Welcome to the Brain Over binge podcast where you learn a simple brain-based approach to ending binge eating. Thank you so much for being here. I’m Catherine Hansen. I’m the author of Brain Over Binge and the Brain Over Binge Recovery Guide. This is part two of a series that I’m recording that addresses healing your relationship with food yourself and others. There’s so much to explore in this topic and if you’re having issues in relationships while also struggling with an eating disorder or even after recovery, please know that you’re not alone. The topic of relationships comes up on so many of the one-on-one coaching calls that I do, and as I mentioned in the last episode, I recently got a relationship coaching certification to be able to help people further in this area. In part one of this podcast series, which was episode 1 71 and I’ll link that in the show description.

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 as well. 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 relationships with others and with yourself. In this Part two episode, I want to talk about three main areas. First, I want to help you discover some of the ways that your relationship with food has affected your other relationships, and this applies even after recovery. The second thing I want to address is separating the relationship issues as much as possible from your ability to recover so that you can overcome your issues with food regardless of what is going on in relationships.

And 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 even reevaluating relationships and possibly walking away from ones that are no longer healthy for you. And this topic is something I’ll address in much more detail in part three of this series. Before I get started with any of this, I want to mention something very important here and say that if you’re currently in any sort of abusive or traumatic situation in your relationships, it’s not the time to be exploring this issue of any possible connection between your eating disorder and relationships. Regardless of what factors may be at play, there’s never ever a reason abuse and it serves no purpose right now to try to determine the factors that 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 situation like this is getting yourself to safety with professional help if necessary, find a community, find support, get help and don’t spend time trying to analyze the situation 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. So if that’s the case for you, I recommend just proceeding with awareness and knowing 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 additional help when necessary because I do not specialize in abuse or trauma and this episode will not address those issues in relationships and I want to make sure you’re aware of that before I dive deeper into this topic.

Another thing I want to make sure that you’re aware of before I begin and I realize this is becoming quite a long disclaimer, is that eating disorders can also be traumatic experiences. They’re harmful and dangerous to the body. Having an eating disorder is in many ways like being in an abusive relationship with the eating disorder continuing to hurt you over and over and again in this situation where you feel your eating disorder is severely compromising your physical health and safety, 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 one of this podcast series, for most people 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, it 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 food behaviors and we offer a lot of support in that area. You can read my books, you can get the online course, you can get help in one-on-one coaching or group coaching or use whatever resources are available to you. This discussion is mainly for those who are not in that 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 of you 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 To get started in thinking about the ways the eating disorder affected you and your relationships, I’m going to pose many questions to guide you.

You can pause the podcast and reflect on each question. You can write the questions down and journal about them at another time or you can just listen and allow ideas to flow, try to avoid judging yourself or anything that comes up. Just 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. So if you have any of these issues, please know that you’re not broken and have as much compassion for yourself as possible because you’ve simply been doing the best that you can. So you can start by thinking about what were your friendships and your family relationships like when you first started dieting or when you first started fixating on food or binging once dieting or binging 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 binging or 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 binging make you avoid friends, miss work canceled 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 over exercising 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 feel like 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 your eating disorder is negatively affecting 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. You can ask yourself, 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 your exercise?

Did you feel like you would lose love or affection from someone or from many people if you were not perfect? This is something I talked about in episode 1 44 with Dr. Ramini d Vasala, which was titled Eating Disorders and Narcissistic Relationships, and I’ll link that episode in the show description because that episode applies to what I’m talking about here. 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, and you end up with this experience of binging getting worse when relationship problems get worse and 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 they knew binging was not an option because that person was always around and because of that, they quit the habit for a period of time.

This is not to say that good relationships are a cure for binging, but different factors can affect our patterns and we all have different patterns and I’m just encouraging you to notice the unique connections in your own life. You can ask yourself, have relationships ever had a positive effect as far as my eating disorder? How did that play out? And it doesn’t even have to be new exciting relationships. 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 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.

The next topic I want to address is separating the relationship issues as much as possible from your ability to stop binging and 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. In order 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 just going to give you a few of my own lower brain thoughts that used to encourage binging in response to relationship related issues. So the first one is when I lived with my sister and another roommate for a year during my binging and they both had boyfriends at the time and 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 and unwanted and unlovable and needed the binging for comfort.

Another example was one time my father came to visit me in college during some of my worst binging days and he hadn’t seen me in a while and when he did he said, you don’t even look like yourself anymore. With the implication being because of all the weight I’d gained in my thoughts looking like myself meant when I was a successful runner and athlete and when he seemingly was the most proud of me, this comment made me feel hopeless like I’d never be able to get back to that version of myself or be able to make him proud of me again and my thoughts said I should just give up and keep binging. Another lower brain thought would occur when I would try to be social, which is not really my strong suit. I would go out with friends and while out I’d feel super insecure and awkward, mostly just because I’m simply an introvert.

I would always have this feeling of not quite fitting in when I was out with groups of friends and as the night went on, I found myself thinking more and more 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 binging was therefore more pleasurable and more fun than being out with friends. Now, on a side note, 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 binging is the last thing that I would want to do. I just want to make sure that 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 binging completely out of this equation that’s never a form of pleasure and always leads to pain.

Some other justifications I had for binging in terms of my relationships we’re encouraged by therapy. As I’ve talked about a lot, therapy taught me to try to find deeper meaning in my binges and try 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 as a child and therefore I binged to protect myself because I always felt like I needed to be the quote 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, but thinking that I binged because of relationship issues just serve 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 the 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 not 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 binging. 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 binging 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 the podcast about the connections between your relationships and binging. 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 binging. Makes total sense. Because of this, you should just keep doing it. This is never the purpose of the questions. So anytime you notice this, start to label it as a faulty brain message 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 binging, 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 binging and relationships. And then on the other hand, justifying binging with relationship issues. 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 binging and relationships, you can counteract any of your lower brain’s messages with a mantra like relationship issues are never a reason to binge.

Another really good way to be onto 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 the binge eating. When you’re aware of this, it’s really 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 are not reasons to binge, and once you see that binging doesn’t help solve any relationship issue, it opens you up to start finding real solutions, which is the third and final topic of this episode. When you take binging out of the equation and when you take dieting out of the equation as well, 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 quote right? In order 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, and 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.

And I believe this has made such a huge difference. But as I’ll talk about more in part three 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, and I’m thankful that I’ve had a chance to do that over the past 20 years, even though I have not always done it 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 towards 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.

Thank you so much for listening to part two of this discussion of healing your relationship with food yourself and others. I look forward to talking about this topic again soon. If you want personalized guidance, exploring this or any other issue in recovery, you can find links to learn about one-on-one coaching and group coaching in the show description. For the one-on-one coaching coach, Julie and I have either full 45 minute sessions or 20 minute sessions at a reduced rate. If you just need some quick guidance and advice, you can also get my extensive self-paced online course for only $18 and 99 cents per month, and that is in the show description as well, along with links to both of my books and the free 30 day inspiration booklet as well. Thank you so much for joining me today. Wherever you are in your recovery or in your relationships, I want to encourage you and remind you that you have the power to change your brain and live a binge free life.

The Brain Over Binge Podcast is produced and recorded by Brain over binge recovery coaching LLC. All Work is copyrighted by brain over binge recovery coaching LLC, and all rights are reserved. As a disclaimer, the host of the Brain Over Binge podcast are not professional counselors or licensed healthcare providers, and this podcast is not a substitute for medical advice or any form of professional therapy. Eating disorders can have serious health consequences, and you’re strongly advised to seek medical attention for matters relating to your health. Please get help when you need it, and good luck on your journey.