Spirituality and Eating Disorders

I’ve just read an article; “The Role of Spirituality in the Treatment of Trauma and Eating Disorders: Recommendations for Clinical Practice” (Berrett, Hardman, O’Grady and Richards, 2007) and it includes what is for me, a nice description of what spirituality encompasses ….”Spirituality includes experiences such as feeling compassion for someone, loving, accepting love, being able to feel hope, receiving inspiration, feeling enlightened, being honest and congruent, feeling gratitude, and feeling a sense of life meaning and purpose.”

Spirituality in any therapy room can be important … experiencing the things listed above, can help a client begin to feel accepted and worthy of the love of others …an often important step on the road to beginning to accept themselves.

Especially though, for people with eating disorders, who tend to have lost touch with themselves, or disconnected from themselves and their ability to connect to others, rediscovering a sense of spirituality can be an important element of recovery. Eating disorders are often about a denial of appetite, a denial of neediness, a denial of the importance of connection to others…. a denial of spirituality.

These clients develop eating disorder symptomatology as a coping mechanism, as a way of living in the most effective way they can with the emotions and experiences which have made up their lives. As a result of this, they tend to lose touch with their inner lives, their inner self, and begin to ‘worship at the altar of eating distress.’ Their whole life and emotional capability becomes focused on food, eating or not eating, and their weight or body shape; they don’t have space to make deep connections with themselves or anyone else. The person with an eating disorder thus becomes completely detached from both themselves and any sense of spirituality.

People with eating disorders tend to dislike themselves and can often only accept themselves if and when they’re happy with their current weight or weight-loss. When someone’s self-esteem is so dependent upon numbers on the bathroom scales, they tend not to hear any positive comments made about themselves by anyone. And if someone can’t, or won’t, allow positive feedback from others to touch their heart, their capacity for spiritual connection is severely limited.

In the counselling room, one of the most important things we can enable our clients to feel is that sense of connection … to us, and, more importantly, to themselves. Quite often, the person with Anorexia simply won’t take on board anything which is said, or will push away any attempt at connection, in the same way as s/he does with food. The person with Bulimia may appear to be taking in everything that is said, connecting on the surface, but they often find it difficult to hold onto, or digest the words and the relationship; casting it all aside (expelling it like a bulimic purge) once the session is over. The person with Binge Eating Disorder may simply interject everything that is said, but without the digestion or assimilation needed to make it their own.

It can therefore be difficult, and at times frustrating, to engage someone with an eating disorder, but once that trust is gained, the rewards for both the therapist and the client can be immense.