Psychedelics Help Establish Body Trust [Eating Disorder Recovery]
Restoring body trust is an embodied process and is a fundamental part of eating disorder recovery - and psychedelics can support this process of reconnection.
People navigating an eating disorder often feel like they are not enough, like something is disconnected within themselves and in the world. These beliefs affect individuals at a deep, core level, resulting in a sense of unworthiness, anxiety, depression, and complexities around food and body.
With traditional eating disorder recovery treatment unable to illuminate the illusion of these beliefs, psychedelics seem to be able, reintegrating fragmentation into wholeness. This is the path of eating disorder recovery.
Plant medicine and psychedelics enhance connectivity between brain regions typically disconnected in our normal waking state. This increased connectivity can lead to a profound sense of embodied unity and interconnectedness.
When the boundaries between self and the external world are blurred, new perspectives arise.
Since an eating disorder brings about isolation and disconnection, experiencing the energetic and embodied frequency of connection can be healing, validating, and reality-shifting.
An eating disorder represents a body that is still stuck in a past trauma. The individual hasn’t yet been able to digest the traumatic survival energies in a safe and supported environment, and so the body has accumulated and stored these stress survival energies (fight, flight, freeze) resulting in dysregulation.
Someone may start to experience complexities around food and body as a result for an eating disorder is the body’s way of speaking in its native language about what it needs to survive and thrive. And if we listen to the body by regarding the disordered eating behaviours as its way of communicating, we might find clues as to what the body find safe or unsafe, and regulating or dysregulating. This then offers a pathway towards how to best support and nourish the body so that the old, stuck trauma energies can digest and release.
Indeed, if the trauma experience couldn’t be processed at the time, whatever had to disconnect and disassociate during the bad and scary moment to protect the individual from complete overwhelm, remains fragmented, leaving one to feel disconnected on many levels and just not quite oneself.
Trauma is a fragmenting experience, and an eating disorder represents that same fragmentation through the disconnection from the body itself.
However, this fragmentation that we see in eating disorders is an opportunity to wake us up to what is waiting to be restored to wholeness.
And plant medicines and psychedelics remind us that connected wholeness is possible. As the brain connects in new ways, the parts of ourselves that we had to disconnect from for years re-emerge as a way to be reintegrated back to wholeness.
By coming into direct contact with these fragmented aspects of ourselves in a safe setting with the help of plant medicine, we can call back the forgotten, painful and hurt parts that got cast to the corner during the time of the trauma.
When this is done with compassion and with the support of a co-regulating other, we can walk the path back home towards greater inner harmony, connection and wholeness.
Psychedelics can support us in shifting the focus from viewing the body from the outside to perceiving the body from the inside out. From this space of Congruent Connection, we can begin to reestablish trust with the body, and the body with us.
In our normal waking life, we have a default way of thinking and viewing the world - and with the support of plant medicine, those structures loosen, resulting in new ways of seeing and perceiving.
When we are focused on an image, we become trapped by it, obsessed by it, and consumed by it. The static image keeps us stuck.
Additionally, if we don’t have a strong, centered sense of self, we may focus on an external image of who we are and what we can attempt to achieve (aka weight loss), and what society insidiously and overly dictates as acceptable.
If the default way of going through life has been overly focused on body image and the external, it is possible to view oneself from the inside out as these new connections form under psychedelics.
We can inhabit the place that is inside of us. Worthy and whole from the inside out.
This place, unlike a static image, is always changing. Sensations, feelings, breath are always in motion. The body is adaptable, fluid and capable of change. This is the process of inhabiting. This is the process of embodiment.
This path of reclaiming and restoring trust with the body is indeed a process. Often there are layers of old, stuck stress survival energies that first need to be processed and digested before we can begin to feel more at home in our own skin.
Eating disorders represent undigested trauma response energies (aka fight, flight, freeze) that were unable to metabolize at the time of an overwhelming, traumatic experience.
This means that the road of recovery requires a processing and eventual releasing of these energies that have been stored in the body for years (and sometimes lifetimes).
For folks who are curious about incorporating plant medicine for their eating disorder recovery journey, it is possible that these old survival energies will arise in journey spaces.
This is because plant medicine helps lower the walls and armour that we have built up over the years to avoid the scary, painful memories and feelings that reside alongside the thwarted fight, flight, freeze defensive responses in order to restore flow, ease and space in the body.
The body wants to heal and when given the space to release what is no longer needed, it will do so. And psychedelics can open up the door for that process to happen.
The part of the brain that is responsible for gate-keeping our emotions becomes more flexible, meaning that we can sometimes end up experiencing big feelings, strong physical sensations and intense memories in a journey.
If there has been sufficient preparation prior to the journey that focuses on nervous system regulation and education on understanding one’s own current nervous system wiring, it is possible to meet these stuck stress survival energies from the past and process and ultimately release them.
With good preparation that works on developing resources and skills to meet these energies, we can enter the journey space with acceptance, compassion, confidence and courage.
When the journey space is held in a clear and safe way, with good external support, we can go to those deeper places that house the defense responses.
Bit by bit, we can process and eventually release these old stress survival energies from the past in journey as well as in preparation and integration phases. Over time, the eating disorder behaviours naturally lessen. This leads to feelings of inner space, presence, capacity, regulation and connection.
Plant medicine can help us remember our inherent worth, belonging and deservingness not based on how we look but simply because we are here.
Psychedelics gives us the chance to see through the external conditionings and the opportunity to embody our inner experience, that is by connecting to our bodies from the inside out, we reclaim what is authentically ours - and in doing so, re-establishing body trust.
Photo by Elmer Cañas on Unsplash