When Coping Turns Caustic: Understanding Disordered Eating Through Trauma-Informed Lenses

If you’ve found your way here, I’m guessing you’ve had thoughts like:
“I can’t stop thinking about food.”
“Why can’t I just eat like a normal person?”
“I hate my body…I hate myself.”
Or maybe, “If I could just control what I eat, I’d finally be okay.”

I understand these thoughts, having had them myself. Please know that my heart is with you. These thoughts can feel relentless, like they’ve set up permanent camp in your mind. You might even feel ashamed to admit how much time and energy goes into “food noise,” meal planning, your body image, and the battle that lives between them. I want you to know that what you’re experiencing makes sense, even if it is deeply painful. 

Disordered eating is not a personal failure or a lack of willpower. It’s a coping strategy—a brilliant one really—that your mind and body developed to help you survive something overwhelming. The trouble is, what once protected you may now be causing harm. This is so common because anything, and I repeat anything, can start as adaptive coping, but turn into maladaptive coping. Even so called positive coping can turn caustic. This is especially true when it comes to behaviors we need to do in order to live, like eating food and moving our bodies. When we depend too heavily on any one coping strategy, it has the potential to outlive its usefulness. Let’s slow this down and look at three common ways disordered eating can function as a coping strategy.

1. Control as Safety

If your past included chaos, unpredictability, or environments where you didn’t have much say, control can feel like salvation. For some people, controlling food becomes a way to create stability where there once was none. Counting calories, restricting portions, tracking macronutrients, these behaviors can bring a false sense of order to a world that once felt anything but safe.

Through a trauma-informed lens, this is your nervous system saying, “I need something predictable. I need to know I can make something happen to be safe.” And for a while, that control works. It is soothing. But eventually, it starts controlling you. The rules multiply, the pressure mounts, and the body, the very home that’s trying to keep you safe, becomes a battleground.

Healing here isn’t about giving up control since that does help us feel safe. It’s about building new kinds of safety that don’t depend on the scale, the meal plan, or the punishing inner voice. By taking a trauma-informed approach to healing, you begin to learn that safety can live inside you. You can discover how to create more internal safety of self-trust and self-love. 

2. Numbing the Unbearable

Sometimes disordered eating isn’t about control at all; it's about escape. When emotions feel too big and terrifying, food can become a way to turn the volume down. Bingeing can numb pain. Restriction can mute rage. Purging can feel like releasing what’s been too heavy to hold.

If this is resonating, I want to extend my compassion: it makes sense that you turned to food to cope. When emotional safety wasn’t available, when you didn’t have someone to help you hold your feelings, your body found a workaround. It’s not wrong; it’s adaptive. All this said, I want to make space for the unconscious nature of this process. Most people do not set out to use food as a coping mechanism to manage intense emotions. This wasn’t a conscious decision on your part and I want to make space for that; however, now you have an opportunity to learn how to deal with your emotions in new ways. 

This is critical because numbing cuts both ways. It silences pain, yes, but also joy, creativity, connection, and vitality. The work of healing here often involves learning to feel again. Taking a slow, gentle, and supportive path toward reconnection is required. This might happen through somatic therapy, grounding practices, or simply learning to notice sensations without judgment. By engaging with your emotions and body in these healing ways, you begin to build tolerance for your own aliveness. And that, I think, is one of the most sacred parts of recovery: learning that your feelings aren’t the enemy; they’re the way back to the home of you.

3. Belonging and Worth

Now I have to state something we all know too well. We live in a culture that worships thinness, control, and self-discipline, traits that can look a lot like emotional starvation when you zoom in. If you grew up feeling unseen or unworthy, disordered eating might have become a way to belong, to prove your value, or to avoid rejection. These are powerful motivators for humans and it is too easy to lose ourselves in the pursuit of belonging and worth in other people’s eyes, especially those of our caregivers, friends, and colleagues. 

When we internalize messages like “I’ll be lovable when I’m thinner,” our body becomes the billboard for our worth. But this is where trauma gets sneaky, it teaches us to perform worthiness rather than inhabit it. From a trauma-informed perspective, disordered eating can be an attempt to regulate not just your body, but your relationships: to stay safe in a world that feels conditional. Healing, then, isn’t just about food. It’s about rewriting the rules of belonging. You start asking, “What if I don’t have to shrink to be loved? What if my worth is not up for debate?” Therapy can support the internalization of these healing messages. 

Making Peace with the Body That Tired to Help You

To close this post I want to bring the conversation around to resources. Trauma can be defined as experiences that took us outside our current internal and external resources, breaking our connection to self-trust and self-love. Hopefully this definition makes it clear many of us have actually experienced trauma. Disordered eating is your body’s attempt to recover those resources but it's a flawed attempt, distorted through the lens of survival. It’s the body saying, “I’m trying to help you cope. I’m trying to help you stay alive.”

When you can see your eating patterns and relationship to food through this lens, you can begin to approach them with compassion instead of shame. You stop asking, “What’s wrong with me?” and start asking, “What happened to me and how did I survive?”

From that place, real healing can begin. You learn to trust hunger again, not just for food, but for life itself. You practice gentleness with the parts of yourself that are still scared. You discover that safety and nourishment can exist without punishment.

And maybe, just maybe, you start to imagine a future where food isn’t the battleground anymore.

If You’re Ready to Start Healing

You don’t have to do this alone. If disordered eating has been part of your life, you deserve compassionate support that honors both your trauma and your resilience.

Resources:

• National Eating Disorders Association (NEDA) Helpline: 1-800-931-2237

• National Alliance for Eating Disorders: https://www.allianceforeatingdisorders.com

• The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk, M.D.

• Intuitive Eating Workbook by Evelyn Tribole & Elyse Resch

Healing disordered eating isn’t about perfection, not even close. It’s about remembering that you were never broken to begin with. Your body was doing its best to keep you alive and safe. Now, together, you can learn how to live in more self-trust and self-love.