Eating Disorders Break Your Heart in Surprising Ways

It comes as no surprise that eating disorders break our hearts. One of the most important relationships we will have in our lives will be the one we have with our eating disorder. Perhaps others view our eating disorder simply as a medical diagnosis. However, most of us who’ve lived with it know that it takes on a life of its own. It becomes our closest friend and confidant, the closest relationship in our lives. It often becomes a strange triangulation and stands in the way of connection with romantic partners and friends. At its worst, the eating disorder breaks our hearts time and again. It’s no surprise why.

Eating Disorders Break Your Heart’s Trust

Trust is the main building block of any healthy, successful relationship. When we first became friends with our eating disorder, we believed that it could help us in some way. We extended, consciously or unconsciously, a level of trust as we opened and shared ourselves with it. The problem with this trust is that we placed it in the hands of something that is, at its core, untrustworthy. Why?

Eating Disorders Break Your Heart Physically

When we become best friends with an eating disorder, we place our life in the hands of one who is trying to destroy us. If the eating disorder wins, we will be dead. We trust our lives to an eating disorder whose only intention is to kill us, and walk away.

Eating Disorders Break Your Heart Emotionally

Having your trust broken over and over again is abusive. Staying with someone that repeatedly, and consistently, breaks your trust, takes a toll on you (Trusting Yourself After An Abusive Relationship). If we hear something enough we will believe it. Over time, the lies of the eating disorder, coupled with its abuse, makes us feel hollow, worthless, tears away our self-esteem, and shatters our self-love.

Eating Disorders Break Your Heart Spiritually

Eating disorders make you feel like a terrible human being. They make you feel like a failure on a daily basis, that you’re never good enough, and that you’ll never be good enough. This wears at your spirit like sandpaper (The Impact of Being in an Unhealthy Relationship). Maybe you feel like God abandoned you or that he’s doing nothing to save you. Maybe the shame is too heavy and so you decide on anger towards God instead. Your heart closes to love.

Eating Disorders Break Your Heart, But You Can Heal

The wonderful part of being human is that we are stronger than we think, and more resilient that we know. The wonderful part about God is that God loves us no matter what, and is for our good (God Wants Us to Be Happy, So Why Aren’t We?). Although, I, too, thought God abandoned me with my eating disorder, I realize upon looking back that there were many things being orchestrated on my behalf to lead me towards recovery. I just hadn’t seen them back then.

The wonderful part about God is that he is love, joy, and hope. God can take the broken pieces of our lives and make them into something beautiful.

Keep moving forward towards your recovery. Heartbreak with your eating disorder may be unavoidable, but it will not last forever.

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