Last year I listened to the New York Times podcast show Rabbit Hole. It’s an 8-part series that looks at how the internet, and particularly social media, is changing who we are. I was struck by just how similar the protagonist‘s experience was to what happens to many of my clients over the course of their eating disorders.
Much of the podcast’s focus was on YouTube and its effects on us. In the last handful of years, it has come under attack for its recommendations section. Because of the algorithm used to make these suggestions, people end up, over time, being shown more and more extreme content. But since this process happens in such a subtle way that, while it is happening, it’s indiscernible and feels natural.
The first three episodes of Rabbit Hole focus on Caleb Cain, a college dropout in his mid-twenties who never felt like he fitted in. At a certain point, he finds YouTube and his life and beliefs are drastically altered.
Interestingly, Cain turns over his YouTube watch history to The New York Times, and they are able to show the incremental changes that occurred over a four-year period.
Starting out as an Obama supporter, Cain moves to the other side of the aisle and starts believing in far-right conspiracies. And then, rather surprisingly, he has his beliefs shift again and ends up in the extreme far-left end of the spectrum.
Cain’s mind got so influenced by what he saw in the videos that he was recommended that he became unable to tell the difference between his own views and the ones that he was presented with.
As sobering as listening to the podcast was, it was also a perfect example of how our minds and beliefs are changed.
As I mentioned, what stood out most to me is how similar this is to the clients I work with. And while Cain was being radicalised in his beliefs about politics and race, my clients’ beliefs about food, weight and exercise have equally become distorted.
What was clearly demonstrated in the podcast and what I’ve noticed in my coaching practice is the insidious nature of change.
Think about this for yourself. Over years or decades, you’ve probably gone from dabbling in dieting and exercise to it slowly ramping up, to it all becoming increasingly disordered and compulsive. With enough time, your behaviour started showing the hallmark signs of an eating disorder.
The way you exercise might start out as something enjoyable or at least as something rather benign. In your mind, it is all in the service of “health” or “weight loss”. With time, however, it morphs into an obsession, compulsion or addiction with a powerful stranglehold. And even if you keep telling yourself that you are “choosing” to exercise, your “choice” is now solely driven by fear.
Changes to eating can start in the same way. At first, you’re cutting out some foods or reducing calories, but it feels like a minor part of your life. But as time goes on, it takes up more headspace and becomes the focal point of your day, impacting on everything, and any deviation or attempted deviation leads to a strong fear response.
Now, obviously, there are cases when things spiral much quicker than this. Maybe you went headfirst into an eating disorder in a matter of weeks or months. However, this rapid descent into the disease is less common with the clients I’ve worked with. For most of them, their experience is a slow, almost unnoticeable slide into the illness, much like the proverbial frog in boiling water.
I remember reading this article on James Clear’s blog many years ago, talking about the idea of marginal gains. The idea is that if you can change something by 1% over the course of a year, this can amount to a huge difference. Of course, over many years, the changes have become exponential.
Unfortunately, this is also the case with issues around food, exercise and your relationship with your body: Tiny changes, when aggregated, really add up. And not for the better.
This process of change doesn’t just work for behaviours but for beliefs too. Maybe, when you first started cutting out foods, you thought of it as an experiment, just to see what would happen (and most probably hoping for weight loss). Even so, chances are that, over time, your rigidity increased and the intensity of your beliefs around food only got reinforced.
As a logical consequence, so did your beliefs about exercise, body image, self-worth, and identity. These all slowly shifted and hardened. Which only served to tighten the grip of the eating disorder.
In the Rabbit Hole podcast, Cain’s consumption of YouTube was immense. He was watching and listening to its content almost constantly. Even when he was sleeping, he had videos playing on his computer.
And while most people aren’t consuming an external source of information in this quantity, it’s important not to underestimate the human mind. Your mind is constantly thinking, showing you images and scenarios and you find yourself being in dialogue with yourself (much like a comments section). Without intending to, you are therefore continuously paying attention to our own internal YouTube.
