Many people with eating disorders long for close, intimate connections but don’t know how to achieve them. Or they end up feeling trapped, suffocated or resentful in the relationships they have. If these descriptions fit you, you may have a history that taught you closeness to others is not basically safe.

A person’s childhood experiences with caregivers and others create expectations—largely subconscious—of what future intimate relationships will be like. If your experiences growing up were positive and secure, you’ll expect adult relationships to be the same. If your caregiving was not so positive and secure, or if peer relationships were traumatizing, your expectations won’t  be so rosy. For example, you may have learned that in intimate connection you’ll be: swallowed up, intruded upon, robbed of an independent self, ignored, humiliated, abused, exposed as unworthy or ultimately abandoned.

Your eating disorder may be acting as a protection to keep you isolated and “safe” from relationships. It probably serves as comfort when relationships or isolation hurt. If you’re in a relationship, your symptoms may help you keep a safe distance from your partner, give you a sense of control or provide a way to ask for caretaking. Increasing your comfort with intimate contact, whether with family, friends or an intimate partner, is not only part of a robust recovery, it’s your birthright!

If you’re having trouble reaching out or establishing secure, satisfying relationships, your history may have left you underprepared in one or more of the following capacities essential for relationship intimacy:

• The ability to establish and maintain healthy boundaries
• Confidence about being known and being vulnerable
• A sense of security that comes from inside

In my next three posts, I’ll go over why each of these overlapping capacities is so important to intimacy. I’ll discuss how you can build skills relevant to each, even if it feels frightening right now. Healthy intimacy is not a matter of “the luck of the draw” in the people you meet. It has everything to do with how you feel about yourself and other people and what you feel entitled to expect from those you include in your life. Often, as eating disorder symptoms subside in recovery, the way you relate to others comes more into focus. That means recovery can be a great time to work on any trouble spots!

Check back in 2 weeks, on June 18th, to read about creating healthy boundaries.

As I and others have said, recovery is a marathon, not a sprint. As every long–distance runner knows, at some point you can “hit the wall” and doubt you have the resources to see you though to the finish line.   So it can be invaluable to have experiences along the way that nourish and encourage you to keep going. If you are working away diligently on your recovery, but your spirits, inspiration or momentum seem to be dragging, here are some activities that could supply just the boost you need:

Add an alternative treatment Sometimes it can be really helpful to approach things from a new angle. As an adjunct to your primary therapy, an alternative treatment, such as acupuncture, dance, art or music therapy, biofeedback, EMDR (which can also be a stand–alone treatment) or hypnosis might offer just the fresh perspective or new entry point you need to jump–start your overall recovery. (See “Boosting Recovery with Experiential and Alternative Therapies,” 2/19/2010.)

Join an eating disorder therapy group Working with others can add a distinct dimension to your recovery. Guided by a professional, you get to experience the support, shared wisdom and personal feedback that others on the same path can offer. Groups can be a great place to develop skills of social connection and to discover how to do so safely.

Check out an online support group If a face–to–face group isn’t available, or you’re not ready for that experience, many people find online support groups to be a viable alternative. If you’re interested, you can check out reputable eating disorder web sites, such as something–fishy.org, bulimia.com or edreferral.com, for resources. Given how important it is to keep the conversation non–triggering and growth–oriented, I recommend you stick to groups that are moderated by eating disorder professionals.

Blog These days it’s common for people to journal about their personal experiences in the public forum of the blogosphere. As long as you stick to non–triggering content, your thoughts and experiences about recovery could be valuable to others. And you might get useful commentary back.

Participate in a body image workshop Improving the way you view and relate to your body is a crucial part of recovery. Spending a day or a weekend learning, sharing with others and participating in experiential exercises can be an eye–opening and inspiring add–on to your treatment.

No workshops in your area? Approach an eating disorder professional and ask him/her to offer one! (Note: If you come equipped with the names of a few other people who would like to attend, this will help your cause.)

Contact your body in some new way that’s joyful, soothing or enlivening Dance, dive, get a massage, learn to chant, consult with a body worker (for example, Alexander Technique, Feldenkrais Method, Somatic Experiencing, or Sensorimotor Psychotherapy), try yoga, t’ai chi, Qigong, or martial arts training, practice mindfulness meditation, experience intuitive eating, and so on.

