So many people with eating disorders don’t feel seen and heard in their lives. Eating disorder symptoms provide relief by numbing, comforting and validating parts of themselves. The end result is that the eating disorder can assuage the emotional pain that results from feeling so invisible.
Although this experience is not universal for people with eating disorders, many people feel terribly alone.
I have written many times how the eating disorder can be a salve against this emotional pain and can be a means to feel companionship and reliability as well.
The path to recovery needs to include meal plans, external factors that matter to the person and a team of clinicians who the person trust and who cares for them. But eating disorder recovery needs something more fundamentally human than that too.
People with eating disorders struggle so much with the balance between a professional and personal relationship in therapy. For people who have felt so unloved, they have a hard time balancing what they actually need with the circumscribed, limited therapy relationship. As real as the connection is, it’s hard not to feel even more heartbreak and loneliness as a reaction to the boundaries imposed by the therapy relationship.
Yet the connection and care of the therapy relationship are critical to any true recovery. To do such incredibly hard work, the person needs to know that they matter to someone.
Granted, it’s easy for the therapist to envision the therapy relationship as a springboard to find that kind of love in a relationship without limitations. That’s easier for the therapist to lean on and potentially more satisfying for the patient too.
But that’s just an easy out. The therapy relationship still is meaningful, very real and ultimately the catalyst that leads the way to get better. The limitations and emotional pain that ensue also need to be addressed since this experience in therapy highlights much of what led to the eating disorder in the first place.
The answer isn’t clear. Even if the boundaries exist, the relationship for someone who has never mattered before is a transformative experience and invaluable. Plus, this is an intensely personal relationship. There is no clear advice that makes it any easier. The goal is to find one’s way, value how much the relationship brings and find gratitude to have found a relationship that makes it possible to live in this new way, one where the eating disorder isn’t dominating everything in life. Moreover, hope for the future can pave the way forward.