When you’re stuck in an eating disorder, your mind is trapped on an internal channel that is constantly looping and reinforcing beliefs and behaviours. Which, almost inevitably compounds and intensifies the disease.
Over time, your mind presents you with more and more extreme ideas and beliefs. But because of the slow pace of change, these adjustments don’t feel extreme and you keep rationalising each step further down into the darkness as if all of it is completely normal.
Or, and this is equally insidious, you’re convinced the changes you made were for the better because that’s what the eating disorder wants you to think. Much like a cult victim, you‘re almost unable to see how trapped and isolated you have become.
Fortunately, despite the slow nature of change, there are moments of recognition of how different things have become. In the Rabbit Hole podcast, Caleb Cain talked about his own moment of realising how bad things had become. For him, it was when he discovered videos where the Holocaust was being denied.
From an eating disorder perspective, there can be many different such a-ha moments.
Maybe you‘re stumbling on a list of the behaviours and symptoms connected to an eating disorder and realise that this perfectly describes your experience.
Or you hear about the concept of restriction and recognise that this is exactly what you’re doing (possibly without even knowing it).
Or you discover the idea of quasi recovery and start understanding that you aren’t recovered in the way you thought you were.
In any case, you start getting a grasp of how much your life has been impaired by an eating disorder, and there’s a realisation that you are stuck in a place that you no longer want to be in.
The painful reality hits you: the honeymoon period of the disorder has long since passed, and you are wasting precious time chasing a mirage. Yes, at this stage, there is bound to be ambivalence, but you realise you want to change your behaviours and leave certain beliefs behind. You just don’t know how to accomplish that. How do you change your internal YouTube?
There are, of course, many aspects to recovery from an eating disorder, but there are a few levers without which all the other actions can‘t gain a foothold. So let’s focus on the three steps that I’ve seen to make the biggest difference in my clients’ recovery journeys.
The foundation of recovery is built on the physical rehabilitation that only occurs through bringing in more energy. I know this one may seem counterintuitive, considering your eating disorder is telling you the complete opposite, but it’s the truth.
Eating disorders arise because a person ended up in a low energy state. Now, for people without the predisposition for an eating disorder (the vast majority of society), being in this state is horrible and unenjoyable and they have no problem getting out of that state as quickly as possible.
However, for a person with the corresponding genetics and physiology, this low energy state turns on an eating disorder. So rather than feeling the awful effects of being in a negative energy balance, they get a certain thrill out of it. The energy deficit may lead to feelings ranging from euphoria, strength or superiority, to invincibility and calmness. Much like a drug addict, this person then keeps on chasing these feelings.
For an individual susceptible to this illness, this will happen no matter what the cause was for them being in an energy-deficient state. It could very well be dieting that caused it, but it could also be fasting for religious reasons, it could even be because of a famine. Whatever the reason, the end result for this susceptible individual is the same.
The reason why I used the word “individual” here is because it doesn’t have to be a human being: You can induce anorexia in susceptible mice and rats, for example. Take away their food and give them access to a running wheel, and they’ll fall into energy debt. Just like a human with an eating disorder, these rodents won’t eat the food, even if it’s returned in plentiful supply. A small percentage of them will even run themselves to death.
So while there can be many factors that make recovery more difficult (the existence of diet culture, for instance), the true cause of an eating disorder is genetic predisposition + low energy balance. As they say, genetics load the gun and the environment pulls the trigger. Luckily, while you can’t change your genetics, you can change the environment: your energy balance.
Your body needs energy to deal with everything that is occurring today, plus the energy needed to make up for the shortfall that has occurred over the previous months, years or even decades.
Let’s zoom in on the idea of energy first, because it’s easy to fall into a way too narrow understanding of this. You may think that energy is what’s needed for walking, running, riding a bike, lifting weights or any other form of physical activity. The fallacy here is that we only need energy if we are in motion and that all of the more sedentary moments of our day are essentially “energy-free“.
Or maybe you already understand that things are more complex than that and you know that energy is needed not just for movement, but for other functions too. That we need energy to digest our food, pump blood around our body and run our various systems and organs.
