Holding The Heart: The Eating Disorder Recovery Journey
Eating disorder recovery is learning how to be with more fullness. Recovery from an eating disorder or disordered eating is the process of increasing our capacity to be with more of life, to be filled by life.
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No longer restricting life, eating disorder recovery requires us to embrace the fullness of each moment.
It means being able to hold the fullness of a feeling, whether it be grief, anger, pleasure, or excitement.
So, take note for yourself - when you get nervous or on edge, or anxious or overwhelmed, or irritated or scared, what do you do?
How do you navigate that feeling?
What do you reach for as a way to cope?
Eating disorder recovery is the development of our own inner resilience and self-compassion, that is both strong and soft, that can hold and navigate the intensity of the moment, whether the moment is intensely beautiful or intensely challenging.
Eating disorder recovery, at its core, asks us to be with our hearts - the heart that feels the complexities and paradoxes of being a full human in this full life.
Getting in touch with our hearts is at the heart of recovery. We can strengthen the connection to our hearts by:
Placing our hands over the chest area and breathing into it
Noticing the pace and rhythm of the heartbeat
Massaging the chest area
Connecting to the diaphragm that moves with the mediastinum (the sac that holds the heart)
Engaging in activities that bring different types of heartrates as ways to consciously strength and support the heart muscle
Hugging another (people, animals, trees etc) and feeling the heart-to-heart connection
Singing, sounding, dancing, breathing
It is known that Struggles with emotion processing (aka connecting to the heart) are central to the developmental and maintenance of eating disorder symptoms – and so the question is, how can we relearn how to connect to heart and feel?
These heart-strengthening and heart-softening practices (listed above) can support our connection to the heart, increasing our capacity to be with a wider range of ebbs and flows.
We can grow our tolerance to be present with the fullness of life without getting overwhelmed, shutting down, or using food and body coping strategies to numb it away.
Indeed, many people navigating disordered eating or eating disorders are scared to feel – and eating disorders can numb away feeling, be it through restriction, binge eating, purging, over-exercising, or a hyper-focus on body image.
Eating disorders often develop as maladaptive coping strategies when a person feels like their internal resourcing and capacity are overwhelmed by what’s happening in their life.
Often people are afraid that feeling the feels will overwhelm them – like a tidal wave, or like the sky will fall down, or like the world will dissolve into chaotic confusion, or that the feelings will just never, ever stop, or the heart will metaphorically bleed to death.
This means that if we want to start connecting to the heart and its feelings, we need to go in bit by bit, literally feeling in bite-sized bits.
As such, relearning how to feel is a process that takes practice, patience and courage.
It is a practice.
That means that we need to develop and practice adding sustainable external and internal resources that support the growing of our capacity to be with the inevitable ebbs and flows of life.
We are strengthening the heart, supporting its resiliency and ability to surrender and soften.
We can practice feeling the feels, whether it be sadness, anger, resistance, numbness, joy, pleasure, or love for a few moments, and then back away and resource ourselves with something that brings soothing, settling and anchoring.
Recovery is a practice, and practice takes time and titration.
If people around us growing up didn’t model a supportive way to be with their own feelings (either they were numb or explosive in how they experienced their feelings), or if our feelings were misunderstood by our caregivers, we may learn ways to disconnect from our bodies and feelings.
This where disordered eating strategies come in as a way to numb the painful feelings, as well as the pleasant feelings.
This is why for many of us, relearning and growing capacity to connect with the heart is a practice, particularly when we didn’t learn how to do it as young children. The good news is that connecting with our emotions and inner state (aka developing introception) can be relearnt as adults even if we didn’t have caregivers around us when we were younger to teach us.
We slowly learn to trust that what we feel is valid and safe to feel, and how we express our feelings is important and accepted.
And we don’t want to feel things all in one go – otherwise that may overwhelm the system. We go in slowly, asking what wants to be felt, tracking sensations and how it feels in the body, whilst staying connected to the environment, here and now. Additionally, remembering that we always have choice and agency in the process – we can slow it down, put the feeling in an imaginary box and return to it at later stage, reaching for healthy resources that helps us ground, tether, and downregulate.
Relearning how to feel can be navigated with the support of another person, with whom we can co-regulate with. Through someone' else’s co-regulating, safe, and accepting presence, we learn how to be with our own feelings, and find our way through to self-regulation.
We can intentionally grow our tolerance to be present with the fullness of life without getting overwhelmed, shutting down, or using food and body coping strategies to restrict or shrink life.
Let us learn how to be full of life, rather than starving life.
We can let life more through us.
We can let life excite our hearts.
Trusting.
Empowered.
Resilient.
Heart-Centered.
If you are curious to explore the landscapes of your heart, I invite you to join my next Eating Disorder Recovery Support Group.
Over the course of five weeks, we will invite our bodies and hearts to be heard, witnessed, and celebrated within the potent context of community support. If you would like more information on this nourishing container, head here.
Photo by Tim Marshall on Unsplash