Breaking down the perfectionism fueled binary in your food and body healing journey
I have seen this dynamic so many times in my healing and my clients healing process, and it is so important that we name it, and give ourselves permission to be in our experience, and pour on as much self compassion as we can muster.
In client sessions, I call it the trap. In short, it’s the place where there is still an eating disorder or disordered eating presence (which is there as coping, it’s always coping with oppression, trauma, and harm) and the shame spiral that comes up with the “failure” to recover, embrace and fully live out body trust, fat liberation, HAES, intuitive eating, whatever language you use to frame your healing.
It’s a damned if you do damned if you don’t kind of place. The more you move towards recovery, your ED mindset is badgering you about failing. When you notice spaces of progress and new chapters with less ED shame, any thought, behavior, or feeling that isn’t totally recovery aligned sends your shame narrative wild- “you fail at everything”, “all your progress is wasted”, “why do you even try” type stuff, that has enough momentum to potentially trigger another loop around the diet / restrict cycle.
What I want for all of us is to move away from the idea that this is linear, non nuanced, easy binary work. To basically, stamp out the idea of perfectionism in all of it. This work is fucking messy!!! It’s supposed to be messy. It’s a paradigm shift. It’s lonely. Everyone is still chattering on about their diets and restriction. It’s confusing, because you’ve never done it before. It’s hard to know what is best for you sometimes. It’s such a long process, and you are the expert, and some amount of embodiment is needed. It is unlearning and relearning SO MUCH.
It doesn’t happen in a stepwise fashion. It’s not linear, how could it possibly be? It’s a million things at once and so many parts of you have thoughts, feelings, ideas about how it is and how it should be.
So of course your ED voice, your diet/ restriction/ controlling/ perfectionistic voice will be popping up. This isn’t a failure, it’s a totally normal experience through it. And, your shame voice will grab onto any ‘indiscretion’ in healing as a sign of failure, because it’s terrified! New territory, sound the alarm!! Our brains, our egos, they want to keep us in what we know because it has adapted to understand how to navigate safety and comfort here. Shame is a powerful tool to get us to stop moving into new chapters of our lives. So it will glom on and berate us for not being perfect right away as a means to slow the process down. And, for many of us, shame is a familiar narrative we are quite identified with.
I believe it’s important to recognize this pattern, this trap of healing where your eating disorder and your shame collude to keep you stuck and small. Recovery is brutal for everyone. It is incredibly hard and intimate work in a world that still does not understand eating disorders or anti-fatness as the harmful system of oppression that it is (this is the problem!! Never your body!!) To expect that we will move from point A to point B (and hey, also, this idea didn’t come from you it came from treatment! Many providers still view healing and recovery as linear and it’s a problem!) quickly and seamlessly “with enough work and dedication” (read: access to resources and ability) is old thinking!
So what do we do? We accept the mess. We understand that we will wake up one day and want to treat out body with some kindness and permission and wake up another day ruminating on a plan. And we let it be okay.
I often reflect to my clients, when they are grappling with this trap or how long it is taking or feeling stuck, I ask them how long they had their eating disorder/ disordered eating/ before they knew and understood there was a different way to relate to bodies (were introduced to some form of the body liberation movement). It’s usually a comparison of decades to years. So Yeah. Learning a whole new way of being in a body and feeding that body, it will take some time. And, just like with bias we have to work extra hard to create new neural pathways, that honor and recognize our humanity. Slowly Slowly slowly and with buttloads of compassion, you will start to feel more distant from your eating disorder narrative, then from your shame, as you start to reclaim yourself as a whole being, worthy of being met where they are at, from within a context that is unique and specific to you: You Make Sense.