The Impact of Relational Trauma on Eating: Eating to Live or Living to Eat? by Sandra Yelich

By Sandra Yelich, MSW - Author of How to Make Peace with Food

The connections between relational abuse/trauma and unhealthy eating patterns, food choices, and body image issues are numerous and varied. These can include trust, fear, people-pleasing, perfectionism, lack of boundaries, guilt, shame, comfort, anxiety – the list goes on. The fundamental element of abuse and neglect is a denial of your self. One of the ways this is accomplished is by the messages we were given that overrode our own, natural, healthy messages. This dynamic caused us to keep the focus off ourselves and our body’s messages, and do what others wanted, whether it was in our best interests or not.

As babies, one of our natural survival instincts was to eat in order to stay alive.  We cried when we were hungry, suckled for sustenance, and spit the nipple out when we were full.  It was a very simple, straightforward process.  We ate to live.

As abuse, neglect, and trauma became part of our relationships, that simple process became corrupted. We innately knew how to listen to the messages of our body regarding hunger and fullness, but others in our lives gave us different messages by word or deed.  Over time, we lost our ability to listen to our bodies, respect what was best for them, and eat in healthy, natural ways.

Abuse and/or neglect leave us hungry for comfort

When we weren’t afforded care, whether on a physical or emotional level, we failed to learn how to care for ourselves in a healthy, natural manner.  We often turned to food for the comfort we’d been missing.

When we weren’t accepted as who we were, imperfectly glorious human beings, we learned to judge ourselves harshly, translating that judgment to what we saw in the mirror.  What we looked like became an equivalent to what kind of person we were.

When our natural eating patterns were overridden by adults with guilt (‘think of all the starving children in china’), people pleasing (‘take one more bite for daddy’), or our sense of what kind of person we were (‘clean your plate – that’s a good boy’), our sense of holding boundaries for ourselves became skewed.

When we weren’t allowed to express all our emotions, we learned to stuff them down with heavy foods. When the stress of daily living became too much to manage, our brains cried out for fats and sugars, energy foods to help those neurons to continue struggling.

When we were told contradicting messages – ‘don’t waste food’/if you eat all that you’ll get fat’ – we lived in confusion of what to do, and became distrustful of our own natural messages.

We learned to neglect ourselves as we had been neglected, hurt ourselves as we had been hurt, or take care of ourselves in the easiest way possible to make up for the lack of care we’d experienced. Ultimately, those original healthy, life-giving and life-caring messages that we were born with became smothered under messages from others that didn’t respect what we innately knew to be best for us, and we began eating for non-natural reasons.

We ate to distract ourselves because we’d never received reassurance when we were afraid.  We ate to comfort ourselves because we’d never received comfort for our pain. The more we weren’t cared about as people, the more we stopped caring about ourselves. After all, we couldn’t do what we’d never learned.

Instead, we couldn’t trust ourselves, denied ourselves, looked to others for a sense of what image to strive for, and ultimately hated ourselves for not being perfect.  We tried to problem-solve when we were children w/ limited experience and limited resources. When we weren’t taught a healthy, natural way to do so as adults, we often looked at the world thru the eyes of children.  We hadn’t been taught how to grow emotionally.

Trauma leaves our brain hungry for fats and sugars

We remembered, instead, to reward ourselves w/ sweets or fats when we accomplished something, (what a good boy – let’s get an ice cream), to deny ourselves when we weren’t perfect (just for that, you’re going to bed w/o supper), or simply guessed at what self-care was about, and used diets as signposts for the rules to follow.  We didn’t know how to rely on our own messages from our bodies anymore.  We found ourselves living to eat.

It’s only by returning to basics through knowledge, understanding, realizations, and practicing new ways to think about food and eating that we are able to also consistently return to putting them into a natural, nourishing, life-giving place in our lives.  By doing so, we’re able to eliminate many symptomatic behaviors and perspectives of our former abuse and neglect.

We can return to a relationship with food that is natural, nourishing and life-giving

It’s not like flipping a switch, but a process. On the way, though, we can learn much about ourselves and how our trauma has corrupted one of the most natural relationships we were born with. Plus, we can take back our personal power of choice that was so horribly snatched away from us when we didn’t have the strength, knowledge, or resources to resist.

 Sandra Yelich, MSW, author of How To Make Peace With Food, is a trauma survivor who has been dealing with food and eating issues much of her life. Her new book can help people get the focus back on themselves and what their body tells them, at the same time leaving behind hurtful, unhealthy behaviors, emotions, and feelings. Sandra’s book is available from Amazon.com.