In my last post, I stated that people with eating disorders, particularly women, tend to deeply mistrust their own needs. I went over how this mistrust develops, how an eating disorder expresses it, and how it negatively affects a person’s life. Being at odds with your own needs is bad for recovery and for the prospects of a happy, healthy future. Time to make friends!

If you are a female with an eating disorder, you have learned that scary or humiliating things will happen to you if you own your needs and act on them. Doing so feels like a threat to your self–esteem and to your relationships with others. Issues of entitlement and control abound. The following represent the most common fears I’ve come across among women with eating disorders when it comes to knowing and acting on their own needs:

• Belief that you are selfish and greedy if you assert your own wishes or needs.

• Fear that people will see you as selfish or greedy and be turned off if you assert your own wishes or needs.

• Feeling undeserving of having your needs met and/or fear that others will view you the same way.

• Fear that any attempt to meet your needs will go out of control.

• Fear of feeling unbearably vulnerable if you identify your own needs.

Notice which of the above statements best describes your own relationship to your needs. If none of them quite fit, see if you can write a description that’s a better match to your feelings. If you identify with several of the statements, pick one that feels most pressing to you at this moment.

What follows are a series of steps for working on negative beliefs related to personal need. Be mindful that working with negative beliefs around personal need can touch on some extremely vulnerable feelings. Be prepared to go slowly or put the work aside if it’s feeling like too much. Wait until you have the resources you need to feel safe and steady. Resources might be having quiet time, less current stress, or a valued friend or a therapist to confide in about your efforts.

1.    See if you can find an image of yourself as a child learning the belief or fear you have identified. Having a context for the feeling makes it a little easier to consider that it may not be valid in your present life.

2.    Imagine what you might like that child to know that she couldn’t know then. If you feel stumped, imagine having a favorite friend or other resource person step in. What would that person say about the child you and her needs?

3.    Make sure to notice any positive feelings that accompany having your needs and wishes affirmed as valid.

4.    Knowing that the fears and negative beliefs about your needs belong in the past, what would you now like to say to yourself about your needs and wishes? If this still feels too difficult, imagine what you’d say to your best friend about her needs and wishes.

5.    Identify a small step you might take in your current life that would indicate treating your needs or wishes as valid. For example, if you’re afraid of turning others off by having your own wishes, you might experiment with speaking up. Choose a low–stakes situation, such as picking a movie or restaurant. Make sure you try your experiment with someone you know is able to take others’ wishes into account.

6.    Review how your experiment went. Did the old beliefs jump in? If so, it becomes another opportunity to remind yourself that they belong in the past, not your present reality. If it went okay, take time to really register how it’s different from what your beliefs and fears predicted.

Be prepared to spend as much time as you need with this facet of your recovery work. Respect for your own needs and wishes is an important ingredient of self esteem, and thus, for recovery more generally.

Warmest wishes,

Susan

If you have an eating disorder, especially if you are a woman, chances are you have a problematic relationship with your own needs. In fact, you may not even be on speaking terms. You may regard your needs as unwanted intruders on your attempts to lead a peaceful existence, or as orphans who constantly watch the party from outside with their noses pressed against the window. To get you started thinking about how you relate to your own needs, you might try the following exercise:

Write down the words that come to mind when you think about identifying or acting on your own needs. Let the word “needs” stand for actual physical needs, emotional needs, also desires, longings, wishes, and so forth. STOP if the exercise becomes triggering!

Are your words more positive or negative? If negative, did this surprise you? Here are some of the words that commonly come up when I talk to people with eating disorders about focusing on their own needs: selfish, self–centered, weak, vulnerable, afraid, at risk, overwhelmed, out of control, disgusting, gross, numb, blank.

Does any of this feel familiar, or resonate with you now that you think of it? How does something so basic as knowing your own needs and deciding whether to act on them become so fraught? Lessons about personal needs start from the very beginning of life. We are all “need” as infants. And we are totally dependent on out caregivers for getting out needs met. Thousands of day–in/day–out transactions in your family around the meeting of needs leave you with an unconscious set of guidelines that you carry into the world. These guidelines tell you whether it’s okay to know and meet your own needs, how to go about it and under what conditions, and what’s likely to happen if you reach out to others to meet them. In a healthy environment, you learn to know and honor your own needs and to comfortably balance these with the needs of others.

What did your caregivers transmit to you about your needs? Was it a joyful exchange, or full of tension and disapproval? Did you learn to protect a depleted caregiver from your needs? Or to hide them from a caregiver who communicated you were too much? Was it too guilt–inducing to receive from a caregiver who couldn’t ask for her own needs to be met? Did a self–centered caregiver or other family member serve as a negative role model for what needs–meeting was about?

Women deal with a second level of messages beyond their families when it comes to meeting their own needs. Our culture tells us that good women are mainly focused on the needs of others, willing to sacrifice their own needs for the good of their relationships, their children, their work or social communities. In such an environment, if you are insecure about being accepted by others, your own needs will seem like they can only get in the way and cause you trouble.

Eating disorder symptoms are usually part of an unconscious internal conversation about whether or not it’s okay to meet your own needs. Am I entitled to have my way? Can I speak out? Can I say no? Can I ask for attention? Can I get support? Will I be rejected or disapproved for any behaviors asserting my own needs? An eating disorder lets desires for food stand for the whole subject of personal need: physical, emotional, or social/interpersonal. Restricting is the side of the conversation that says having needs and meeting them are not okay. Bingeing may be an angry assertion that you’ll have what you want, even if it’s not okay. Somehow it’s easier to dialogue about internal needs when they are masked as impulses to eat.

Getting your relationship right with your own needs is very central to eating disorder recovery. If you remain in an ongoing adversarial relationship, your recovery will be fragile at best and vulnerable to relapse. In my next post I’ll talk about how you can begin to make the shift away from hostilities and toward friendly collaboration with your needs.

Until then…

Warm regards,

Susan

It’s summer. Thoughts of beaches and bathing suits can lead straight to body image distress for many of you. The need to dislodge automatic negative thoughts about your body is a subject I’ll address in future posts. But here’s a small tidbit to chew on this long holiday weekend: one study after another shows girls and women believe males prefer them to be slimmer than is actually the case. Married women mistakenly think their husbands prefer them slimmer; single women think men in general prefer slimmer women than they do. Discrepancies about what women think men prefer and what they actually prefer range up to 20 pounds.

Now if you’re thinking you shouldn’t be worrying about what someone else thinks you should weigh anyway, you’re ahead of the game! To me the point of these consistent findings is that as women, we’ve drunk the cool–aid of cultural body prescriptions in a way that men have not—but we just can’t believe they haven’t. The findings offer one more way to stop and question entrenched and destructive beliefs that only culturally–dictated ultra–slim bodies are acceptable, and that only the women who possess them can be loved and admired.

Have a wonderful Independence Day!

Warm regards,

Susan