Pursue an interest that has nothing to do with your eating disorder Develop a new skill: artistic, athletic, technical, craftsy… Learn more about a topic that interests you: a person, an era, a region, an activity, an art form… Visit a place you’ve never been: a new neighborhood, a nearby town, a site in nature…

Breaking out of your habitual mode can be energizing. Developing new knowledge or skills promotes self–esteem. All the while, you’re reinforcing that there’s more to you than your eating disorder. And you get an important reminder of your ever–present potential for growth.

Volunteer Engaging with needs or problems outside your own can boost your mood, provide perspective and enhance your self–image. Of course, the list of possible ways to volunteer is endless, so you can offer your time and energies to whatever cause touches you most: people or animals in need, the environment in need, policies or causes you care about, and more.

Try a goal–setting exercise In goal–setting exercises, you envision your future as you’d like it to be and then establish bite–size steps to help get you there. Here’s one commonly–used outline:

Set aside 30–45 minutes when you won’t be distracted. Start by writing a paragraph about how you’d like your life to look in five years. Include dimensions such as school/career, relationships, self–care, living situation, spiritual development, extra–career activities, and so on. Next, make a short list of what you will need to have accomplished in a year to be on the road to your five–year vision. When you have that list, list what you will have to accomplish in six months to move you toward your one–year goals. Now list what you will have to accomplish this month in service of those six–month goals. Finally, list what you will need to do this week in order to accomplish your one–month goals. Try to limit each list to no more than four or five goals. One–week and one–month goals should feel clearly doable. If not, break your goals down to smaller steps.

Working with concrete goals can help you clarify your personal values and priorities and invigorate them with some forward momentum. The success of the exercise depends on your ability to be realistic about short–term goals (not what your perfectionistic self tells you you should be able to do!) and your willingness to adjust, based on what you learn as you go along.

Alert! For some people, goal–setting exercises just feel overwhelming or discouraging, not invigorating. Pay attention to how you’re responding and honor any signals that tell you this won’t be helpful to you.

Connect with your “Future Self” Psychotherapist Nancy J. Napier describes the “future self” as the part of you that has already gone ahead on the path of healing, problem resolution or growth in a way that’s optimal for you. The future self draws on unconscious reserves of learning and life wisdom projected forward in time to an image or sense of yourself already experiencing the best possible outcome. Contacting a future you that’s recovered completely from your eating disorder or specific symptoms or issues can encourage forward momentum, act as a guide or a prompt for steps along the way, or help you arrive having already become familiar and comfortable with the changes involved.  If you’d like to explore more about how to work with your future self, see Napier’s Recreating Your Self: Help for Adult Children of Dysfunctional Families (Norton, 1990).

To get the best results from adjunctive recovery activities or practices, review what you’re thinking of with your primary therapist. This will help you make sure any additions fit well with other work you’re doing and are well–timed for where you are in recovery. Your therapist’s participation will also ensure you of any support you might need for your efforts.

In “Dethroning the Inner Critic: Part I,” (4/23/10) I explain that the Inner Critic develops in childhood to help you adapt to your parents or other caretakers. If pleasing your parents was hard, your Critic learned what you had to do to win their approval. Of course, its understanding of what you needed to do came from a kid’s point of view. This gives us a really valuable insight about your Inner Critic: Although your Critic may sound or appear for all the world like a ferocious adult, it really is just a kid. While the rest of you grew up, your Critic and its view of the world never did. When people I work with discover this, I’m always reminded of the scene in The Wizard of Oz in which Toto pulls away the curtain beneath Oz, the Great and Terrible, to reveal an ordinary little old man pulling the levers.

Your Inner Critic has held tyrannical power over you. The revelation that it is actually just a very young part of you opens up new pathways for dealing with its tyranny. Remember that its intentions are protective. It wants you to behave in ways that will make others accept and love you. It doesn’t want you to experience the shame of being judged inadequate. It’s the keeper of the rule book for how to accomplish these goals. But now that we know your Critic is still stuck in your childhood, we can say that its rules were relevant for you then but not now.

You may wish to take a moment to imagine how your Critic would appear if you “pulled away the curtain.” How old would it look? What stage in your life might it come from? If it feels comfortable, you might wish to start thinking about the experiences in your early life that could have given rise to the rules your Inner Critic enforces. (Here and elsewhere, stop if the exercise makes you uncomfortable.) The following is an example of how this process might look:

Karen (a fictitious but representative example) hears her Critic’s voice anytime someone she knows needs something from her, no matter how inappropriate the request or how it affects her. It says, “You must always take care of other people’s needs; you must always put them before your own.” Or: “This person won’t like you if you don’t do what she wants.” Karen thinks of her mother who was selfless to a fault and always expected the same of Karen. What’s more, her mother always appeared profoundly disappointed if Karen failed to live up to this standard. The shame and anxiety Karen felt under her mother’s disappointed gaze became powerful motivators. Her Critic came into being to help Karen remember and avoid feeling like a disappointment to others in the future.