Or maybe you have an even deeper understanding of the issue, and you know that the body uses energy to repair itself and turn over cells regularly. And that even when we are sleeping, our body is using energy, as this is when many of our systems, including our immune system and our organs are doing a huge amount of work.
Did you notice what’s missing in all of the examples above?
Typically, when we think about energy needs for the body, we think of the body… minus our head. Almost automatically, we tend to forget how important energy is for our brain function, our mind and our mental state.
And considering that you are trying to change your perception and beliefs, you need to become aware of just how important sufficient energy levels are in all of this.
During the Minnesota Starvation Experiment, each participant completed the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) on several occasions. The MMPI is a psychometric test of personality and psychopathology, asking questions relating to anxiety, obsessiveness, depression, anger, low self-esteem and a whole host of other areas.
What they saw as part of the experiment was that during the “starvation phase” (their calories were significantly reduced), as time went on and the men got further into energy debt, the worse their MMPI scores became. As this phase continued on, all participants saw their scores increase for hypochondriasis, depression, and hysteria. This was so common that this triad of changes got labelled as “semi-starvation neurosis”.
It was shown that, as the body gets into energy debt, the thoughts, feelings, beliefs and perceptions that naturally occur to a person also change. Being in this energy-deficient state automatically leads to inevitable changes to the content you are watching on your internal YouTube. One could say that this state influences the recommendations, to meet the mood that the energy debt itself creates.
Most humans have times when they are impacted by low energy levels and the subsequent impact on their cognition and emotions. People talk about being “hangry” (hungry + angry). But if this is merely a transitory experience, this is quickly remedied by having a snack or a meal, after which the body shifts out of this state.
When the energy deficit is a prolonged experience, however, it’s not so simple anymore. There’s no single snack or a meal that is going to change this.
And this is because significant changes have occurred.
As covered in this podcast, the brain is harmed due to insufficient energy coming in on a regular basis. Not to put too fine a point on it, if the body’s energy needs repeatedly aren’t met, the brain literally shrinks. Using MRI, the difference in the size and functioning of brain regions in those suffering from an eating disorder (like anorexia or bulimia) in comparison to healthy controls are clearly visible.
The damage can be to such an extent that it causes anosognosia, which is also called “lack of insight”. This is where the damage to the brain renders a person unable to understand or perceive their own illness and the symptoms or impacts it is having. This state is actually quite common in eating disorders, as most people report feelings of not being sick enough, no matter how extreme the obsession and rigidity might have become
The good news is that these brain changes are reversible. And so are the changes to thoughts and emotions (as shown with the MMPI tests over the course of the Minnesota Starvation Experiment). It should come as no surprise that, in both cases, getting out of prolonged energy debt is the solution: eating more food and reducing physical activity.
While you’re reading this, your ED driven thoughts might come up with a million objections and counterarguments as to why your case is different, but let me say it again: no matter how counterintuitive it sounds, more food is the answer.
If we want our habits and beliefs to change for the better, we need to expose ourselves to messages that are in alignment with this.
As demonstrated in Rabbit Hole, we know the power of repetition, and that what gets repeated over and over again, in time becomes how we see the world.
When working with clients, I suggest that they are intentional about consuming supportive information: listen to podcasts, read books, find YouTube and Instagram accounts that are all singing from the same hymn sheet. Listen to this like you would if you were a student going to college. Become absorbed in it.
The information that you avoid is equally important. In the early stages, everything is precarious and your mind is on anything but stable ground. It’s easy to be triggered by what you read, see or hear. It’s hard to have new beliefs form if you are receiving a barrage of unhelpful messages that are in opposition to these new beliefs.
So not only do you need to add in new material, you need to remove unhelpful material. Unsubscribe from emails, unfollow Instagram accounts, cancel podcast subscriptions. Anything that is not in alignment with recovery has to go.
