Adult Trauma and Binge Eating Disorder, How to heal both.

You’ve done it again. You’ve Binged out, even though you said you wouldn’t. You couldn’t help it, you just couldn’t stop it. Now afterwards you have feelings of shame and are angry and frustrated that you couldn’t stop just this once. The reason you can’t stop is not due to a lack of willpower, but to do with the past. Trauma and Binge Eating Disorder go hand in hand. Let’s find out why and how to heal.

Understanding Trauma and PTSD

Experiencing life trauma and or PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) can be very misunderstood. You may be experiencing disordered behavior symptoms, such as emotional eating but because you are not aware of the PTS disorder symptoms, you might not realise you are suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder. 

Psychological trauma is an emotional response to a terrible event, like a natural disaster, physical harm, rape, or seeing someone get killed.

Trauma can present as different emotional, psychological, and or physical symptoms. We may not realise we are suffering from trauma as we only pay attention to the presenting symptoms.

If you have witnessed or experienced a terrible event, it does not necessarily mean you will suffer from tauma or PTSD.

Also read :

How your childhood trauma could be causing your binge eating

4 Signs of Inner child wounds and how to heal them

Different types of trauma

There are different types of trauma such as:

Acute Trauma – This is the psychological response to one severe incident, such as a sexual assault.

Chronic Trauma – This comes from repeated exposure to stressful events. Examples include emotional abuse, emotional neglect, psychological abuse, physical abuse, sexual abuse, and physical neglect.

Complex trauma – Results from exposure to multiple traumatic events. This is often invasive and interpersonal. It also refers to the wide-ranging and long term affects of exposure to the events.

You never know what is going to happen one minute to the next. One occasion everyone is nice, so you learn to relax a little, the next you’re being hit or shouted at.

Minor trauma – It is the response to repeated minor events, such as verbal abuse, bullying.

How trauma presents

Trauma can present in many ways, physically, emotionally, and psychologially.

Symptoms of trauma include

Anxiety, nightmares, confusion, depressive symptoms, guilt, irritability, numbness, fear, panic attacks, anger and denial.

Physical symptoms can present as aches and pains in an area, digestive problems, headaches, lethargy, hypersensitive.

These life experiences put a filter on how you experience the world and others and how you relate to others.

Also read:

Is my childhood making me overweight?

Emotional Eating, how to manage your emotions without using food

PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder)

Unresolved trauma can result in PTSD. PTSD has symptoms that are similar to trauma only lasts a lot longer and is more severe. PTSD symptoms will affect your ability to carry out day-to-day tasks. 

The DSM5 Diagnostic criteria for PTSD are as follows:

Criteria A (1 required)

Exposure to actual or threatened death, serious injury or sexual violence in one or more of the following ways:

1. Directly experiencing the event.
2. Witnessing in person the event as it happened to others.
3. Learning that the trauma had happened to a close friend or relative.
4. Indirect exposure to aversive details of the trauma, usually in the course of professional duty (like first responders, paramedics)

Criteria B (1 required)

The traumatic event is persistently re-experienced in different ways, such as:

1. Unwanted upsetting memories,
2. Nightmares
3. Flashbacks
4. Emotional distress after exposure to traumatic reminders
5. Physical reactivity after exposure to traumatic reminders

Criteria C (1 required)

Avoidance of trauma related stimuli after the trauma, in the following ways:

1. Trauma related thoughts or feelings.
2. Trauma related reminders.

Criteria D (2 required)

Negative thoughts or feelings that worsened after the trauma, in the following way:

1. Inability to recall key features of the trauma
2. Overly negative thoughts and assumtions about oneself or the world.
3. Exaggerated blame of oneself or others of causing the trauma
4. Negative affect
5. Decreased interest in activities
6. Feeling isolated
7. Difficulty experiencing positive affect

Criteria E (2 required)

Trauma related arousal and reactivity that began or worsened after the trauma, in the following ways:

1. Irritability or aggression
2. Risky or destructive behaviour
3. Hypervigilance
4. Heightened startled reaction
5. Difficulty concentrating
6. Difficulty sleeping

Criteria F – Symptoms last for 1 month (required)

Criteria G – Symptoms create distress or functional impairment (Social, Occupational) (required)

Criterion H – Symptoms are not due to medication, substance use or other illness (required)

Two specifications

1. Dissociative Specification. In addition to meeting criteria for diagnosis, an individual experiences high levels of either of the following in reaction to trauma-related stimuli:
   • Depersonalization. Experience of being an outside observer of or detached from oneself (e.g., feeling as if “this is not happening to me” or one were in a dream).
   • Derealization. Experience of unreality, distance, or distortion (e.g., “things are not real”).
2. Delayed Specification. Full diagnostic criteria are not met until at least 6 months after the trauma(s), although onset of symptoms may occur immediately.

This is the DSM5 (Diagnostic and statistical manual for mental health disorders version 5) criteria for PTSD.

I see many people who do not fit the exact criteria, yet are experiencing the disorder behaviors. For example, I see a lot of people who disproportionately blame themselves.

How Does Trauma Lead to Eating Disorders?

Life trauma can build up and have a cumulative effect on a person’s well-being. Experiences such as bullying, emotional abuse,  emotional neglect, or even living in a chaotic or unstable environment, may not affect us at the beginning but over time they lower our defenses and lessen our self-esteem. Our emotional health deteriorates leading to feelings of fear, helplessness, and loss of control, which can greatly impact an individual’s relationship with food and their body.

Experiencing a loss of control can lead to disordered eating as we try to regain control through our relationship with food.

Food is often something that is constant and we can rely on it. Trauma can show up in other eating disorders such as Bulimia Nervosa, Anorexia Nervosa and food addiction. 

