I’m always really disappointed when I see mental health professionals, especially those who claim to be trauma informed, post food-shaming content on social media.
Trauma survivors very often struggle with food.
Sometimes we literally struggle to get ourselves to eat.
Other times we seem to struggle with getting ourselves to STOP eating.
Many of the addictive and compulsive dynamics that trauma amplifies play out around food— our food choices, our eating habits, and our attitudes and habits around physical exercise.
Sexual trauma in particular tends to show up in our beliefs and attitudes about our physical body and our experiences of pleasure, control, satiety, and deprivation.
All of which is to say: when we’ve experienced trauma, eating, exercise, and everything around it, often tends to be complicated.
What seems to be “common sense” for many people when it comes to eating and exercise often gets turned on its head when trauma, especially sexual trauma, is in the mix.
Our cultural attitudes toward consumption, body size, and and “character” are often kind of f*cked up to begin with.
The very LAST thing trauma survivors need is mental health professionals reinforcing simplistic “wisdom” around diet and exercise that doesn’t scratch the surface of how complex their actual experience is.
Yet, some mental health professionals just can’t seem to help themselves.
We have a long, problematic history in our culture of associating deprivation with “discipline.”
We love the simplistic equation of, “if you have ‘character,’ that shows up in your willingness and ability to deprive yourself.”
This pervasive cultural trope dovetails in perfectly toxic ways with a specific way trauma impacts many people: cultivating a belief that in order to be “safe,” one has to be physically smaller, require less, consume less.
Many survivors get it in our heads that it is not safe to be seen, noticed, or to take up space.
Many survivors get it in our heads that it is not safe or “right” to consume resources— we can quite literally get it in our head that we are a “waste of oxygen” and “don’t deserve to eat.”
Survivors of sexual trauma in particular often come out of the experience with a very ambivalent relationship toward their body— which can manifest in a reluctance to literally, physically feed it.
When we do “break down” and allow ourselves to eat, we often struggle to set limits with what we eat— which makes us feel worse— and then we do a hard shift into obsessively exercising to rid ourselves of the nourishment we feel we “don’t deserve.”
If you have been caught in this cycle of body dysmorphia and disordered eating, you know it is hell. Absolute hell.
And it’s a hell that the culture simply does not understand, nor does it care to understand.
This is why I get so bummed when I see mental health professionals posting “health hacks” designed to get people focused on calories in vs. calories out.
I get bummed when I see mental health professionals sharing “tips” on how to short-circuit the body’s natural hunger cues.
I get bummed when I see mental health professionals using therapy concepts, often from cognitive or behavioral therapy, in the service of health tropes that can be incredibly harmful (even life threatening) to people struggling with disordered eating.
Yes, I know it’s not the case that EVERYONE who follows EVERY therapist on social media struggles with disordered eating.
But eating disorders are sufficiently common, and sufficiently overlooked (or, let’s be honest, encouraged) by the rest of the culture, that I really wish therapists would err on the side of acknowledging them.
And they wonder why I kind of balk whenever they claim that all therapists, by definition, are trauma informed.
If ONLY that were the case.
Use Your Damn Skills 