At this early stage, you’re wanting to create a bubble or cocoon of helpful information. Yes, eventually you want to be solid in your beliefs and know that you‘ll stand firmly rooted whatever comes your way. But, much like a small child or someone recovering from a serious injury, you are not here yet. You need to be nurtured in a kind and gentle way to build up strength, and the way to do this is by curating content that is filled with ideas and stories that are pro-recovery.
So far, we’ve covered external sources of information, but let‘s not forget the internal sources. The very same effort needs to be applied in regards to your own internal YouTube channel. Start turning your awareness towards the contents of your mind. Whether by meditating or journaling on a regular basis, start familiarising yourself with your thoughts and the power they have, and dare to challenge and question them.
The power of a thought lies in its ability to hook you and pull you in a certain direction. This could be a thought pulling you into a place of endless rumination that leaves you feeling hopeless. Or it could be a set of thoughts pulling you to take actions that go against recovery.
I have an exercise* that I do with clients where they list all their most destructive thoughts. These thoughts can fall into four broad categories.
What judgments does your mind come up with about yourself, others, life, the world, your body, your mind, your behaviour, etc?
What stories about the past (e.g. painful memories) or the future (e.g. worrying, predicting the worst) does your mind tend to hook you with?
What reasons does your mind give you as to why you can’t or shouldn’t do the things that matter to you?
What unhelpful rules does your mind insist upon, in terms of what you can, can’t, should or shouldn’t do; or how life, the world, others should or shouldn’t be?
*Note: this is an exercise that I learned from Russ Harris, the author of The Happiness Trap and one of the superstars in the world of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT).
This exercise can be very useful to see the destructive thoughts that, when they arise, are likely to hook you and take you down a path away from your values and where you want to be heading.
So this exercise is one of many I do with my clients to help them recognise and stop unhelpful thinking patterns more quickly. As part of our work, we go through many practices and techniques for putting thoughts to the side and moving on.
And while this is obviously an invaluable skill, it is only a part of an effective skill set. Because rather than solely trying to put thoughts to the side, we can also use our thoughts as an indicator of the state we’re in. It is well worth a small detour to illuminate what I mean by this.
In this podcast, I spoke to Deb Dana about polyvagal theory. Despite the less-than-catchy name, it brilliantly describes our nervous system and how profoundly different its three separate states are and how they affect our perception. To get a good overview of these three separate states, it’s easiest to think of these stages as a ladder.
At the top of the ladder is “safe and social”*. To quote Dana: “In this state, our heart rate is regulated, our breath is full, we take in the faces of friends, and we can tune in to conversations and tune out distracting noises. We see the “big picture” and connect to the world and the people in it. I might describe myself as happy, active, interested and the world as safe, fun, and peaceful“.
*The word “social” can be misleading here, as it doesn’t necessarily mean that, in this state, you‘ll want to be hanging out with a bunch of people. What it does stand for, however, is that you‘ll be in a state where you can safely be in connection with living beings, be that animals (like pets, for example), the people you trust, and—most importantly—yourself.
Moving down the ladder, we enter into “fight and flight”. This is a survival state, so the body is on the lookout for cues of danger, rather than cues of safety. To quote Dana: “In this state, our heart rate speeds up, our breath is short and shallow, we scan our environment looking for danger—we are “on the move.” I might describe myself as anxious or angry and feel the rush of adrenaline that makes it hard for me to be still.”
Moving to the bottom of the ladder, we enter into “shutdown”. This is also a survival state. So, again, you’ll be more acutely attuned to cues of danger instead of safety. To quote Dana: “Here at the very bottom of the autonomic ladder, I am alone with my despair and escape into not knowing, not feeling, almost a sense of not being. I might describe myself as hopeless, abandoned, foggy, too tired to think or act and the world as empty, dead, and dark.”
(Note: These quotes are taken from Deb Dana‘s free Beginner’s Guide To Polyvagal Theory, which you can check out here.)
The truth might be surprising to you, but we are not the authors of our thoughts. Thoughts are just regurgitated bits of what our minds have been exposed to over the course of our lives, of all of what we saw, heard or learned, intentional or not.
