How are shame and eating disorders connected?
Professionals in the mental health world often talk about the difference between shame and guilt. We define guilt as feeling bad about something you’ve done, I.e. feeling bad about stealing from the self-checkout, whereas shame is a core belief that “I am bad.” Many of us walk around the world with chronic, persistent shame, and don’t even have words for that icky, “I hate myself,” feeling. Sometimes clients have an aha moment when a therapist finally says, “I think what you’re experiencing is shame.”
It is an easy misconception to think if you hate yourself you should just work on your self-esteem. Often very talented, brilliant people carry extremely negative beliefs about themselves, and it seemingly doesn’t make sense to that person’s friends/family. “But Cynthia, you’re the star soccer player, how can you say that you hate yourself?
What folks often don’t realize is that shame is a more complicated emotion that often occurs and builds through repeated relational repairs. For instance, let’s say a child grows up in an alcoholic home. Every time this child’s parents come home from a long day of work, down a bottle of gin, and ignore the child. The child, experiences a relational rupture every day this happens, because as human beings we are hardwired for present, attuned, connection from our parents.
If the child were developmentally able to say, “Oh, I get it, the reason I’m not getting my needs met is because my parents are alcoholics!” It might be easier to recover from this living environment. However, we are evolutionarily wired to view our parents as safe, protective caregivers, no matter what. We are wired to trust them even if they make us feel unsafe.
Therefore, whenever this child experiences a sensation of being emotionally dropped or unseen, they turn the feelings of pain inward on themselves. They think, “this is happening because I’m bad.” People experience this phenomenon not just with caregivers but with siblings, bullies at school, and friends. Often by the time people reach adulthood, they’ve collected enough chronic relational repairs to build up pervasive shame, or what we call Core Shame.
Core shame is typically the key driver for eating disorder behavior. When we feel so intrinsically low, it makes sense that we want to earn a sense of worthiness through dieting, restrictive eating, and binging/ purging. A common misconception about eating disorders is that a person who has one is obsessed with food/ their body image. One might think, “why are they so superficial?”
In fact eating disorders and eating disorder behavior is hardly about food at all. With the right support in therapy, client’s can work to understand and resolve Core Shame that drives such harmful, all-consuming behavior.
Maddy Pettit, LMFT