It's About Relationships, Not Food!

Beginning in infancy, relationships, food and feeding become intertwined. Think about it: Baby cries and baby gets fed. Someone has to do that feeding, and that someone is usually holding the baby and relating to him or her. So, from our earliest memories, food and being fed is one of our first ways of connecting to one another. As we grow and develop, social events often revolve around mealtimes; whether it is family dinner or a social gathering with friends, we are enjoying the nurturing that food and company can provide.

With the eating-disordered population, however, the connection between food and relationship can become a troublesome link. When there is a lack of safe, connected, nurturing relationships in an individual's life, food and food rituals can easily become a substitute.

As Susan H. Sands, PhD says: "It is now generally accepted that eating disorders serve essential self-regulatory functions. The disordered relationship to food has been viewed, essentially, as filling in for a missing bond with a self-regulating Other".

What exactly does Sands mean? Let's take the first phrase:

"It is now generally accepted that eating disorders serve essential self-regulatory functions." What does it mean to self-regulate? Most of us have learned how to emotionally self-regulate; for instance, if we are upset we find ways to calm down. The ability to calm or self-soothe is usually learned in relation to a calming and soothing Other. For example, when a child falls down and hurts her knee and is crying, Mommy picks her up and comforts her. But what if Mommy doesn't do this? What if she yells at the child and blames her for being so clumsy? Then the child has to turn elsewhere for soothing. Here is where turning to food in order to self-regulate or self-soothe can begin.

I have yet to meet someone suffering from an eating disorder who does not also suffer from a relational trauma, by which I mean that the person grew up without the experience of a caregiver being attuned to them and their needs and acting as a source of comfort when they were stressed or hurt. The caregiver was either absent or blaming and generally not attuned to the child. As Susan Sands so eloquently puts it: "The disordered relationship to food has been viewed, essentially, as filling in for a missing bond with a self-regulating Other."
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