What Psychedelics Can Teach Us About Treating Eating Disorders
How can we approach eating disorder recovery and healing from disordered eating in ways that are additive and empowering rather than restrictive or controlled?
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With the global growing interest in how psychedelics and plant medicine can support eating disorder recovery, we are collectively moving towards not only a new understanding of what eating disorders are, but how to address treatment too.
From what I can see, psychedelics are teaching us to expand our understanding of how to treat eating disorders (and trauma), and to reassess our current older methods of treatment that we have been using for centuries.
It is clear that eating disorder treatment doesn’t always work nor does it always last in the long run. It is also very clear that many, many people around the world are suffering with some form of an eating disorder or disordered eating, and that a new approach to treatment is needed
Anorexia nervosa, in particular, is the deadliest psychiatric disorder. The physical implications as well as the high rate of suicide are risk factors. Despite the knowledge that has been gathered over the centuries, there is no drug that has been approved to treat it. Treatment usually is a combo of therapy, antidepressants and nutritional programs aimed at helping the individual regain weight. However, the rate of recovery is low.
Reports of people with eating disorders who have undergone a psychedelic experience say that they feel better afterwards. They notice greater ease to eat, to be in their bodies, to express emotions, to socially engage, to state boundaries, to accept all of themselves, to reconnect with purpose, to feel their capacity to regulate and resource, and to feel a sense of belonging and interconnectedness.
This is because psychedelics and plant medicines help individuals go to the root of their suffering rather than treating the symptoms or focusing on the weight.
Psychedelics are here in full force right now because as a collective we have to change how we relate to, understand, and support the process of eating disorders recovery.
With the expansive lens that plant medicines offer us, we can see the eating disorder in a new light, including why they may have developed as protective strategies, what they are protecting, how it is impacting an individual’s well-being, and the generational and societal threads that make recovery challenging.
However, these insights that emerge in a psychedelic journey don’t exist solely in the mind. They are experienced in the body. Psychedelics offer an embodied experience, where insights and reflections land and digest on a cellular, visceral level.
Indeed, the eating disorder only exists because there are stuck stress survival energies that are trapped in the body. So in order to heal, process and release old traumas - and to step into the fullness of our truth - we must go in the body.
Psychedelics point to the importance of adding the body in the recovery road map.
Psychedelics point to the importance of adding support to the nervous system.
Psychedelics point to the importance of addressing systemic issues, like patriarchy, capitalism, and colonization, and how that impacts and shapes the body.
Psychedelics point to the importance of addressing the impact of generational trauma on the body.
Psychedelics point to the importance of adding tools of compassion, curiosity and creativity for the recovery path.
Psychedelics help us expand our perspective and vision when it comes to looking at the recovery road ahead.
Pland medicine remind us that anything is possible in recovery.
And that anything can be added to support the process.
Recovery is a creative process. There is no “correct” way to go about.
Nothing should be judged, shamed, or condemned.
Recovery should never have the same voice or tone as the eating disorder.
We should not approach treatment from the same restrictive lens of the eating disorder.
Recovery should be expansive, supported, nourishing and empowering, where new tools and skills are added alongside the eating disorder - so that eventually the eating disorder lets go of us.
This is a natural, organic process that requires no doing, forcing, purging, or purifying the eating disorder away.
We let the eating disorder let go of us.
We let the eating disorder let go of us not because of what we have done or not done, but because of us embodying (being) who we truly are.
Psychedelics are showing us a new way to approach eating disorders and recovery.
Let us listen to what they have to teach.
Let us listen.
Let us loosen the grip of what we have known as “correct” in terms of treatment plans and be open to what is yet to be known as a possibility for eating disorder recovery.
In order for recovery to be recovery, let us to approach it with a frequency, an attitude, and an energy that encourages expansion, self-expression, agency, and embodied empowerment.
What has psychedelics or plant medicine taught you about eating disorder recovery? I would love to hear from you.