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People who develop eating disorders often live ‘out of order.’ They have difficulty trusting their instincts. Their relationships make them feel anxious instead of supported. So instead of engaging with the outer world from a position of internal strength, they end up living, in effect .. outside in.

Gaining (via decisioni)

(via parisstateofmind)

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The relationships of these patients to others are similar to their relationships to food - an alternating between a great eagerness for relationships and a capacity for isolation and withdrawal, with an intolerance for loneliness as well as for closeness.

Psychodynamic Approach to Eating Disorders
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Individuals who are innately predisposed to introversion tend to defend against shame by internal withdrawal. Relationships are either avoided or abandoned, and the individual may display an oscillating in- and- out pattern with regard to relationships. When an introvert is forced to contend with excessive shame, the typical response is to hide deeper inside. While some innate introverts develop “learned extroversion” in response to shame, usually the self becomes more hidden, shut in, further isolated, increasingly detached from others.

Gershen Kaufman, The Psychology of Shame
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Depression presents itself as a realism regarding the rottenness of the world in general and the rottenness of your life in particular. But the realism is merely a mask for depression’s actual essence, which is an overwhelming estrangement from humanity. The more persuaded you are of your unique access to the rottenness, the more afraid you become of engaging with the world; and the less you engage with the world, the more perfidiously happy-faced the rest of humanity seems for continuing to engage with it.

Jonathan Franzen, How to Be Alone
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By looking to food rather than people to meet self-object needs, the eating disordered individual tried to circumvent the need for human self- object responsiveness and to avoid further disappointment and shame. Food is seen as trustworthy, while people are not.

Sensing the Self
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A bulimic person’s shame may lead her to try not only to hide her eating- disordered behaviors but also her basic needs and yearnings. She may wish that her needs and desires did not exist and may try to act as if she does not need or want anyone or anything. when that attempt inevitably fails, she may wish others could magically read her mind and respond to her needs and wants without having to ask for anything. To avoid shame of expressing her needs and desires, she turns to food rather than relationships, for comfort. Instant gratification, that you can’t find in other places.

Sensing the Self: Woman’s Recovery from Bulimia
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People who develop eating disorders often live ‘out of order.’ They have difficulty trusting their instincts. Their relationships make them feel anxious instead of supported. So instead of engaging with the outer world from a position of internal strength, they end up living, in effect .. outside in.

Gaining (via betterthanbones)

(via parisstateofmind)