"What to Look For in an Eating Disorder Treatment Center" is an article in the New York Times. I wish it went a little beyond its content.
Lots of Passionate Words but Nobody's There: Understanding Irritation and Fury in Relationships
- Details
You've been in a conversation that speeds into brief, passionate discourse and hurtles on to furious speech, familiar emotional agony, indignation and hurtful stalemate. Right? You've been in several or maybe many. Here's what may be happening. * info re picture below.
If you have or have had an eating disorder, the eating disorder's behavior and thinking distract you or block you from emotional knowledge you can't bear. Whatever that may be, it's below your awareness. It's unconscious.
But just because it's unconscious doesn't mean you don't know it.
The information is in you. You know it, but you are not aware of it. Sometimes something or someone will trigger that information, and out it all comes in a passion. But it's still out of your awareness.
You start speaking, reacting and acting like yourself or someone else from another time in your life...and you don't know it. You hurtle on without control. This is what "acting out" means. You are acting out your unconscious without conscious awareness.
If you do this almost routinely with another person, it's possible that you trigger something similar in them. They "act out" a section of their inner life that is a match for yours.
If that happens, neither you nor the other person is fully in the room.
Neither of you are aware of the meaning and ramifications of the exchange or capable of making any adjustments or accommodations to reality. You are both locked in your own histories and battling out a repetitive scenario that has no solution in this form.
It can happen between parent and child, between siblings, between husband and wife. It can happen between friends and acquaintances whose unresolved issues are a "match" for each other.
You can't make progress or come to a resolution when you are caught in this scenario. A powerful wave is carrying you on. You feel righteous. You feel, in a strange way, that you are in a familiar place where you know what you must say and do to prevail while, at the same time, knowing that the response you get from the other person is predictable and familiar, too.
An important part of your recovery work is to make your unconscious conscious.
Without that you will be vulnerable to this kind of interaction and repeat it when the triggers are present. You can make destructive decisions, be attracted to people who serve to give you an outlet for this acting out, drain your energy and contribute to your unhappiness.
To deal with these traps, you need to know they exist, recognize them, and help yourself heal your way out.
Many approaches exist to help you recognize and learn from your unconscious rather than act it out.
- How do these traps show up in your life?
- Do you know what triggers them?
- What methods do you use to learn from them?
- What methods do you use to catch yourself before such interactions go too far?
* I've seen this dance several times in Bali. The main character is Rangda, an uncontrollable evil. The dancers try to drive her away. It's a dance of great passion. What's key here is that it is a trance dance. The warriors and Rangda, and later the Barong, are all in a trance, as are you when you are caught in the acting out of your unconscious. The dance is repeated endlessly with no resolution. It's an incredibly gripping experience to see this, just as it is an incredibly gripping experience to be in it. The dancers need to be carried off at the end and revived by shamans.
Please share your thoughts in the comment section below.
Written by Joanna Poppink, MFT. Joanna is a psychotherapist in private practice specializing in eating disorder recovery, stress, PTSD, and adult development.
She is licensed in CA, AZ, OR, FL, and UT. Author of the Book: Healing Your Hungry Heart: Recovering from Your Eating Disorder
Appointments are virtual.
For a free telephone consultation, e-mail her at
Eating Disorders at Work: What Should You Do?
- Details
Suppose you see or know or suspect that an employee has an eating disorder. What should you do? Here's a guest article by Joy Nollenberg, director of The Joy Project addressing this issue. She wants readers to know that legal issues abound in this realm and that her words are not legal advice. In other words, check out your legal position before embarking on a workplace confrontation.
There may be times when someone in the workplace appears to be very ill with an eating disorder. This can be a difficult situation with many potential pitfalls. It's important to keep these points in mind.
Night Eating and Weight Gain: Importance of Sleep
- Details
Body signals often are misinterpreted by a person with an eating disorder. You may have a tendency to avoid sleep when you are tired. When feelings of tiredness transform into food cravings rather than getting needed rest trouble is brewing.
Friends Change as You Heal in Eating Disorder Recovery
- Details
When you have an eating disorder friends who are attracted to you are attracted to who you are and how you respond with your eating disorder intact. Friend change as you change throughout your recovery work.
How you and your friends change as you recover
When you are deep in your eating disorder your friends and associates have a relationship with a sick person. When you start to get well your attitudes, choices and responses change. Your friends' responses will change too.Mature Women: Issues After Eating Disorder Recovery
- Details
A mature woman, decades after eating disorder recovery, may live a life fraught with relationship, career and self-esteem difficulties. You are no longer starving, binging or purging, but you still suffer from painful issues in your life, particularly self-doubt.
If you went through effective psychotherapy you found your way to ending your eating disorder behaviors. As a mature woman today, maybe you rarely think of those starving, binging, food-obsessed days and nights.
Yet underlying psychic structures of the eating disorder can still be present, ready to spring into action when you are threatened by more than you can bear or allow yourself to see or know.
Bias confessions of a psychotherapist: overeating recovery
- Details
Bias Clarity and the Therapeutic Alliance
Bias in psychotherapy needs to be on the table. This is critical for a cooperative alliance between client and psychotherapist.With or without an eating disorder, we all live our lives based on our agendas with our values and perceived survival needs leading the way. If we balance our emotions and stress levels with overeating we will get short term benefits. If we let overeating continue to balance our tolerance for stress we move into isolation, self-criticism and loneliness break our own hearts and can't save ourselves from our pain.
Guarantee for Recovery in Psychotherapy? Find Out Here.
- Details
Guarantee? My informed consent form that clients sign before working with me states that no guarantee comes with psychotherapy. Yet psychotherapists and clients strive together for healing and recovery. Five phases of the work create the strongest possibility for success.
Despite the lack of a guarantee, clients have hope and willingness to work as do psychotherapists. The client puts energy and commitment into her work because she wants health, freedom and happiness. The psychotherapist puts energy into the work because she’s seen healing and recovery in others and has a growing framework of what makes recovery possible.
When the psychotherapist sees the commitment of the client's energy, the psychotherapist’s commitment and energy for the client’s well-being grows and vice versa. Therapy is a partnership on the healing journey.
- Were You Alone and Binge Eating at Christmas? How to Ground Yourself.
- Eating Disorder Slip over the Holidays: find meaning and recovery
- Eating Disorder Self Care in the New Year: Start at any time
- Eating Disorders and Coping with Feelings after New Years
- Perspective on Eating Disorder Recovery and Relapse
- Eating Disorder In-Patient Experience
- Gratitude Journal: ease your anxiety and your binge eating
- An Eating Disorder Hides Your Authentic Self
- Professional Confidentiality and Blogging
- Five Stages to Healing and Recovery
- Cure for Boredom and Being Stuck
- What Powers Our Dedication, Commitment, Relationships and Career Choices? Meaning Versus Sensation
- Self-Talk for More Personal Space and Freedom
- Virtual Psychotherapy: What's It Like? A Video
- How Are You Holding Up? Depression, Anxiety, Eating Disorders Emerging Show Us What We Need Now