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.

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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