This is part three of a blog series that addresses healing your relationship with food, yourself, and others (I’m recording this as a podcast series as well!). If you haven’t read Part 1 and Part 2 yet, you will want to explore those prior to diving into this post because they provide foundational insights about how disordered eating can affect personal connections.

Binge eating and food restriction tend to isolate you from others, from your own needs, and from your ability to care for yourself. In the first two posts, I helped you explore the many ways that issues with relationships could be intertwined with your eating disorder. I also addressed how important it is to separate your ability to improve relationships from your ability to avoid binge eating. You want to set yourself up to be binge-free no matter how well or how poorly relationships are going, because bingeing is never the solution to relationship issues.

Creating space for connection after recovery or recovery progress

Stopping binge eating—or even just making some progress in recovery, so that food starts to take up less of your time, energy, and mental capacity—starts to create space for more connection in your life. It creates more room to focus on addressing and healing relationship issues, whether that’s with yourself or others, and that will be the focus of this post.

As I discussed in Part 1 of the series, if your relationship with food is still consuming you, it’s going to feel really hard to heal other relationships because you’re still in that survival mode. So it’s very important to get to a more stable place with food, and we have many resources to help you do that—including one-on-one coaching with me or Coach Julie, the Brain over Binge group, and my books or course.

With that in mind, this post is mostly directed toward people who are binge-free or on their way to becoming binge-free. But regardless of where you are in recovery, the ideas here could still be useful to you in a way that’s safe and feels doable right now.

Where do I even start in rebuilding relationships after binge eating?

I want to begin with a question that came up during my Q&A call with the Brain over Binge group a couple of months ago, because it serves as a helpful guidepost for everything else I’ll talk about here.

The question was basically this: “I’ve been bingeing and obsessed with food for so long that I don’t know where to start in learning how to have a friend or be a friend.”

You may be feeling this way too, and it’s also common to feel this way when it comes to your relationship with yourself—in that you aren’t sure how to be a friend to yourself. I’m going to use a lot of the advice I shared on that group call, and expand on it, to address this overarching question: How do you start learning the skills of being a friend to yourself and others? This also applies to being a partner, a family member, a coworker, or navigating any kind of relationship.

Begin with compassion and patience

Always start with compassion toward yourself and toward any friends or other relationships you may have lost or not nurtured along the way. The eating disorder took this away from you; it wasn’t your intention to neglect relationships or not to form them in the first place. Beating yourself up doesn’t help, so any amount of self-compassion you can offer is a great first step.

Next, develop a mindset of patience as you learn these new skills. If you’re more isolated right now, you likely won’t wake up tomorrow with a fulfilling social life and a great relationship with yourself. You may have been trapped in these eating issues from a very young age, and you therefore didn’t get a chance to develop these skills, so be kind and gentle with yourself. Think of it like picking up a musical instrument or a sport—you wouldn’t expect yourself to be perfect right away. You’d start with the basics and gradually build toward more advanced skills.

Notice the good in your life, within yourself, and in your relationships

Once you have self-compassion and patience, you can begin taking steps to heal your relationships and build a healthy connection with yourself. Depending on where you are now, here are some ideas about how to start this healing process. You can take what resonates with you and what you feel ready for, and use it as inspiration to think of your own ideas as well.

A good place to start is to begin noticing the good in your life and within yourself—whatever that may be. This suggestion doesn’t involve creating anything new—but just noticing what’s already there. Yes, binge eating may have taken a lot away from you, but there is still good in your life. As you go through your day, try to notice small joys and pleasures—whether that involves others or just yourself. Notice moments when you feel a positive emotion, when you think a positive thought about yourself or your abilities, when you sense a good smell, a food that tastes great, a comfortable outfit, a beautiful sight in nature, a peaceful place in your home, a piece of art or music, someone who smiles at you, a funny joke, a good conversation.

Urges to binge have a way of telling us that “nothing is good or exciting, so you might as well go back to bingeing,” so please be aware of that thought—and dismiss it. You wouldn’t tell someone else to binge eat as a solution to boredom or a lack of pleasure. You’d encourage them to seek out, cultivate, and savor what’s good, and to never return to something that’s always harmful and painful. 

