Relationships have a huge impact on someone’s relationship with food and the ability to maintain recovery from an eating disorder. Many articles on this site address issues of co-dependency and relationships.
Co-dependency is essentially an unhealthy reliance on another person, or allowing another person to have an unhealthy reliance on you. If you tend to be co-dependent (here is a self-test for co-dependency), it can be difficult to maintain healthy boundaries in many relationships, whether it’s someone you’re very involved with or a stranger you just met.
You can lose yourself in co-dependency, in what someone else does, or what you imagine they may be thinking or feeling, supersedes your own priorities – including your healthy eating and lifestyle goals. So if they choose a restaurant that only has foods that trigger you, you say yes instead of insisting on a place that is safe and healthy for your needs.
If you supress your own feelings in relationships, disordered eating becomes a language you use to say what you’re not saying with words. Because you’re not able to speak up or control other people the way you want to, you try to control your food and body.
Resentment is another relationship issue that plays a big role in eating disorders. There is a 12-step saying that resentments are like drinking poison and hoping the other person will die. Of course it’s the one who drinks the poison who suffers. If you overeat or restrict over a resentment, it’s your body that feels the effects.
People pleasing (strongly related to co-dependency) is another trigger. When we people please we build up a resentment towards the other person and ourselves. That can lead to disordered eating behaviors such as overeating, restricting, bingeing and purging, or just purging.
If co-dependency is leading to choices that are self-harming instead of self-caring, it’s important for that person to find their way back. At White Picket Fence Counseling Center, we spend a lot of time teaching people the skills to speak up in a healthy way in relationships.
We find that even if people have or once had these skills, if they’ve lost the habit they lose the skills. That’s why we do a lot of role play with our clients and give them opportunities to practice healthy communication patterns.