If you ever tried to stop thinking for even a matter of minutes, you will have found that you are unable to do so: without you making an active decision, they’ll just keep popping up. And that’s because thoughts just arise in our mind and we become a witness to them.
From then on, it’s in our hands whether we let them float by, or if we perpetuate them by letting them hook us, which naturally gives them more traction. I think we’ve all experienced this many times in our lives: From road rage to old grudges to bad habits, unless we train our minds, it’s easy to get sucked in by thoughts that may give us the rationalisation for harmful actions.
The fact remains that it is us who give thoughts their power. Again, their initial occurrence is out of our control. The only thing we have power over is our reaction to them. Much like YouTube recommendations, you can’t stop them, you can only choose to dismiss them.
The same is true of emotions. These will naturally arise on their own and then you find yourself feeling joyous, hopeful, excited, angry, sad, or jealous.
While they are often a consequence of our getting hooked by a particular thought, they can also just naturally arise. You‘ve probably experienced it yourself: if an emotion arises without any prompt, and you resist creating a story around that particular emotion, it can simply be felt, and it will pass. On the other hand, if it is your thoughts (a story) that power an emotion, that feeling will persist and linger.
Now that we know that thoughts and feelings naturally arise in us, it’s understandable that we have a vested interest in making sure that we get recommended the best internal YouTube content, so to speak.
And what dictates the kinds of thoughts and feelings that naturally occur to you is your current position on the polyvagal ladder. As Dana regularly says “story follows state”. If you are at the top of the ladder, in a state of “safe and social”, you’ll naturally experience positive and hopeful thoughts and feelings. And if you are at the bottom of the ladder, in a state of “shutdown”, you’ll naturally have thoughts and feelings that are connected to hopelessness and being lost.
As soon as we start seeing things through this lens, it becomes clear that the first and most important objective is to get you up to the top of the ladder, to “safe and social”. It makes intuitive sense that the quality of your thoughts automatically improves when you feel safe and are able to feel connected to yourself and the world.
Only then can you start practising letting go of unhelpful thoughts. Because it is incredibly difficult to try to let your thoughts go when you are in one of the survival states: if your system perceives danger and threat, justified or not, you are naturally getting more negative and more persistent thoughts and feelings.
So, in order to move you to the top of the polyvagal ladder, you want to start to…
You want the new information that you‘re learning from recovery-oriented content to actually make an impact and help you. For that to happen, your current habits and behaviours also need to shift. Naturally, nothing changes if you’re just doing things in theory. Sure, you may “know” more, but the reality of the situation will stay exactly the same.
Now, of course, at the very beginning, simply becoming aware of and taking in new information is an important first step in the right direction. Because what you are learning is expanding your viewpoints and causing shifts in your beliefs and how you see the world. But for this to truly lead to change, there needs to be a transition from theory to practice. Let’s sum up what we know:
We touched on the most important focus of change: increasing your food intake so that more energy is coming in. The goal here is to increase the amount of energy that the body has available for getting through the day plus all the repair that needs to happen. Now, the ED thoughts will likely suggest compensating for (and thereby nullifying the positive effects of) more food, so it‘s crucial to simultaneously reduce exercise and physical activity. We really don’t want to waste any energy that is needed for all the tasks at hand.
We also mentioned making necessary changes to your information consumption: Download books and podcasts that are pro-recovery and start intentionally reading and listening to them as frequently as possible. If you decide to consume content on YouTube, always keep in mind that it is a very slippery slope (just as shown in Rabbit Hole), as it can lead you to very misguided “recovery“ channels in no time. There are, however, a few great channels that I regularly recommend to my clients.
The great thing about these two action steps (more food/rest and better information) is that both of them simultaneously help to move you up the polyvagal ladder, where you‘ll find yourself in a better position to make the most effective changes.
When working on this with clients, we set goals together. For example, we decide in advance how they‘re going to change and increase their food intake.
It might be scary to think about having this goal hanging over your head, but what I keep hearing back is that making a decision in advance makes it easier for them. It’s not going to make the scariness disappear completely, but it is much easier to be more rational about it because you want to achieve your goals.