This leads me to the absolute best way you can be a friend to yourself now and through the rest of your life—and that is to give yourself the gift of not binge eating. Even if other things feel a little flat right now—which is common as your dopamine and pleasure pathways are regulating—making binge eating not an option keeps you moving toward real solutions to whatever you need to heal within yourself or with others.

Part of looking for the good in your life is recognizing the connections you do have. Most binge eaters or former binge eaters aren’t completely isolated; you may have family, friends, partners, coworkers, or acquaintances. Even if it’s just one person, notice their qualities that you enjoy and notice how you feel around them. Also notice the qualities you exhibit around others that make you feel good about yourself—for example when you make someone laugh, give to people you care about, share a mutual interest, or even express an opinion or set a boundary.

This practice is something Coach Julie and I discussed in Episode 105 of the podcast—“Taking in the Good.” It’s based on the work of Dr. Rick Hanson, and it’s a researched strategy for growing your capacity to experience happiness and override the brain’s negativity bias.

Exploring what you want to bring into your life after binge eating

The next step after noticing what is already in your life is exploring what you may want to bring into your life in terms of relationships or ways to improve yourself. What connections with others do you want to nurture? Are there people already in your life that you want to make an effort to communicate with more or spend more time with? Are there people you’ve lost touch with that you want to reconnect with?

What ways do you want to improve how you care for yourself? Do you need to release some of the pressure and perfectionism you put on yourself? Do you need to add a self-care ritual, even if it’s just a few minutes in your day? Do you want to spend more time in nature or add a meditation practice? Do you need some positive daily affirmations to remind yourself that you are worthy and you deserve self-care and care from others?

Are there completely new relationships you want to think about bringing into your life? If so, what are some small steps you can take toward that goal? Do you want friends with similar interests? You can usually find local groups that connect over shared hobbies, or maybe there are classes you could take. You can start really small here—brainstorm about places where people with the qualities you are looking for in a friend might be… is it church? the gym? museums? concerts? farmers markets? coffee shops?

Challenge yourself to go to places where you feel good, and chances are if you feel good in those places, others you may have a chance to connect with will likely be there too. Even if you don’t talk to anyone right away, you can still build that healthy relationship with yourself by putting yourself in places that inspire you and give you a sense of joy or purpose.

Know that this is not easy for anyone, with or without an eating disorder history—especially as you get older and there aren’t as many natural opportunities to make new friends like there were in school—so give yourself some grace if you don’t find new connections right away. You can start with very simple actions like a smile or wave and gain more confidence over time.

It’s all about exploring, experimenting, and adapting depending on what works and what doesn’t work for you—and of course always being patient and compassionate with yourself along the way.

Rebuilding, repairing, and setting boundaries

The next step—and these aren’t really steps but suggestions—is repairing, rebuilding, or setting boundaries in relationships affected by the eating disorder or intertwined with the eating disorder.

If there are relationships you neglected, know that repair doesn’t always have to mean sharing a lot right away. It could be as simple as a text that says, “hey, I’ve missed you,” or possibly making time to meet someone for coffee—without overexplaining yourself or only explaining what you feel comfortable sharing. Start with the people who feel very safe and easy for you to reconnect with and who serve as positive influences.

You don’t have to reconnect with everyone or right away—especially if certain people introduce some toxic elements to your life as far as focusing on appearance, weight, or dieting. I also realize that some relationships with toxic elements may not be ones you can fully avoid, and maybe you can’t avoid them much at all. For various reasons, you may not be able to get out of living situations or relationships right away, and this is why it’s so important to know that you can avoid binge eating no matter what.

Don’t put pressure on yourself to make big moves or change things significantly right away. You can give yourself some time to process and adapt to your binge-free life and work on learning what you truly want and need, because you may have been out of touch with that for quite a while during the time you were distracted with the eating disorder.

