Eating disorders are complex mental illnesses that disrupt your relationship with food and your body, causing psychological distress. Both your mind and body are impacted by eating disorders, which makes them more complicated to treat than other mental illnesses.
Childhood trauma is a commonly reported experience among those with these disorders, so if you struggle with an eating disorder and have been impacted by trauma as a young person, you aren’t alone. Child trauma is an umbrella term used to describe any frightening, dangerous, or violent event posing a threat to a child’s life or bodily integrity. In addition, childhood trauma can also include witnessing an event that threatened the life or physical security of a loved one.
Traumatic experiences cause intense emotions and physical reactions, which can continue long after the event has ended. The lingering psychological effects may include low self-worth, struggles with emotional regulation, perseverative thinking, or a disconnection from your body. Eating disorders can develop as a natural way to cope with this psychological distress, with food behaviors becoming a way to cope with yourself and the world around you.
How to Define Childhood Trauma?
Dr. Dan Siegal developed the concept of a window of tolerance, which is the optimal zone of emotional “arousal” for life's functions. When you are within your window of tolerance, you can effectively manage stress and cope with emotions. Childhood trauma includes any dangerous, violent, or frightening event that pushes you outside your window of tolerance and leaves behind emotional and physical effects.
Trauma in childhood is an event that threatens your or your loved one’s life and/or bodily integrity. When you think of trauma, you may first jump to abuse or disaster, but the term can include a wide range of emotionally, psychologically, or physically damaging experiences.
Examples of Child Trauma
- Physical, sexual, or psychological abuse and neglect
- Natural disasters
- Family or community violence
- Discrimination, prejudice, and racism
- Sudden or violent loss of a loved one
- Traumatic separation (could include an immigration journey or incarceration)
- Accidents
- Life-threatening or chronic illnesses
- Miltary-related stressors (parent loss, injury, or deployment)
- Family substance abuse
Interpersonal Trauma
Interpersonal trauma is a type of trauma where one person causes harm to another, and it accounts for more than half the reported traumatic incidents among children. Research shows a link between childhood, interpersonal trauma, and the development of an eating disorder. This could be due to interpersonal trauma’s impact on your relationship not only with yourself but also with others.
Eating disorders are known to mute your emotions, making the ongoing effects of interpersonal trauma more manageable. The danger is that eating disorders are dangerous illnesses and, if left untreated, can have life-threatening consequences.
Childhood Trauma’s Impact
The ongoing psychological impact of childhood trauma leaves behind emotional and physical effects. We would need an entire book even to begin to scratch the surface of all the ways that trauma sticks with us and shows up later in life. For the sake of this article, we will focus on two—trauma’s impact on your beliefs regarding emotions and trauma’s impact on your thought processes. We will hone in on these because of the role they play in the development of eating disorders.
Impact on Beliefs about Experiencing Emotions
When you experience trauma in childhood, it alters your perspective of emotions. Living through scary, dangerous, or violent events brings up intense emotions such as shame, terror, or rage.
Your brain is smart and protective. It adapts from past experiences in an attempt to keep you safe in the future. So when intense emotions come back up, your brain may signal that you are in serious danger because it associates those emotions with a threat.
Being repeatedly thrown into fight/flight/freeze mode can make you believe emotions are overwhelming, uncontrollable, or damaging.
Impacts Thoughts Process
Trauma also impacts your thought processes. The past is more vivid and intrusive when you’ve been traumatized, leaving you ready at all times to detect threats. Being in a constant state of defense can change how you think. You may notice perseverative thinking, where you can’t seem to stop replaying memories, or an increased perceptiveness to threats, where even everyday experiences become debilitating. You may also begin to turn your distress on yourself, leading to self-blame, low self-worth, and low self-esteem.
To help manage trauma’s impact on your thought processes, you might turn to ineffective coping strategies, such as thought avoidance, self-blame, or emotional suppression. The hard part is, when you suppress your experiences, you never heal the real reason behind your distress and, instead, end up collecting more ways to cope ineffectively.
Why do Eating Disorders Develop?
Recent research has moved away from the belief that there is one reason why an eating disorder develops. Instead, it’s been discovered that eating disorders occur when several predisposing factors interact. These predisposed factors can be placed into three categories—genetic, environmental, and situational.
Genetic
- You have a parent or close relative with an eating disorder.
- You or a close relative has another mental illness, such as anxiety or depression.
- You are neurodivergent.
- You are a perfectionist.
Environmental
- You experience pressure from society to be thin.
- You have a parent who diets or cuts down their appearance.
- You see the media praising people who align with conventional beauty standards.
Situational
- You have been a victim of trauma.
- You have been bullied or socially ostracized (can also be considered trauma).
- You went through a major transition (moving schools or your parents divorcing).
Does Childhood Trauma Cause an Eating Disorder?
So far, we’ve explored what childhood trauma is and how it impacts you. We’ve also taken some time to break apart the risk factors for developing an eating disorder, which shows trauma puts you at a higher risk for these disorders.
Trauma impacts your beliefs about emotions and your thought process, and an eating disorder can develop as a way to suppress unwanted emotions, disconnect from your body, or control an otherwise scary world.
The bottom line is trauma, alongside other predispositions, can lead you to develop an eating disorder. But trauma is not the only reason an eating disorder develops, and nor is everyone who has an eating disorder a victim of childhood trauma.
Find an Eating Disorder Therapist in Seattle
If you have experienced childhood trauma and/or are struggling with an eating disorder, consider reaching out for support. By finding a therapist that you feel comfortable with, you can begin to heal from the deeper, underlying reasons for your struggles. In therapy, you may untangle your thought processes, redefine your relationship with your emotions, and learn to cope in ways that promote lasting change.
Thrive for the People has a team of therapists who treat trauma and eating disorders. On their website, you can schedule a free consultation call with a team member to see if they’d be a good fit for your needs.
