Overcoming a restrictive eating disorder is incredibly hard. In fact, I regularly say that it's likely the hardest thing that you will do in your lifetime because it is. And a significant factor in making an eating disorder so hard to overcome is the inevitable return of emotions that can hit you out of no where during the recovery process.
For many, the often rapid return of strong emotions can be debilitating when they first kick in. But let's face it, eating disorders don't have such low recovery rates because you just choose to start eating 'normally' one day, gain a bit of weight and job done. Eating disorders have low recovery rates because there are powerful brain-based factors at play, making the necessary changes, that to the outside world might seem simple, feel complicated, emotional and impossible to tolerate to the person trying to navigate through it.
In the past, many 'experts' believed that an eating disorder was caused by past trauma or poor parenting. I like to think that both those theories have been discredited enough by now and they are not views that remain widespread.
But despite the fact that eating disorders don't initially develop purely as a means to manage hard emotions, stress or trauma, their addictive nature and the surge of positive feeling that pursuing energy deficit through an eating disorder will create very quickly changes this.
An Eating Disorder Becomes a Powerful Way to Numb and Block Painful Emotions
The pursuit of energy deficit with an eating disorder, achieved by restrictive eating and compulsive compensatory behaviours, enables you to feel calm, better able to function and at least at the beginning of the eating disorder, quite good in yourself. This effect ensures that rapidly after onset, the eating disorder becomes the most powerful way you will ever have to numb painful emotions, feel better and manage stress.
As with other addictions, an eating disorder can quickly consume you, shrinking your ability to experience a wider life , and removing your experience of either good or bad emotions beyond a basic level.
This is caused by a brain whose primary focus is the pursuit of energy deficit and its numbing effects—a pursuit that's happening at a deep and subconscious level.
It's also the case that an energy deprived brain, which is an inevitable consequence of a restrictive eating disorder, has a reduced ability to find joy in things that were once pleasurable. This natural physiological and psychological reaction to hunger and starvation was covered in more detail in my earlier blog posts on the Minnesota Starvation Experiment.
The longer that you have an eating disorder, the more likely it is that you will lose your ablity to associate with true emotions. This means you lose connection to yourself and your ability to live authentically. When you are unable to recognise what you feel, it’s hard to understand what your needs are beyond the inner compulsion to pursue energy deficit and to build a life around that addictive drive.
Lacking The Full Impact of Emotions Can Become Your Norm
Many people live within an eating disordered brain for years, sometimes decades, so it’s been years or decades since they experienced real emotions. This is something that can be hard to realise and accept. When being numb has been your norm for years, it’s hard to remember or understand that you are not experiencing emotions in the way other people do because what’s normal is quickly forgotten. This makes resurfacing emotions during the recovery process even more alarming.
But when you do abstain from the compulsive behaviours in the process of overcoming the eating disorder, your emotions will begin to re-emerge, and they can be intense. This is a frightening and overwhelming time, and can become an obstacle in feeling able to push forwards when these powerful emotions automatically create stronger urges to return to the eating disordered behaviours.
Stronger Positive Emotions Can Also Be a Double-Edged Sword
Of course, it’s not just negative emotions that resurface. Positive ones do too, which can be incredible as you feel real joy or genuine laughter again. You are likely to feel positively relieved that you are no longer living a life of entrapment in an eating disorder and perceive colour returning to your world in all kinds of small ways.
However, even the return of positive emotions can feel like a double-edged sword as it can be tinged with intense sadness that you lost this ability to experience real pleasure for so long. Alongside this, experiencing joy again can be coupled with vulnerability and fears:
What if all these good changes are snatched away once more?
Feeling Stronger Love For Others Increases Your Vulnerability
The ability to feel even more intense love and affection for friends and family also becomes stronger as your emotions reawaken. Of course, the love was always there, but an eating disorder can blunt the intensity. The return of the strength of emotional feeling you have towards others can also be frightening as love makes us vulnerable, even though it's also amazing and powerful.
When emotions strengthen towards others in your life, so, too can feelings of pain and guilt around the impact that the eating disorder had, not just on your life but the lives of those who love you too. When you were consumed within the eating disorder, it was very likely more difficult to notice or do anything about the impact that the eating disorder had on those around you. The harsh reality often only hits as you overcome the eating disorder and the narrowed focus it created begins to widen again. These can be challenging emotions to sit through.
Many people experience feelings of guilt and shame in relation to the impact the eating disorder has had on loved ones and on themselves. Shame is an incredibly painful emotion and hard to tolerate. Experiencing it can lead to powerful urges to re-engage in old behaviours for their numbing effects.