Not changing anything right away also has some benefits (unless of course there is something abusive going on—and in that case it’s your absolute priority to get yourself to safety, which I addressed in Part 2 of this series), because when you keep things pretty much the same but you don’t binge anymore, it really shows you that it was never your life or your relationships causing the binges.

This was something that was a powerful lesson for me when I recovered 20 years ago. After I stopped acting on my urges, I had this mindset of “wow, this is amazing—I can have all of these problems and still not binge. I can be depressed and anxious and still not binge. I can be lonely, sad, confused, have poor self-esteem, relationship conflicts, etc.—and still not binge!”

It was truly wonderful, and I believe that mindset of almost wanting to experience negative feelings—so I could prove to myself I didn’t need to binge—was highly protective in preventing me from ever returning to the habit, and allowing me to completely disassociate my binge eating from emotions, relationships, and other problems in my life.

Understanding what was lost to my eating disorder in terms of relationships

It’s not that I didn’t face any of my feelings or problems or try to find ways to deal with them during that time of recovery. It’s just that I really didn’t change very much in my life, and I didn’t hinge stopping binge eating on how well I dealt with issues in relationships or within myself. But looking back, even though that mindset was protective as far as not bingeing, I think it held me back a bit in terms of my own personal growth. I was so excited to be done with the eating disorder that I think it made me minimize or gloss over some of the ways that being in that dark place of bingeing and overexercising for so long had affected me—and it may have kept me from really looking at what the eating disorder took from me, and what skills I didn’t develop in my life because my eating disorder consumed me for many of my teenage and young adult years.

There was a reality that needed to be faced: that I had wasted a lot of time, and I had made some bad decisions based on how badly I felt about myself because of the eating disorder. I lost people who were important to me because my binge eating took me away from love and connection. I felt like my friends I had before the eating disorder went on without me in many ways—not intentionally, but because I was just no longer very available, and I no longer responded much and no longer tried to make plans or actively reached out.

I woke up from the nightmare of binge eating—of course very excited to be done with the binge eating—but also realizing that I had become isolated in some ways, and also possibly made the wrong connections in other ways.

A personal example of the long-term effects of eating-disorder-related isolation 

Shortly before I was writing this Part 3 blog post, I got a call from one of my old childhood friends—the only friend from my high school that I keep in touch with in any capacity today. She said this in a much more tactful way than I’m going to say it, but she called to let me know that our old friend group from high school had planned a big girls’ trip, and it had been in the works for a long time, and all the plans were made, and the rooms were booked—but she remembered me last minute and wanted to reach out to apologize for not including me and to invite me.

I thought it was amazingly sweet that even one friend from high school remembered me—even at the tail end of this planning, but I also thought it was a good example of the residual effects of the eating disorder even today. It was so telling in terms of the mistakes I made along the way in not doing enough to reestablish connections.

I didn’t go on the trip because it would have been too challenging to leave my kids so last minute, but it made me reflect a bit on ways I need to be a better friend even today. It’s not only eating disorders that take us away from connections—I’ve had a hard time with finding time for connection since having kids and putting so much time into my work, and I’m sure there are things in your own life that distract from relationships.

The lessons you learn from reestablishing or sustaining connections through or after an eating disorder can be valuable through the rest of your life—to maintain relationships even through difficult times.

An invitation to begin healing relationships—when you’re ready

There is no pressure to get right back out there and start being social all of the time, but I do want to encourage you to put some conscious effort into connection after recovery—whenever you feel ready, and in a way that feels safe for you. I know how easy it is to let the days, weeks, months, and even years go by and let responsibilities take over and to let friendships slip away or never form.

This isn’t to push you or make you fear that if you don’t do this now, you’re going to wake up at 43 years old and be forgotten for a girls’ trip. You’re allowed to protect your energy and peace if that’s what feels right to you now—and maybe that’s what felt right for me then too. This is an individual journey, and you get to decide what your next steps are.

When eating disorder recovery brings relationship clarity

Another related shift that can happen after recovery is realizing that you’re no longer the same version of yourself who chose for certain people to be in your life—and I feel like this comes up most often in terms of romantic relationships.

