The Underlying Psychological Causes Of Binge Eating Disorder And Bulimia

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

To hate yourself for this and at the same time eat - eat until the stomach begins to beg for mercy. There is everything in a row, sometimes without feeling the taste, and do not even remember what it was. And then - guilt and burning shame.

Binge eating is the inability to control food cravings, and bulimia is essentially the same binge eating disorder that is accompanied by compensatory behaviors that allow for strict weight control. These phenomena are usually based on very similar mechanisms.

People with eating disorders often suffer from anxiety and depression. Compulsive overeating is especially characteristic of those whose parents, in varying degrees of concern for the physical well-being of the child, did not pay attention to his emotional state. Therefore, a child growing up often does not know how to hear and correctly recognize his emotions. He is almost constantly in strong tension, not understanding what is happening to him, and tries to weaken this tension through food binges.

The feeling of hunger is a very vivid sensation, familiar to everyone. It is simple and understandable from childhood. Want to eat - ate - it became good. And at the unconscious level, this link is fixed. If you are experiencing something incomprehensible, you need to eat and, perhaps, it will become easier.

For the unconscious part of our psyche, food is the personification of the connection with the mother. Often, people who lacked love and maternal acceptance seem to substitute food for an emotionally inaccessible, cold parent. Thus, contact with food is an additional symbolic contact with the mother. And he can bring pleasure and pain at the same time, as it once was in childhood. Our unconscious tends to strive to preserve the habitual. Often at any cost.

To feed means to maintain life, to give love, however, people who were force-fed in childhood often begin to feed themselves "forcibly", re-living this violence that was once committed against them, over and over again, because for the unconscious this is a zone of habitual, and therefore, "equilibrium".

Often, compulsive overeating (including with the subsequent release from food) is a consequence of a chronic feeling of guilt, an unconscious desire to punish oneself, as well as a ban on the expression of emotions, primarily negative ones. This is typical of children of authoritarian, tough, sometimes even cruel parents, who demanded complete submission from their children, and at the same time allowed themselves to vividly show aggression towards them. Then the child directs this parental aggression, unable to resist it, to himself: “I do not feel parental love. So I'm bad. So I need to be punished. And in the future, he also gets used to his aggression, which normally would have to find a way out, direct it to himself, including during food binges.

As for the release from food, it is both a symbolic expression of emotions, bringing temporary relief, and a way to relieve tension, the illusion of regaining lost control. And also - often the desire to rip out of oneself to a drop the symbolic mother, with whom until recently I so wanted to merge, and now it is unbearable to be together.

Often, a person prone to bouts of compulsive overeating does not experience almost any pleasure from eating, because he remembers all the time: the moment of reckoning will come soon - you will need to get rid of food or look at yourself in the mirror and get upset about the weight gain.

The reason for the onset of compulsive overeating can be psychological trauma at different stages of life associated with sexual violence, rejection of one's body, an internal ban on the manifestation of sexuality, a ban on joy, unresolved internal conflicts, and much more.

Often, people with bulimia appear to be quite prosperous and successful, since their main need is to receive recognition, although in fact, in most cases, this is an attempt to compensate for the lack of love that formed in childhood. These people are very sensitive to the reactions of others to them, seeking approval. They have low self-esteem, a lot of anxiety, shame, chronic feelings of guilt. The perception of oneself as real and the ideal that one would like to correspond to are very different. Such people try to always be strong. Everything that relates to their weakness, impulsiveness must be carefully hidden from strangers, and breaks out in bulimic attacks.

One of the additional, concomitant, causes of compulsive overeating, in almost all cases, is an acute deficit of positive emotions, the lack of saturation of the true needs of a person, the realization of his desires.

For successful psychotherapeutic work with eating disorders, it is very important to correctly establish the reasons that led to the destructive mechanism being triggered, and to influence not only the consequence, but also, first of all, the core of the problem - its primary source.