Creating space in eating disorder recovery.

The intertwining of your eating disorder and you.

One of the most important concepts when healing from an eating disorder is the idea of creating space between you and your eating disorder. Especially when you’ve been living with an eating disorder for a while, it can be really difficult to see the difference between you and the eating disorder - it can feel as though you are the same person. The eating disorder thoughts in your head sound like you and look like you, and it can be near impossible at first to distinguish which “you” is talking in your head.

Viktor Frankl’s concept of power of choice.

The psychiatrist, author, and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl wrote a beautiful quote about the space between stimulus (“unsafe” foods, inability to exercise, overwhelming emotions) and response (bingeing, restricting, purging).

“Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

- Viktor Frankl

The power to choose a response is one that becomes withered when the eating disorder is the one holding the reins. However, in creating space, in pausing, in choosing the response rather than blindly reacting - this is where our healing lies.

The discomfort of creating space.

Stopping, pausing, creating space - all of these can be really uncomfortable states, even for those without an eating disorder. We tend to want to take action, or to completely ignore what’s happening, and it takes a certain amount of inner strength to be able to sit with the discomfort of stillness, of deliberate non-action.

Yoga as the key to successful healing.

Yoga is a practice where we experience stillness, discomfort, irritation, failure, and observe our responses to all of these states. Rather than running away from these feelings, or by launching into hair-trigger reactions, we sit, we create space, and we choose our responses.