When you’re in the thick of binge eating or food/weight obsession, you may not be in touch with who you really are and what you truly want and need in romantic relationships. You may have chosen a partner during a time when your self-worth was really low and your shame was really high, and that’s rarely a good time to make clear and aligned choices about who is truly right for you or how you deserve to be treated.

After recovery and adapting to being binge-free, you may look around and feel like something no longer fits. Maybe you feel like your partner doesn’t support your growth, or the relationship was built around you not being well or not being the best version of yourself, or maybe it now just feels like you’ve outgrown it based on the changes you’ve made.

There are so many ways this could play out, but know that you’re not alone. When people make major changes in their lives—like stopping a terrible habit or addiction—it’s like waking up to reality after a long time of being clouded. You may come to painful realizations, but it’s important to be honest with yourself about who you are now and how the people around you fit with that new version of yourself.

It doesn’t mean you did anything wrong in the past—you made the best decisions you could from the place you were in, and you don’t need to spend time in regret—but you are now seeing things more clearly or from a different perspective, and you can go forward from there.

If you find yourself in this situation, know that you don’t have to make any sudden decisions. You can start by getting curious, and asking yourself how you feel around this person now? Can you be your authentic self in this relationship as a recovered person, or do you see the possibility that you could be your authentic self in the future—if you both work on it? Does this relationship help or hinder the life you’re building after recovery, or do you see the possibility that this relationship could be a fit in your recovered life—again if you both work on it?

Growth after binge eating recovery isn’t always comfortable—but it’s worth it

You don’t need all of the answers right away, but it’s okay to admit to yourself that things have shifted. Give yourself permission to begin to explore what that means for your future. If the relationship can grow and adapt with you, then that’s a beautiful thing. But if it can’t, that doesn’t mean recovery broke something—it means recovery made you into a healthier version of you who can now learn to have the clarity and strength to choose what’s truly right for you now.

Try to see this as an opportunity and not as a crisis. When food is no longer the main struggle, you get the chance to explore all of this, and even if some of it is painful, I want you to see it (as much as possible) as a way that you are growing in a positive direction. Try not to see it as something that is daunting or that you have to do perfectly—because there are no perfect decisions when it comes to relationships.

You can learn to care for others, build and repair connections, while also protecting and caring for yourself. You’re not broken if this feels awkward or slow. You can take all of the time you need, and keep asking yourself what you want your life to look like and who you want beside you on this path.

Go to Part IV of this blog series

Support is available if you want to talk about this

If you want guidance as you explore any of these issues in your own life, Coach Julie and I are here to help you. As I’ve mentioned in the previous relationship posts, I am now a certified relationship coach as well, to better help people in this area. When you book your coaching session—if you do want to talk about relationship issues—just mention it in the brief intake questionnaire. You can book either a 20-minute laser session or a full 45-minute session with me or Coach Julie at brainoverbinge.com/one-on-one-coaching. 

The Brain over Binge group is also a great place to get support in this area, because everyone there understands what you are dealing with and faces similar struggles in their own lives.

This is part two of a blog series that addresses healing your relationship with food, yourself, and others (I’m recording this as a podcast series as well!). If you’re having issues in relationships while also struggling with an eating disorder or even after recovery, know that you’re not alone. In Part I of this blog series, I talked about some of the ways that eating disorders can affect our capacity to engage in relationships with others and can also prevent us from developing a healthier relationship with ourselves. I talked about this using the framework of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, explaining that when your basic physiological and safety needs are not being met—which is often the case when an eating disorder is present—you can’t fully pursue other needs for connection, and your relationship with yourself suffers as well.