Also read:

ADHD and Binge Eating, the connection

Binge Eating vs Food Addiction, The differences

The relationship between Trauma and Binge Eating Disorder.

When we have suffered from an event like sexual trauma, or a series of events like emotional abuse and or physical abuse, the feelings can be so overwhelming our unconscious finds adverse ways to cope. The unconsconscious will take measures such as suppressing our feelings, so we numb out and don’t feel our feelings.

Yet these uncomfortable feelings are still there, they are just not at the forefront of our minds.

The brain is an amazing organ, in that it suppresses feelings to keep us safe and so we can carry on. Our brain’s outcome is to keep us alive. If it did not we would all be on the floor being a dribbling mess.

When we are carrying emotions from suppressed trauma, it can make us feel emotionally dysregulated. This might mean we get irritable quickly, we doubt ourselves, we feel on edge a lot, we are wondering when the next event will happen.

Disordered Eating

This is where disordered eating comes in. Food can be a great comfort in times of stress.

Patients with Binge Eating, do not automatically start with a huge binge. Binge-eating disorder may start by overeating, eating just a bit too much in one sitting. You might dig into the biscuits and find you are eating larger quantities of food than usual.

It might begin as emotional eating, eating to help you feel better. It might also feel like you have a food addiction, where you can’t stop eating certain types of foods.

You may slowly start to try and cut back in other areas, like depriving yourself because you have eaten so much in one sitting. The more you continue on this path, your eating becomes more polarised and you end up being stuck in the binge eating cycle.

Also read:

How to stop Binge Eating in 5 easy steps

Binge Eating Disorder, the symptoms and signs to look out for.

Distracting Yourself from the Traumatic experiences

If we were to sit quietly for a little while, just sitting with ourselves, we would start to get restless and this is when uncomfortable feelings start to surface.

We can feel fidgety, and feel like we have to keep busy. We have to find things to do.

This is where disorder behaviors like overeating come in. We unconsciously go towards food to fill in an empty feeling.

Some people also experience alcohol use disorder alongside other self-destructive behaviors.

The more we overeat to calm us, the more our unconscious learns that this feels good. When something feels good, we feel compelled to keep doing that behaviour.

Before we know it, overeating and Binge eating have become an unconscious habit.

We find ourselves not knowing why we are overeating and not knowing how to stop.  Thus the relationship between trauma and Binge Eating Disorder.

Self-Blame, Guilt and Self-Harm

After Bingeing, we get very angry, frustrated with ourselves for bingeing.

This only makes us feel worse on top of the pain that we are already experiencing.

The levels of shame we experience can be immense. We may feel shame from the traumatic event, like sexual abuse, physical abuse or emotional abuse.

We also feel shame from having Binge Eating Disorder. That we can’t stop it from happening. With an eating disorder like Binge Eating and even Bulimia Nervosa we can experience weight gain. This leads to a poor body image and poor physical health. 

This role of shame keeps us feeling low levels of self-esteem and can fuel our disorder symptoms.

When we can recognise that it is the unconscious way of coping, helping us to escape

Eating Disorders and Sexual Trauma

Understand an eating disorder is never a choice. We now understand it is often a way of helping us to cope.

Sexual abuse can severely affect someone’s mental health. The event is so shocking to us that our brain shuts down to help us to function.

Food again comes in to help us to cope, it comforts us and acts like a friend to us.

Healing Trauma and Binge-Eating Disorder

Can you heal your trauma and Binge Eating Disorder at the same time? Absolutely, though rather than focusing on the food, disorder treatment tends to focus on healing the life trauma, including the sexual trauma. People notice that the binge eating slowly subsides and stops altogether.

This is because is it the emotions and thoughts wrapped up in the life trauma that is causing the binge eating.

How can you heal your life trauma?

1. Move.
2. Gentle Movement helps you to connect with your body and get back into your body. It does not have to be strenuous, in fact gentle yoga and movement will help you to notice your body. Pay attention to the feelings both physically and emotionally.
3. If you can, get out and walk in nature. Put your phone away and you just enjoy the weather, the sounds, the smells and the feel of walking.
4. Writing
5. Writing things down can help, writing your thoughts, your feelings and even just about your life.
6. Meditation
7. Just sitting in stillness for a short period of time each day allows our brain to stop, pause and feel. It helps us to connect with ourselves again and to just experience us.
8. Be kind
9. be kind to yourself and speak to yourself as if you would a friend. I hear so many people give out to themselves over what they have just eaten. they blame themselves for the traumatic event. Just know, that none of it, none of it is your fault. It may well have been out of your control.
10. Speak to yourself like you would a friend. Saying comforting words like, it’s ok, I will get through this, I am working on this, Rome was not built in a day so I am making steps forwards.
11. Intuitive Eating. This is a natural way of eating where you let your body guide you on how much and when to eat. Do not put expectations on yourself to eat like this straight away, but knowing the principles can help to guide you.
12. No restriction
13. Binge Eating can often start with restricting food and not allowing us to eat the food we want. 

Final advice on Trauma

If you have suffered from a life trauma, sexual abuse or PTSD, it is advisable that you see the help of a qualified therapist. Someone who understands what you are going through and is trained to help you to process it and be able to move forwards.

Talking helps you learn to recognise what is happening to you, rewiring the thoughts you have, and helping you to process the unwanted emotions into more positive ones.

Binge Eating Disorder can also come with other mental disorders such as ADHD, OCD and autism. So it is beneficial to get advice from mental health professionals.

Find a specialist therapist, who can help with trauma and Binge eating disorder.

Effective treatments include Cognitive-behavioral therapy and talking therapies.

There will be support groups and charities that can provide help for you. I’ve listed them below.

Further Support and help

BEAT – https://www.beateatingdisorders.org.uk/

NEDA –https://www.nationaleatingdisorders.org/