To help you in moments of hesitation, you can also tap into the healthy part of you that wants you to succeed and leave your eating disorder behind. That part might suggest that you prepare the food in advance or get someone else to do so, or it will just hold your hand when the time comes to actually do it.
You’ll find that, while an uncomfortable feeling of anxiety might still be there when you face the food, you are able to “just do it” and eat it.
On the other hand, if you try making food decisions only moments before eating, this is likely going to be much more challenging. Because that’s the exact time when you will be in one of the two lower states of the polyvagal ladder. There, any decision making will be much more impaired, and you are more focused on cues of danger. Consequently, you’ll most probably try to play it safe with food and do what you’ve always done.
I am the last person to discourage any spontaneous additional food decisions that you feel up to, but if you are finding that this is a struggle at the early stages of recovery, we can always make food decisions in advance, together. Hence why meal plans are often common at the start of recovery, they can be helpful to get over the early hurdles.
As we saw before, it’s key for you to be at the top of the polyvagal ladder as often as possible, as this automatically improves the nature of thoughts and feelings that spontaneously occur to you. For that to be the case, we need to start figuring out what it is that moves you up and down the polyvagal ladder.
While we’re all unique individuals, there are commonalities that apply to all living creatures. When we are in a low energy state, the body responds by turning on the stress response. Hormones like adrenaline and cortisol help to liberate energy in the body. Which makes perfect sense, because if you are running low on fuel you are most vulnerable to predators, so you’ll need the extra boost to be able to run or fight.
In other words, if the body is in a low energy state, this stress response automatically pulls you down the polyvagal ladder into a survival state. And as this happens, your thoughts, feelings and perceptions naturally change.
Therefore, if you have an eating disorder, the existing energy deficit turns the start of recovery into a bit of an uphill battle: The stress caused by the lack of energy is going to be taking you down the ladder. So, in order to get your nervous system up to the top of the ladder into the best position, we will work on diminishing this deficiency as quickly as possible.
Parallel to that, until you’re safely out of the energy deficit, we will bring in as many moments where you experience how it feels to be at the top of the ladder, in the state of “safe and social”. To that end, we spend time figuring out ways that help you to get in that state, and also how to make those moments last as long as possible.
There’s a specific reason why I‘m putting so much emphasis on this: At the beginning of the recovery process, most of what you‘ll have to do to get better will feel counter-intuitive. The steps to recovery (the food, the resting, the new information) make sense when you are up the ladder, where you can manage and feel positive about your goals.
But as soon as you drop down that ladder, the eating disorder thoughts get louder, and the awareness you had at the top is lost to a perception of threat. Down here, these steps to recovery start feeling counterintuitive, maybe even dangerous. Which, in turn, will almost inevitably pull you towards isolating, restricting, and filling your time with movement.
Note how, again, this makes total sense, because these are the automatic thoughts that occur in this state when you have an eating disorder.
And this is exactly the time when a list comes in handy. For these moments of crisis, I want you to have two separate lists where you keep a record of all the factors that influence the state of your nervous system, so that you know what to turn to and what to avoid.
On the “Up The Ladder” list, you might then be reminded of things like having a conversation with a close friend, asking for a hug, eating food, watching a comedy or something else that makes you laugh, and any number of other things.
On the “Down The Ladder“ list you can remind yourself what never worked in your favour, like isolating yourself, ruminating on thoughts about weight or calories, eating less food (intentionally or unintentionally), or comparing yourself to some Instagram celebrity, just to name a few.
Thanks to these lists, and because we’ve gone through this in advance, you can start to recognise what is going on. You can understand that while it feels strange to be asking for a hug right now or sitting down and having a meal, it’s through this action that you‘ll move up the ladder.
Once again, being prepared in advance is what can save you from backsliding into the disease.
All of what we’ve gone through here shows why taking action is so important. There’s no amount of thinking that would change the current state your nervous system is in. Trying to argue with your thoughts at this point is rather futile if there isn’t some action to support the goal. Simply put, if everything stays the same, the thoughts will stay the same as well: they’ll simply reappear over and over again.