In this blog post, I’m going to address 3 main areas. First, I want to help you discover some of the unique ways that your eating disorder has affected your own relationships, and this applies even after recovery. Second, I want to help you learn to separate the relationship issues (as much as possible) from your ability to recover, so that you can overcome your struggle with food regardless of what is going on in your relationships. Last, I want to talk about how recovery gives you the brain space, the energy, and the time to start building skills and healing relationships—or reevaluating relationships and possibly adjusting or walking away from ones that are no longer healthy for you. The last topic is something I’ll address in much more detail in Part III of this series. But, before I get started with any of this, we need to discuss something very important in terms of your safety…

Address your safety before addressing any connections between your eating disorder and relationships

If you’re currently in any sort of abusive or traumatic situation in your relationships, it’s not the time to explore the issues I’m talking about in this blog post. Regardless of what factors may be at play, there’s never a reason for abuse, and it serves no purpose right now to try to determine the factors that may have led up to you being in that situation. Never blame your eating disorder for any abuse you’re experiencing, either physical or emotional. There’s simply never a reason for that, and the priority in any abusive situation is getting yourself to safety as quickly as possible, with professional help if necessary. Find a community, find support, and don’t spend time trying to analyze the dynamics involved or think that recovery will somehow magically make it better, and never blame yourself or your eating disorder.

Even if your safety isn’t currently at risk, relationships can be a fraught space for anyone with a history of abuse or trauma in relationships. If that’s the case for you, I recommend proceeding with awareness as you read this, and know that you may want some additional support as you explore this topic, depending on your situation or where you are in your healing. I believe we’re all capable of building up resilience and learning to overcome relationship challenges in our lives, even really difficult ones, but I want to make sure you prioritize your safety and get more help when necessary because I do not specialize in abuse or trauma, and this episode will not address those issues.

Also know that eating disorders themselves can be traumatic experiences. They’re harmful and dangerous to the body and having an eating disorder is, in many ways, like being in an abusive relationship—the eating disorder continues to hurt you over and over. In this situation where you feel that the eating disorder is severely compromising your physical health, remember that safety is your number one priority. The priority is not analyzing your relationships or how the eating disorder has affected them. Like I mentioned in Part I of this blog post, healing the relationship with food usually needs to come first (or at least it needs to be strongly prioritized alongside of any other issues), and if health is in danger, addressing the food issues has to be the absolute priority.

Before you can have the brain space to look at your relationship with yourself and with others, you need to stabilize your eating habits and stop any extreme and dangerous behaviors like restricting, bingeing, and purging. We offer a lot of support in that area, through my books, the online course, one-on-one coaching, or group coaching; or you can use whatever resources are available to you and that you find helpful. This discussion on relationships is mainly for those who are not in immediate danger from the eating disorder. It’s for those of you who have made some progress in recovery and who feel ready to look at some other issues, or for those who are fully recovered and want to become the best version of yourself—and that can include exploring some of the ways the eating disorder interfered with your life, and learning how you can move forward from here.

Explore the ways your eating disorder has affected your relationships

To get started in thinking about the ways the eating disorder affected you and your relationships, I’m going to pose several questions to guide you. You can journal about the questions or just reflect on them and allow ideas to flow. Avoid judging yourself for anything that comes up—simply try to observe your thoughts with an open mind and see where it leads.

I’ve developed these questions based on my own experience and the experience of others that I’ve talked to over the years, especially in coaching. If you have any of these issues, please know that you’re not broken and please have as much compassion for yourself as possible because you’ve simply been doing the best that you can.

What were your friendships and your family relationships like when you first started dieting or when you first started fixating on food or bingeing?

Once dieting or bingeing started, what effect did that have on your friendships? What effect did it have on your family relationships, and if applicable, what effect did it have on your romantic relationships?

Did you start isolating yourself to spend more time calculating calories or planning meals? Did you spend less time out in the world socializing and connecting with others?

Did your initial eating disorder behaviors get you compliments from others, setting you up to think that your appearance and your ability to be fit or thin determined your worth in relationships?

Did you think your ability to make friends or to date was determined by your body’s shape or size?

If you felt you weren’t the right weight, did you avoid interactions?

Did shame about your body affect any romantic or sexual relationships?

Did being distracted with bingeing, secretive eating, or dieting take you away from connecting with family or friends?

When you were with people, did you feel like you weren’t really present because you felt like all you could think about was food, or your weight, or what everyone else was eating, or other people’s weight, or what you should or shouldn’t be eating, or what you wanted to eat when you left the gathering?

