t even begin to allow yourself to feel it or acknowledge it, the pain the eating disorder brings seems like a blessing in comparison. We use the Eating Disorder to avoid and distract ourselves from all the things that are really going on, inside. More often than not, it’s an accumulation of any number of these thoughts, feelings, beliefs and experiences and there is bound to be plenty of other influencing factors that I haven’t listed. Everyone is different.This is just a list of some of the more common causes that I know of from experience living with my own Eating Disorder and being close to many others who have Eating disorders, it is by NO means the ‘absolute’ list.

Please also know that insight into these reasons takes time in therapy and a lot of self reflection and personal development…a sufferer doesn’t make a conscious decision to develop an Eating Disorder so they can avoid feeling emotional pain, for example. This is all going on subconsciously. The Eating Disorder masks all of this and convinces us that our only problem is that we are fat.

So if someone you care about is struggling with an Eating Disorder, instead of telling them to “just eat”, ask them what they believe is behind their Eating Disorder and don’t take “I’m just fat” as a valid answer…because that is NEVER the answer. No matter how strongly they feel that in the moment, it almost always goes much deeper than that.

Help us stop the silence. Let’s start talking about this on a deeper, less superficial level. One of the most important steps towards recovery involves allowing us to explore and express our own personal stories. We need to understand why we have developed an Eating Disorder and how it serves us before we have any hope of true recovery.

Surrendering to your sorrow has the power to heal the deepest of wounds

For many people grief is an option. Looking at my own life, I realized it is a matter of life and death. In fact, throughout my life, grief has been an important theme from crying for food as a child to dealing with deep pain of losses as I grow older. My earliest memory of deep grieving was when I was a little girl, about 5 or 6-years old. One of my playmates died. I was so shocked and confused by the whole business especially when I am told I would never see him in a physical form again. I grieved for a long time and it just wouldn’t stick in my head that my friend had died. Every day I would try to go with the hope to play with him, but he wasn’t there. My community would gently say to me “do you remember that he died?,” and they supported me and grieved with me. Although I grieved for a long time, over a year, it was accepted as a normal part of life. I was never asked, “Aren’t you finished grieving yet?” Rather, they would say – “have you grieved enough? Have you cried enough?”

For my people, the Dagara tribe of Burkina Faso in West Africa, we see that in life it is necessary to grieve those things that no longer serve us and let them go. When I grieve I am surrounded by family reassuring me that the grieving is worthwhile and I can grieve as much as I want. We experience conflicts, loved ones die or suffer, dreams never manifest, illnesses occur, relationships break up, and there are unexpected natural disasters. It is so important to have ways to release those pains to keep clearing ourselves. Hanging on to old pain just makes it grow until it smothers our creativity, our joy, and our ability to connect with others. It may even kill us. Often my community uses grief rituals to heal wounds and open us to spirit’s call.

I thought this perspective on grief was natural for everyone until I came to the U.S. I was with a friend who was having a conflict with her family and I knew the situation was not easy for her. But one day I heard her alone in the bathroom crying! I said, through the door, “Are you OK?” She said, “Yes, I’m fine!” I said to myself, “Oh my god, something is not right here.” The people who were supposed to support her were not there. I felt conflicted and wondered what would my grandmother do in this situation?

I was in my late teens when my grandmother died. I was overcome with so much devastating grief I was unable to release it. I was stuck in feeling of anger, betrayal and even rage. I wondered, how could my grandmother do this to me? Everyone was grieving around me. Though I could not join them they made a space for me. Everyone took turns caring for each other as they broke down. Luckily, the seventy-two hours of usual grieving time were stretched beyond five days. When everyone was finished, I still had much to grieve, and people were still there for me. Though I began my grieving late I never felt dissatisfaction from those around me. It is natural that people around you start to grieve when you do. We know that when you have pain it’s not a personal pain, it is a pain of the whole group. We experience a collective sharing, so that an individual doesn’t need to bear all the weight of the suffering.

Many years later, while in the U.S., I had a relationship crisis. I felt like I was dying. I realized that I was feeling lonely in my grief as my soul, heart and mind continuously collided. I was not used to giving an intellectual explanation to my grief. I found much relief in various communities here and when I got home and everyone joined me in the grieving all of a sudden, I felt lighter.

There is a price in not expressing one’s grief. Imagine if you never washed your clothes or showered. The toxins that your body produces just from everyday living would build up and get really stinky. That is how it is with emotional and spiritual toxins too. What we must remember is that, the more these toxins rise the more we have a tendency to blame or hurt others around us. People never harm others out of joy, they give pain to others because they too are hurt or in pain.

There can be so much grief that we grow numb from the unfelt and unexpressed emotions that we carry in our bodies. Unexpressed hurt and pain injures our souls, and can be linked directly to our general sense of spiritual drought and emotional confusion, not to mention the many illnesses we experience in our lives. Many of us suffer from medical conditions that are grief-related. Grieving, whether in private or in community, has many scientifically proven health benefits, from lowering blood pressure and risks of heart attacks to simply having a better quality of life.

We need to begin to see grief not as foreign entity and not as an alien to be held down or caged up, but as a natural process. As the recipient of someone’s grief we also must understand that it is OK for someone to express pain.

In today’s world, most of us carry grief and do not even know it. We have been trained at a very young age how not to feel. In the West we are often taught that to be good girls and boys we have to “suck it up.” The consequences are that even with your most intimate and trustworthy friends you might feel like, “I am burdening them.” Crying in front of others is too often a forbidden fruit. We learn to compartmentalize our grief because expressing it in an unwelcoming place will only lead to more grief. We are taught that the people who are closest to us have no way of holding us when we fall apart.

Yet we are born fully knowing how to grieve. We cry naturally to feel better, to unburden ourselves and take a few pounds off our shoulders and souls.

If there is a way for everyone to grieve openly, I believe it will also diminish the blaming and shaming that goes on between the races. When you are in the presence of someone grieving you don’t see color anymore, it is a universal language. We are all in pain. There is no need to blame others. Blame, shame, and guilt come from being unable to express our grief properly. How can we pretend to be happy, peaceful and loving when we have so much pain and grief?

I believe the future of our world depends greatly on the manner in which we handle our grief. Positive expressions of our grief are healing. However, the lack of expression of our grief or its improper release is what is at the root of the general unhappiness and depression that people feel, all of which lead to war and crimes.

There are things we can do in society to help heal. We can begin by accepting our own and each other’s grief. We can have grief rooms and shrines in public spaces where people can go to grieve. I have seen this happen in different communities in the United States and it worked for them. Churches can have rooms for people to grieve. One of my dreams is to turn places where there have been great and repetitious crimes into grief shrines where people can go to mourn. I imagine Memorial Day not as a day of barbecue, but a day to allow us to deal with our daily frictions, losses and grief as a community.

Communal grieving offers something that we cannot get when we grieve by ourselves. Through validation, acknowledgement and witnessing, communal grieving allows us to experience a level of healing that is deeply and profoundly freeing. Each of us has a basic human right to that genuine love, happiness and freedom.