Connecting Eating Disorder Recovery with Women’s Emotions and Power

The first part of eating disorder treatment is typically focused on normalizing eating and implementing a meal plan. Regulation of food and nutrition allows the body and brain to receive adequate energy to heal and function normally again.

The second part of treatment is amorphous and more complex. The last several posts highlight, on a larger scale, how the suppression of girls’ and women’s emotions and anger is very much related to eating disorders. Thus, it’s not coincidental that recovery focuses on identification and expression of those suppressed feelings along with exploration of someone’s true identity once the eating disorder is no longer the only driving force in her life.

The true engine of an eating disorder is the obsessive, persistent thoughts about food and weight. At its worst, an eating disorder so dominates one’s mind that there is no room for all the thoughts, feelings and experiences that come from living life. Once the eating disorder thoughts begin to dissipate, the mind almost feels blank and people often find themselves longing for the old thoughts to occupy all the empty space.

It doesn’t take much encouragement or living to bring up new and different thoughts and feelings. They come automatically just by living in the world. However, the experience of true reactions to the world can be overwhelming after having been sheltered for years behind the wall of the eating disorder.

Fairly soon, the new feelings land on anger and often this anger relates to the ways in which the person has been suppressed, oppressed or kept down in some way. The reaction and feelings can be very overwhelming yet the path to recovery has to go through those very real and valid feelings.

In the context of the recent posts, this step in recovery represents the idea that eating disorders have become the newest psychiatric disorder that pathologizes girls’ and women’s emotions. The goal of recovery isn’t just to help people eat and live their lives again. The goal is to open the door to living fully and freely, including the ability to express all of one’s feelings in the world.