Did the physical effects of bingeing make you avoid friends, miss work, cancel plans, avoid romantic partners, or avoid trying to form new connections?

Did your eating issues influence relationship decisions like who to date, or the decision to continue or end a relationship, or the decision to get married or even have children?

Did purging behaviors or overexercising make you too exhausted to socialize and connect with others?

Did you hide from people because you had gained weight and didn’t believe you would be accepted?

Did you share your eating disorder struggles with people who did not react well and made you feel even worse about yourself?

Did you start struggling with food as a young child and did food start to feel like your only friend at some point?

Did you give up on even trying to form bonds with others because you felt so connected to food?

Did eating feel safer in some ways than putting yourself out there and risk getting hurt?

Did you feel like you were disappointing others along the way because of your struggle with food? How did that affect your relationship with those people?

As far as your relationship with yourself…

Did you lack confidence to go after your own goals because of your eating disorder?

Are there ways in which you stopped taking care of yourself because you didn’t think you were worthy of self-care?

Were there things that you’ve wanted to do just for yourself, but you’ve let your weight or your body shape stop you?

These questions so far are primarily directed at helping you see where the eating disorder is negatively impacting your ability to put energy and time into relationships, including the relationship with yourself. But there’s another connection to think about and that’s the possibility that relationship issues contributed to why you started dieting in the first place and why it got out of control. Ask yourself these questions…

Did anyone in your life make you feel like you needed to diet or look a certain way to be loved and accepted?

Did someone put you on a diet when you were a child so that you didn’t even have a choice in the matter? What effect did this have on you and your relationship with that person and your relationship with yourself?

Did someone in your life give you the message that you had to be perfect, including with your eating and exercise?

Did you feel like you would lose love or affection from someone or from many people if you were not perfect?

(The impact others have on your feelings about your body and your desire to diet is something I talked about with Dr. Ramani in Episode 144: Eating Disorders and Narcissistic Relationships).

There’s also the issue of developing a connection between bingeing and relationship stress over time so that the relationship stress starts to automatically lead to urges to binge. In this case, you end up with the experience of bingeing getting worse when relationship problems get worse. This connection can go in another direction as well in that a good relationship might have a positive effect on your recovery. I’ve had more than a few people tell me about time periods when they were in new, exciting relationships or living with someone for the first time and that temporarily quieted their urges to binge—or even if their urges did not decrease, they simply did not follow them because that person was always around, which led to quitting the habit for a period of time.

This is not to say that good relationships are a cure for bingeing, but different factors can affect our patterns, and everyone has different patterns. To explore these unique connections in your own life, ask yourself…

Have relationships ever had a positive effect as far as my eating disorder? How did that play out? (It doesn’t have to be a new, exciting romantic relationship, it can be any relationship).

Do you tend to have less urges to binge when you’re connected with good friends or people you care about?

Do you have less urges to diet or focus on weight when you’re with people who have healthy attitudes about food?

These questions are certainly not exhaustive of every possible connection of eating issues and relationships, but I hope they give you a place to start as far as exploring this area.

You can avoid binge eating regardless of relationship dynamics

The next topic I want to address is separating the relationship issues (as much as possible) from your ability to stop bingeing, stop harmful restrictive behaviors, and develop a healthy relationship with food. Relationship challenges will be present throughout your life, and you want to put yourself in a position to be binge free regardless of what is going on in those relationships. To do this, it’s vital to recognize any thought you have that uses a relationship struggle as a reason to binge. As examples, I’m going to give you a few of my own former lower brain thoughts that encouraged bingeing in response to relationship-related issues.

For a year during my bingeing, I lived with my sister and another room mate and they both had boyfriends at the time. It felt like they were always out with their boyfriends, or their boyfriends were hanging out at our apartment, and I was always alone, and my thoughts told me that “I was lonely, unwanted, unlovable, and needed the bingeing for comfort.”

