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Choosing to Trust your Treatment Team in Eating Disorder Recovery
Trusting anyone, including yourself, can be challenging when you have struggled with an eating disorder. Throughout your time in treatment, you are likely asking yourself which “voice” in your head is yours? What desires are you versus the eating disorder manipulating you? How can you trust yourself when you feel that you are the one that betrayed you? It is in these confusing moments that trusting your treatment team will be key.
The individuals in your treatment team not only have the expertise, but they also have the outside perspective necessary to know what is best for your mind and body to move you forward on your recovery journey.
Your Treatment Team Dietician
If there is anyone tough to trust on your treatment team, your dietitian is it, not because they aren’t informed, but because their recommendation has the most direct tie to your disordered eating behaviors. I work as a therapist in a residential eating disorder treatment facility and often see the push-and-pull that occurs between a patient and dietitian.
Your eating disorder wants you to do exactly the opposite of your dietitian, and your eating disorder has run the show for a long time, making you feel almost stuck-in-the-middle. A patient once said, “if you are mad at your dietitian, that means they are doing their job.”
When you are unsure of how to nourish your body, how to work through reseeding and weight restoration, and how to eat intuitively, your dietitian is the one who can provide you with the next steps.
Your Therapist
Next-up on the treatment team is your therapist. This is another relationship that can be rocky, as the therapist’s job is to look at the disordered eating behaviors themselves and examine the pathology behind them.
Your therapist will ask you to dig through your most painful memories, confusing emotions, deepest fears, and longest-held beliefs. They will guide you through questioning all of these and working to process and resolve them in a way that helps your future beliefs, thoughts, feelings, and behaviors become recovery-focused instead of eating-disorder-focused.
This is a painful process, and you might truly dread meetings with your therapist for some time. The goal of therapy in treatment is not to make you feel warm-and-fuzzies, although you will at times. The goal of therapy in treatment is to challenge you to face what you have avoided through your eating disorder because you can overcome it.
Your Doctor
A final crucial component of the eating disorder treatment team is your medical support, such as your primary care doctor. Eating disorders are biological as much as they are psychological. They wreak havoc on your physical body and cause extreme damage.
Your medical team is there to help you restore what you can. Trusting them means listening to their knowledge above your eating disorder voice. Your eating disorder voice may say you are fine, that there are no medical complications related to your behaviors, and everyone is overdramatic or “just trying to scare you.”
Your medical team is there to inform you of the reality and the facts by showing you your vitals and labs and explaining to you how these connect to your disordered eating behaviors.
Trusting all of these individuals is often crucial to your recovery. When you don’t know how to heal, they can guide you. When you’re uncertain of how to improve your relationship with food, they can point you in the right direction.
When you can’t imagine what is behind your behaviors, they are there with a box of tissues and some well-placed honesty to help you find it. When you know you can’t trust your eating disorder and are working on building trust with yourself, your treatment team is there.
About the Author:
Margot Rittenhouse, MS, PLPC, NCC is a therapist who is passionate about providing mental health support to all in need and has worked with clients with substance abuse issues, eating disorders, domestic violence victims, and offenders, and severely mentally ill youth.
As a freelance writer for Eating Disorder Hope and Addiction Hope and a mentor with MentorConnect, Margot is a passionate eating disorder advocate, committed to de-stigmatizing these illnesses while showing support for those struggling through mentoring, writing, and volunteering. Margot has a Master’s of Science in Clinical Mental Health Counseling from Johns Hopkins University.
The opinions and views of our guest contributors are shared to provide a broad perspective on eating disorders. These are not necessarily the views of Eating Disorder Hope, but an effort to offer a discussion of various issues by different concerned individuals.
We at Eating Disorder Hope understand that eating disorders result from a combination of environmental and genetic factors. If you or a loved one are suffering from an eating disorder, please know that there is hope for you, and seek immediate professional help.
Published October 23, 2020, on EatingDisorderHope.com
Reviewed & Approved on October 23, 2020, by Jacquelyn Ekern MS, LPC
