Therapy is neither sadism nor masochism

A response to an earlier post, which I somehow just noticed, made me feel the need to clarify issues facing people with eating disorders. Eating disorders, despite appearances to the contrary, are not about eating but rather about control, largely over emotions. The relationship with food is used to replace the need to deal with difficult emotions.

People with binge eating disorder, with which the people in Finding Om have been diagnosed, eat to numb their emotions. People with eating disorders are notoriously disconnected from their bodies. They live in denial of their bodily needs, be it the need to eat (in the case of anorexics) or stop eating (as it is with binge eaters).

To break the cycle of self-abuse people need to find new, more healthy ways to deal with their emotions. This means acknowledging their bodies and coming to an understanding of how the way they have been treating their bodies is ultimately self-abusive.

In order to heal we need to learn to feel all of those difficult emotions we have been using food to avoid. And those feelings, such as shame, self-hatred and anger, are usually not pretty. And it isn't easy to begin feeling them instead of literally stuffing them down with a few bags of potato chips and a gallon of ice cream.

So to see someone cry and feel shame at how she has been treating herself to me represents a personal breakthrough for her. She is getting to a much healthier place. I get no joy out of seeing her cry; rather, I am glad to see her access those emotions and am not afraid to sit with her and support her through that difficult time.