Another example was a time that my father came to visit me in college during some of my worst bingeing days. He hadn’t seen me in a while and when he did, he said, “you don’t even look like yourself anymore” (because of all the weight I’d gained). In my thoughts, looking like myself meant when I was a successful distance runner and athlete—the time when he seemingly was the most proud of me. His comment made me feel like I’d never be able to get back to that version of myself or be able to make him proud of me again. My thoughts said “it was hopeless, all was lost, and I should just give up and keep bingeing.”

Another lower brain thought would occur when I would try to be social (which is not my strong suit). I would go out with friends and while out, I’d feel super insecure and awkward, mostly because I’m simply an introvert. I always had (and often still have) a feeling of not quite fitting in when I am with groups of people. When I was a binge eater, the longer I stayed around people, the more I found myself thinking about food and what I would eat when I got home. My brain would justify it by saying that “I would never fit in, and bingeing was therefore more pleasurable and more fun than being out with friends, and I deserved some enjoyment just for myself.”  It’s important to point out here that to stop bingeing, I didn’t need to learn how to be more social and less awkward. I’m still an introvert, and I would still prefer to eat a good meal than go out with a big group of people, but bingeing is the last thing that I would want to do. I say this to make sure you know that nothing is wrong with you if you sometimes think food is more appealing than people—because it certainly can be in certain situations, but it’s about taking bingeing completely out of this equation. Bingeing is never a form of pleasure, always leads to pain, and is never a solution to social anxiety.

Some other justifications I had for bingeing in terms of my relationships were encouraged by therapy. As I’ve talked about frequently, therapy taught me to try to find deeper meaning in my binges and to discover what I was trying to use food to “cope with”—and a lot of these things became the reasons my lower brain used to get me to binge. Some of the relationship-related justifications were: because my parents didn’t give my feelings enough validation and support as a child, so I needed to binge to stuff down those feelings; because I feared intimacy and sex due to the messages I received growing up, and therefore I binged to protect myself; because I always felt like I needed to be the “good child,” and I therefore got caught up in a lot of people-pleasing even at a young age, so I needed to binge for relief from this pressure; because romantic relationships made me anxious, so I needed to binge to soothe myself. This list could go on and on, but my brain—which was hooked on bingeing—was all too quick to give me reasons why I should binge, and because relationships are a big part of life, my binge-encouraging thoughts could easily center on relationship struggles. However, thinking that I binged because of relationship issues just served to encourage more binge eating.

There is a difference between noticing some patterns and connections you have between binge eating and relationships, and then on the other hand, using relationship issues as reasons to binge. Like I mentioned earlier, you may indeed get more urges when relationship stress is high, and it’s good to notice and acknowledge that so you can be prepared to dismiss urges during those times. What’s not helpful is to believe that you’re powerless not to binge in the face of relationship stress. Yes, it may take more effort and support to avoid a binge during those times, but relationship stress doesn’t make binge eating inevitable. It may make an urge to binge inevitable because of the habit, but you always get to choose what to do when you have an urge.

When you know the urges are the only direct cause, you have the freedom to have a wide variety of experiences in relationships without ever fearing bingeing. That never means you have to accept poor treatment or that you should do nothing about relationship conflict. It’s always helpful to try to make relationship improvements or even make decisions to leave unhealthy relationships, but your ability to avoid binge eating cannot hinge on that. In relationships, you’re only in control of half of the equation—you can’t always predict what the other person will do, and that’s why it’s so empowering to know that no matter what, you can avoid a binge. Some of the relationship problems I blamed my bingeing on in the past still come up today, but have completely disconnected binge eating from those issues.

Many of the relationship issues I’ve faced since recovery have been much more serious and difficult than what I dealt with during my binge eating years, and not once did binge eating feel like an option. To help you make this separation in your own life, I want to circle back to talking about the questions I asked you earlier in this post about the connections between your relationships and bingeing. As you think about these questions, it can be a great opportunity to notice and become aware of your lower brain’s messages. Your lower brain’s tendency will be to point to a connection or a pattern and say, “yep, that’s why you binge,” “bingeing makes total sense,” or “because of this issue, you should just keep bingeing.” Because this is never the purpose of the questions, anytime you notice these type of thoughts, start to label them as faulty brain messages or as neurological junk from the lower brain.

