Finding a New Norm and Narrative
Recovering from an eating disorder requires grit and determination. Not only do you have to rescript how you think about food and body, you also have to change your relationships with others and how you interact with the culture around you. In my free masterclass, I will delineate my three-part system of eating disorder that’s 25 years in the making and coming to you LIVE from San Diego, California! The third part of this system involves rescripting your relationships with food, with eating, with your body, and with your loved ones. It’s all about creating a new narrative for yourself, and I’m going to give you a sneak peak on how to do it.
Walking the Line
Sometimes when you are in recovery from binge eating and bulimia, it feels as though you’re walking a line between your eating disorder and recovery. It can feel disconcerting, as there’s a lot of dissonance there. I often tell my clients that there’s a recovery part of your brain and an eating disorder part of your brain. The more you can lean into the recovery part of your brain, the quicker you can stop binge eating and binge/purging. I take these concepts from dialectical behavior therapy, and I use the notions of emotion mind and wise mind. Emotion mind is where the eating disorder lives. If your life is like a car ride, you’re in emotion mind when emotion is driving the car, and you’re locked in the trunk. Emotion is going up on the sidewalk and driving backward the wrong way on the freeway. Emotion is doing doughnuts in the parking lot. Reason is nowhere in sight. The goal is to move from emotion mind into wise mind. Wise mind is where recovery lives. You’re driving the car, and emotion and reason are passengers. You feel grounded and calm, and you’re dialoguing with emotion and logic. You validate your emotions (using self-compassion), and you listen to reason, and you respond intentionally and consciously to the world around you.
Making the Leap
Moving into a recovery mindset feels so scary. You’ve relied on the binge eating and binge/purging behaviors for so long; you don’t know what you’d do without them. It is like a leap of faith. It reminds me of the part in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade when he needs to cross a deep canyon to get the holy grail, and he doesn’t know how to do it. He takes a deep breath, closes his eyes, and takes a step, and a bridge magically appears. Eating disorder recovery feels similarly. You may not know how you’re going to get the holy grail of recovery, and your treatment team keeps telling you to move forward, and your brain is screaming, “But there’s this deep canyon there! I could die!” The only way to keep going is to trust the process and do the very opposite thing that your feelings are telling you to do. This step also comes from dialectical behavior therapy, and it’s called opposite action.
Grieving the Loss
You may feel surprised that grief is a part of recovery. You could be thinking, “Oh no! Recovery is supposed to be AMAZING! I don’t wanna deal with grief.” With binge eating and binge/purging, there are benefits. You developed these behaviors for a reason. Yes, there is a huge biological component, as eating disorders are brain disorders. You probably used binge eating and binge/purging to deal with uncomfortable situations and distressing emotions. You might even feel numb while binging and, if you purge, relief when purging. You likely get more pleasure from food than people who don’t struggle with binge and binge/purge behaviors. With recovery, this intense pleasure diminishes somewhat. You still enjoy food; however, it becomes neutral to you—there’s no rush from binging or relief from getting rid of it. You may miss these responses, and that’s okay. Let yourself miss it. There’s plenty of room in your emotional repertoire to miss your eating disorder. Grieve. Heal.
Reforging the Links
It’s likely that you have created new relationships as you’ve been on your recovery journey. Links with your therapist, your eating disorder dietitian, and your loved ones have helped you get to this new norm. What you will find is that you have to reforge these relationships and set new boundaries with friends and family member. For example, if you have folks in your life who talk about dieting all the time, you need to tell them that diet and negative body talk are “no-fly zones” for you, which means that it’s distressing, it’s triggering, and it’s unhelpful for your recovery. You deserve to assert your needs and establish parameters around conversations. Eating disorders don’t start in a vacuum; environmental factors such as trauma, family toxicity, bullying, and even diet culture activate your biological disposition to develop binge eating and binge/purging behaviors. In order to have a solid recovery, you must change how you interact with your environment, which include your relationships.
How can I get a new norm and narrative in eating disorder recovery?
🌻 Sign up for my FREE Masterclass: The Ultimate Training on Breaking the Binge Eating Cycle. It’s a live, virtual, 1-hour seminar on Tuesday, September 13th—and it’ll include a FANTASTIC bonus surprise for people who stay through the end! It’s an interactive workshop for binge eating online, and it will address both binge eating disorder (BED) and bulimia.
🌻 Check out my Fall 2022 Freedom From Binge Eating class. It is a live, virtual, 4-week class on Tuesday, September 27th, from 12-1p. It’s an interactive workshop on binge eating. There will be many bonuses, including videos from yours truly, journal prompts, worksheets, and notes from each class! Anyone with BED, bulimia, binge eating, or emotional eating will greatly benefit!
🌻 Join my Instagram LIVES on Thursdays from 12-1p. I have conversations with professionals such as eating disorder dietitians and therapists on many topics, such as binge eating, BED, bulimia, body image, etc. Subscribe to my Instagram @drmariannemiller, and you’ll get bulimia and BED info sent to your phone with my reels, posts, etc.
🌻If you live in California, you can work with me in therapy!