In theory, you can do everything I have described above on your own. You can figure out what you need to do with increasing your eating and cutting down your exercise and changing your information content and how to support your nervous system all on your own.
But in reality, this is incredibly difficult. The eating disorder may loudly encourage you to try, and you might feel tempted to prove to the world that you can do it alone. Believe me, almost all of my clients have tried, and even for those who had a supportive partner or family, it just wasn’t enough to help with recovery.
There are many reasons for this but let me just mention two.
One is that an eating disorder is a brilliant trickster. It can distort your worldview so much that you don’t know what to believe anymore. Much like Cain from Rabbit Hole, you slowly become unable to tell the difference between your own true values, views and opinions and the ones that you’ve been exposed to: your internal YouTube channel recommendations.
You feel paralysed with indecision because you have all these different ideas circulating in your head, pulling you in every direction. You second guess every decision, and you feel the walls of fear surrounding you. You are exhausted.
Unfortunately, all of this pulls you further down the polyvagal ladder. Chances are that, down there, you are feeling hopeless, thinking that you’ll never get better. Or you start launching vicious and scathing attacks on yourself, which also pulls you further away from recovery.
Outside help not only provides you with reassurance about decisions and goals, but it also functions as a powerful tool of co-regulation.
To understand what makes co-regulation so effective, think of a small child. Left to its own devices, it won’t be able to soothe itself and will stay full of despair and hopelessness. With loving caretakers around, however, it will be heard and attended to, which enables it to get out of that rough spot. As it continuously gets shown how to deal with emotions and frustrations, it learns how to regulate itself. So, co-regulation, in essence, is piggy-backing on the nervous system of someone else to move up the ladder.
You probably know this yourself: when you are in a better place (at the top of the ladder) you are much better able to regulate a specific moment when your nervous system freaks out, and you can move yourself back up the ladder.
But when you are in a depleted state because of an eating disorder, your ability to do this on your own is compromised. And this is especially true for those who have experienced trauma, which is very common for those suffering from eating disorders. When this is the case, co-regulation is crucial (especially at the beginning of the healing process) to help a person move up the ladder into the zone of safety.
When I’m talking to clients, for example, I’m in a “safe and social” place, even when they are not. I provide various cues of safety, which a client will subconsciously pick up on.
In these moments, I am in the role of the “ideal parent.” This essentially means that, no matter what you bring to the table (be that anger, irritation or resistance), I will meet it with kindness, compassion and support.
Through this interaction, you feel heard, understood and cared for. This is what helps to move you up the ladder and prevents you from falling into your own internal YouTube rabbit hole where nobody but the eating disorder will be making recommendations.
Once we‘ve established this place of safety, as described above, we will start figuring out ways you can start doing this for yourself, outside of the consults. Because the more time you can spend up the ladder, the easier it becomes to make decisions that are pro-recovery.
It will take a while until those decisions feel completely natural, of course, but you are well equipped for the journey ahead. Whereas if you keep trying to do this on your own and have nobody to help you regulate during the many inevitable difficult moments or freak-outs, recovery is highly unlikely.
There are obviously many more reasons than just these two for why getting outside support is helpful. You can check out this page or listen to podcasts like this one or this one, to hear what past clients have found so useful for us working together.
If you are wanting to recover and would like help in making this a reality, I’d love to help. This is the case whether you are yet to get started and are paralysed with how to begin, or if you’ve been making some progress on your own but know that it’s time for some guidance and support.
I’m a leading expert and advocate for full recovery. I’ve been working with clients for over 15 years and understand what needs to happen to recover.
I truly believe that you can reach a place where the eating disorder is a thing of the past and I want to help you get there. If you want to fully recover and drastically increase the quality of your life, I’d love to help.
Want to get a FREE online course created specifically for those wanting full recovery? Discover the first 5 steps to take in your eating disorder recovery. This course shows you how to take action and the exact step-by-step process. To get instant access, click the button below.
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