Body Image & Eating Disorders
Gain the insights and help needed to navigate the complicated beliefs, thoughts, and behaviors trapping individuals in a web of self-destructive behaviors, which can result in serious health outcomes.
Love After Love
The time will come
When, with elation,
You will greet yourself arriving
At your own door, in your own mirror,
And each will smile at the other's welcome,
And say, sit here, Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
To itself, to the stranger who has loved you
All your life, whom you ignored
For another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
The photographs, the desperate notes,
Peel your image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.
-Derek Walcott
It feels safe and familiar.
Eating disorders are a complex set of beliefs, thoughts and behaviors trapping individuals in a web of self destructive behaviors, which can result in serious health outcomes and even death. Although ED clients suffer greatly emotionally and physically they often also feel very strongly about holding on to this way of being as it feels safe and familiar. This creates an addictive quality to the disorder and guides some of the treatment focus on ambivalence toward recovery. An additional related issue is that of body image which is often distorted or overly emphasized, criticized, and compared and results in great distress and maintenance of disordered eating or emotional suffering.
As it turns out, a great number of patients who suffer from eating disorders often also carry the burden of traumatic childhood experiences— and so the two populations overlap both in terms of histories as well as symptoms and syndromes they exhibit. Although eating disorders are common among trauma survivors they can also arise due to other biological, developmental, cultural, and physiological contributors, especially during adolescence.