How Psychedelics Can Support Eating Disorder Recovery and Treatment

The ability to shift from eating disorders symptoms to more root-based causes of disordered eating are what psychedelics are helping us awaken to.

We need to readdress the treatment of eating disorders, including how we understand eating disorders so that we can find a way forward in supporting people - and the reframing power of psychedelics and plant medicine can help us with that.

For me, this is the power of plant medicine; they are supporting us in offering new perspectives on what eating disorders and disordered eating behaviours are and as such, the ways in which we go about treating them.

We know that the traditional treatment options for eating disorders don’t often result in long-term success. Globally, the status of full recovery from an eating disorder is low, and the risk of relapse is high.

There are so many people across all walks of life, around the world, who are struggling in silence, who have reached the end of their options, or who are simply needing a different recovery approach and understanding in order to find a peaceful, free relationship with food and with their bodies.

When we shift from focusing on the symptoms and move closer to the root, we find much more complex issues that need addressing:

A sense of lack of safety in the world.
A sense of not belonging in the world.
Early childhood developmental trauma.
Lack of or misunderstood care, attunement, validation, support from caregivers growing up.
Sexual abuse.
Physical, verbal, emotional abuse.
Chronic stress and daily pressures.
Patriarchal gender norms and standards.
Ancestral wounding and international trauma.
Sensory processing challenges.
Living in a hard world od diet culture where external looks, in particular where the thin ideal body size or hardness are championed.
Living in a go-go world where capitalistic, extractive, objectifying, and misogynistic values are normalized.
Fear of emotional overwhelm.
Challenges in identifying, naming, articulating, and expressing emotions and feelings.
Living in a world where it is best to harden the heart and put on protective armour (causing toxicity in the body) than to show too much emotion.
Not having good role models growing up on how to be with emotions, authentic impulses, and self-expression.
Lack of having a voice.
Not having a clear sense of true agency or independence.
Living in a world that decries closeness as a form of weakness.
Nervous system dysregulation.
Living in a world that is afraid of women (of all ages) in their power.
Disconnection from the Earth and the natural elements.

Psychedelics help us move beyond the food and rather towards these deeper, core themes. Plant medicines highlight how food is a place where all of these complex issues get projected onto. Psychedelics help us see how food becomes strategies to try resolve, balance, and manage these very complicated, sensitive, generational, and collective issues.

Psychedelics and plant medicine help us drop from the surface to the deeper layers by:

Softening rigid neural pathways that govern stuck maladaptive rituals, rules, critical thoughts, and emotional ruts.
Allowing different brain networks to communicate, helping us move from small, narrow focus to open, wider, creative, divergent, and imaginative focus.
Increasing sensitivity of the 5-sense perception, thus heightening intuition and body connection.
Quietening the critical and judgmental ego and its demands.
Opening the heart space and possibility for self-compassion, empathy, and love by shifting brain chemicals.
Allowing for insights to emerge on an embodied experience, not just on through a top-down understanding.
Offering an opportunity to re-experience and remember on an embodied level what it is like to exist without the grips of the eating disorder, free, empowered, authentic, trusting.

A main focus of traditional eating disorder treatment is to put in measures to stop an individual from engaging in the eating disorder and its behaviours.

This can result in a panic or fear because the eating disorder - the one thing in the person’s toolbox that brings a sense of stability, control, and safety - is now taken away. This is why we see many people relapsing and holding onto the eating disorder even tighter once they leave traditional treatment. They are so scared that their one tool - that they can trust and rely upon - vanishes and restricted from them.

And when we see how these food and body behaviours are not just extreme tactics to lose weight but are strategies that are trying help someone navigate a disordered culture, a dysregulated society, and a history of traumatized generations behind them, it begs the question: what needs to be recovered?

Psychedelics are pointing us to look at what is out of alignment not only on an individual level but within the greater collective.

Indeed, for eating disorder recovery to be possible, societal nervous system regulation and collective trauma healing needs to occur.

Psychedelics are highlighting a great and deep need for us to address the societal issues that perpetuate disembodiment from our own bodies, from our relationships, and from the natural world. Our collective nervous system needs restoring and nurturing.

The oppressive diet culture norms, and the normalization of living in the mind and ignoring and being severed from the body must be challenged. The disconnection from the Earth and the natural cycles needs to be restored.

Of course, we need to do our individual recovery work, and of course we need to replenish the physical body with food and good nourishment; working at the level of our own nervous systems means that we feel more free, empowered and capable to be with the many challenges of this world. Supporting our nervous system, and the health of our bodies results in each one of us having more space, strength, resolve, and resiliency to impact the collective nervous system and make change.

And that the same time, dominant cultural norms that leave us disembodied, exhausted and dysregulated need to be addressed.

It is time from oppressive, top-down, societal conditionings to dismantle that have resulted in generational trauma, and disconnection from nature, from the wisdom of the body, and from the ineffable human spirit.

Eating disorder recovery is an individual and collective undertaking. Imagine a world without eating disorders…

What would have to change?

What systems would transform or fall away?

What institutions would cease to exist?

How would we relate to our bodies, each other, and the Earth?

Psychedelics invite us to imagine a world without eating disorders.

Imagine.

Photo by Susan Wilkinson on Unsplash