... And Boredom Also Strikes
Boredom, feeling low and despondent or flat are also common in the recovery process. Your go-to for a sense of distraction and pleasure has been the eating disorder behaviours for a long time, and other pursuits people find pleasurable will have lost the same appeal to you.
When you make yourself stop the old habitual pleasure-seeking methods, you will feel lost and flat because your brain isn’t yet capable of being able to enjoy significant pleasure in what might be considered simpler ways. This will occur as you are going through the dopamine deficit state and your natural dopamine levels are taking time to return to a natural and more stable baseline (see this post to understand the dopamine see-saw).
Learning to tolerate boredom and just be in your own skin is important, without using the eating disorder to numb or distract. It’s also important to let yourself feel the hunger signals your brain and body are sending in times of boredom as this is when they can be most striking, and although its strength can be frightening, the hunger is there for a reason.
Finally, it’s not uncommon for people to become very depressed at various stages of the process to overcome an eating disorder. In large part, this can be due to the dopamine deficit state that the addictive nature of the eating disorder created. Time is needed to allow dopamine levels to naturally return to a level balance. Of course, there are also other reasons people can go through episodes of depression in the process. If you feel your mood is reducing significantly and you need professional help for it then please seek that input from the right people.
What Purpose Do Emotions Serve?
Without getting into the deep science of feelings and emotions, it’s important to acknowledge that emotions and feelings serve a purpose. Humans don’t have the capacity for emotions without good reason.
As many people who have lived in the numb world of an eating disorder can testify to, it’s very hard to live a truly full and meaningful life without the experience of emotions, both good and bad.
But what are emotions and what wider purpose do they serve?
Most people don’t realise that emotions occur before you are consciously aware of them. Emotions are essentially a physical state change that your brain then interprets—using its best guess as to what caused this change—and turns it into a feeling.
This is the point at which your brain’s interpretation of the change in physical state enters your conscious awareness. In this way, emotions can take over our thoughts and trigger immediate responses. This is often necessary for survival.
For example, emotions can serve the purpose of ensuring we are able to make quick decisions and deter from danger. So, if you see a car heading towards you at high speed, fear is an appropriate emotion and serves the purpose of making you rapidly move out of the way.
Other purposes of emotions can include:
A prompt to communicate with others. Emotions can guide you to seek connection and support;
An aid to help you understand others;
A guide to show you what is safe and good for you;
A means to instruct you; and
A means of allowing you to function on a social level and live among others (also important for survival).
When you can feel your emotions and recognise them, it can help you to identify what you need. For example:
If you are feeling lonely, you might seek out someone for a hug or find ways to connect with others.
If you are feeling overwhelmed, you might seek out quiet time to be by yourself.
If you are frustrated and angry that your boss is constantly belittling you, you might seek a new job.
If you feel guilt for forgetting your friend’s birthday, you might call them to apologise and arrange a date to get together.
If you are feeling sadness, you might recognise what has caused this and acknowledge that something important to you is missing, allowing yourself time to cry.
When you feel joyful that you have conquered that large pizza AND the ice cream that the eating disorder stopped you from enjoying for so long, you might do a victory dance and share your win with someone who gets it!
Emotions are Important
Emotions are a valuable part of being human, and without them, life becomes suboptimal. But of course, emotions are not easy to experience. Many people use all kinds of measures to avoid feeling emotions. Eating disorders are one powerful method, but people without eating disorders might use alcohol, gambling, shopping, excessive social media use or other numbing habits.
When your emotions return as you overcome the eating disorder—which they will, and they need to—it will be crucial to find ways to manage them.
You will get strong urges to resort to the old, effective eating disordered habits and block the emotions as they surface. Be prepared for this. Seek support, use a coach, use people who love you and develop a range of healthy skills in emotion regulation.
Feel the painful emotions and let them guide you by recognising what they are trying to tell you. Then, allow yourself to wallow in the positive emotions, because after living in an eating disorder, you deserve to experience all the joy that life can now bring.
The return of emotions in overcoming an eating disorder can be a critical time period in the process. It's a time you are much more vulnerable, making the eating disorder urges in the shape of thoughts, anxiety, overwhelm and automatically finding yourself going back to old ways more intense and frequent. Be prepared for this time and let yourself experience and process feelings again.
If you do find that you start to experience difficult trauma responses or feel you are becoming a threat to yourself or unsafe then you must seek professional support to help you while you go through this critical and challenging time safely.
In future posts I will cover a few more of the factors that make overcoming an eating disorder so hard so that you can be aware of and navigate them more effectively. If you want to read about them before then, it's all in my first book, 'Addicted to Energy Deficit' which there's a link to below.
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