The questions are also never to suggest that you have to fix the relationship issues before you can stop bingeing, but that’s what the lower brain will often suggest. You may have thoughts like, “well, I’m stuck in this particular relationship situation or with this particular parent, so I can’t possibly stop binge eating until I figure out how to solve that relationship issue.” You can learn to dismiss those thoughts and realize that again, there’s a big difference between acknowledging that there are some connections between bingeing and relationships, and on the other hand, justifying bingeing with relationship problems.

Acknowledging connections allows you to learn and grow from what’s happened in the past, and justifying keeps you stuck in a harmful, habitual cycle. As you explore any connections that you have between bingeing and relationships, you can counteract any of your lower brain’s messages with a mantra like “relationship issues are never a reason to binge,” or “bingeing is never a solution to relationships issues.”

Another great way to be on to your brain when it comes to this topic is to notice that it will even suggest a binge to cope with a relationship issue that is directly caused from binge eating. When you’re aware of this, it’s easy to see the faulty logic of the lower brain. For example, if you isolate yourself because of the bingeing, your lower brain will encourage you to binge because of the isolation. Once you start to see that these issues don’t need to ever cause binge eating, it opens you up to start finding real solutions, which is the third and final topic of this post.

Freedom from binge eating gives you the capacity to focus on the relationship with yourself and with others

When you take bingeing (and other harmful eating behaviors like restriction and purging) out of the equation, you give yourself the brain space, energy and time to start learning new relationship skills—especially some that you feel like maybe you never truly developed because the eating disorder got in the way during your formative years. It opens you up to reevaluating relationships and possibly even walking away from ones that are no longer healthy for you. It opens you up to learning coping and communication skills for difficult relationships that you can’t or don’t want to leave. When you disconnect binge eating from this endeavor of improving relationships, it gives you so much freedom because you don’t have to worry about doing all of this “right” to avoid a binge. You can get curious about the ways you want to show up in relationships, or the type of people you want to connect with, or the ways you want to improve your relationship with yourself; and you can know that no matter what happens, you can continue dismissing urges to binge and you can continue eating adequately.

Doing this gave me freedom that I never thought possible. It’s hard to believe, but it’s been almost 20 years since I recovered and through these 20 years, I’ve never believed that my continued freedom depended on fixing anything within myself or within my relationships. I believe this has made such a huge difference.

However, as I’ll talk about more in Part III (coming soon) of this series, there were things to improve and there were things to heal within myself and within my relationships—some of those things related to the past eating disorder, and some of those things unrelated. I’m thankful that I’ve had a chance to work on other goals within myself and with others, even though I have not always done that perfectly. If you’re anything like I was, you’ve probably been in “fixing mode” in relation to your eating disorder for a very long time, and I want you to start to get excited about turning attention toward some other things in your life and addressing those things—even if some of those things are very difficult. It’s refreshing to start to look at your life as a binge-free person, and see what you want to make of it, and think about who you want to be on this journey with, and how you want to relate to the people around you, and how you want to take care of yourself along the way.

Go to Part III of this blog series

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The topic of relationships comes up so much in coaching that in order to help people more effectively, I recently got certified as a relationship coach (in addition to my certification in health coaching from the Institute for Integrative Nutrition). So, if you are having issues in relationships as you recover from binge eating, it’s definitely something I understand and something I can help guide you through in one-on-one coaching.

Additionally, I have a lot of personal experience in this area ranging from the issues related to the eating disorder, and then later through a challenging marriage, parenting, divorce, co-parenting, dating, difficult relationships, breakups, and healthy relationships as well. Just like I frequently remind you that I do not eat perfectly, I also do not do relationships perfectly by any stretch of the imagination, but I have overcome some challenges in this area, and I have a capacity to listen without judgment and to help you work through your own unique issues. This goes for Brain over Binge Coach Julie as well, who is certified in life coaching and can help you with so many other issues that may come up in your life or in your relationships.

Learn more about 1:1 coaching and book your 45 minute or 20 minute session