Locating your Critic’s demands and character attacks back where they originated can be a starting point for developing some distance and objectivity. That is, you can start to question them. Here’s how this looks for Karen:

Karen had no way of knowing as a little girl that such excessive, unbalanced selflessness was evidence of her mother’s own Inner Critic and her particular life experiences. Back then Mother was taken to be an accurate representative of the larger world. Karen concluded, largely unconsciously, that she better learn the lesson if she didn’t want to be shamed or rejected by others. Of course, as Karen moved out into the larger world she encountered people who reinforced her mother’s teachings. But she also met people with more balanced views. The problem was that her mother’s teachings had so much fear attached to them that it always felt too risky to think any other way. Now, as Karen begins to assign the lessons on selflessness back to her mother and not the world, she can dare to consider more balance between her own needs and those of others.

In my experience, when people do this contextualizing work, in time their Inner Critics  tend to shrink, soften and lower the volume. As with Karen, who begins to value her own needs alongside those of others, people become freer to develop previously undervalued and underused aspects of themselves. They experience more flexibility and more options for living.

Okay. So now you’ve uncovered your Inner Critic’s childhood origins and realize that the rigid rules it wants you to live by don’t actually apply in your current life. You’ve begun to work on updating the rules to take into account what your older self knows and to establish more balance and humanity in the way you live. Does this mean it’s time to chuck the Inner Critic? Some take that view. I always try to remember that the Inner Critic is actually on your side, however misguided its methods. It seems to me that you can never have too many resources on your side! If you’re of the same mind, you may wish to consider giving your Critic a more adult role in your personal guidance system.

A modernized Critic’s judgments would be ruled by wisdom and compassion, not fear. A part that can think wisely about what’s best for you without terror of humiliation or abandonment can be a mighty valuable ally. As an ally, the Inner Critic might act more like a consultant, for example, helping you stay on track toward your goals, reminding you of your standards or encouraging you to put out your best effort—but only for objectives that are right for who you are. This updated Critic’s tone would always be encouraging and advisory, never threatening or demeaning.

So you’re working on maturing and modernizing your Critic, what do you do when the old, familiar voice pops up? Here are some responses that may help:

• Imagine what the voice would be saying if it were speaking from its adult viewpoint: For example, you failed the exam for a driver’s license, even though you worked so hard to prepare. The old Critic stops by to tell you: “You’re so stupid! Only an idiot would have made that left turn. You should just forget it.” A consultant Critic, by comparison, would help you review what you got right and go over the areas where you need more practice. It might encourage you to think of whether you need other assistance, like a professional driving instructor. It would remind you of how much having that license is going to mean to you, that the effort will really be worth it. Most of all, it reminds you that failing from time–to–time is human, that failing proves you’re taking risks and trying.
• Bring in your “pride resources” (See “Countering Shame with Pride Resources,” 10/2/09) This could be a great time to remember what you do well: using your high school Spanish to get around in Mexico, building those shelves, wowing everyone with your salsa… Or think of setbacks you’ve overcome: you had to rip out a whole sweater you made and start over, you failed that audition but came back the next year and got chosen, they didn’t make you committee chairperson but you made a big contribution anyway…
• Use this as a chance to practice tolerating imperfection In my post “Doing Nothing Usefully in Eating disorder Recovery” (10/16/09) I discuss how increasing your capacity to tolerate difficult feelings gives you more flexibility and options. Tolerating difficult feelings about yourself gets extra credit, especially when you’ve been used to a harsh Inner Critic. Your old Critic will tell you your imperfections are the final, fatal word on your worth. From a more grown–up perspective, you can learn that your imperfections are only a part of a bigger you and just make you human.
• Limit the air time the old Inner Critic gets If all else fails or you just need a breather, you don’t have to sit around and listen until the old Critic has spent itself. Change channels! Think about something else. Get involved in something else. The old Critic’s voice may be familiar, but it doesn’t have anything useful to tell you. You won’t be rude if you interrupt!