Emotional eating and eating disorders are common coping mechanisms for many individuals, especially those who have experienced trauma which serve as a way to manage or numb difficult emotions, and emotional pain. However, these conditions further perpetuate barriers to connecting with one's feelings, which is essential for healing, personal growth and health.
Many people struggle to make sustainable health changes, especially when it comes to diet and nutrition. While surface-level advice like just eat healthier or practice mindful eating may seem straightforward, deeper psychological barriers often make these changes feel overwhelming or impossible. One of the most significant, yet often overlooked, barriers is the impact of trauma, particularly early childhood experiences, and resulting dissociation, particularly how they disconnect people from their emotions, body signals, and true needs.
Trauma, Dissociation, and Emotional Awareness
Dissociation and Emotional Eating
Dissociation is a psychological response to trauma where an individual feels disconnected from feelings, resulting in distorted thoughts and sense of identity. This detachment can lead to emotional numbness, making it challenging to recognize and process emotions. In the context of eating behaviors, dissociation can manifest as eating without awareness, using food to fill an emotional void, restricting food as a means to cope with feelings of powerlessness, shame, loneliness, and exert control over internal experience, providing a temporary experience of self-mastery, or consuming large amounts without realizing it. This pattern of being disconnected from emotional experience and bodily signals is related to the state of frequent or even chronic dissociation, and in turn, eating to dissociate, where food becomes a tool to comfort or distraction from emotional pain and overwhelming emotions thus reinforcing a self-destructive pattern and relationship to eating and food.
For many trauma survivors, not knowing how they feel is a common experience. This can manifest in various ways:
Emotional numbing: Feeling detached or unable to identify specific emotions.
Confusing physical sensations with emotions: For example, interpreting anxiety as hunger or fatigue.
Feeling fine but engaging in unhealthy behaviors: Ignoring stress or emotional distress and instead soothing with food, restriction, or avoidance.
Dissociation often creates a profound disconnection from hunger and satiety cues, making it difficult to:
Recognize true hunger vs. Emotional hunger.
Know when you’re full or satisfied.
Identify which foods make you feel energized vs. sluggish.
Connect eating habits with emotions, stress, or past experiences
How This Affects Health Behavior Change
If someone doesn’t know how they feel or why they make certain food choices, making sustainable dietary changes can feel impossible. Trauma survivors often operate on autopilot, using food (or the restriction of food) as a coping mechanism without realizing why.
Some common trauma-related barriers to healthy eating include:
Emotional Eating as a Survival Mechanism
Food provides comfort, safety, and control when emotions feel overwhelming.
Without alternative emotional regulation strategies, food becomes the default way to soothe distress.
Rigid Control or Perfectionism
A history of trauma can lead to black-and-white thinking around food (good vs. bad foods).
Dieting, extreme restrictions, or food rules can be an attempt to regain control in a chaotic internal world.
Avoidance and Numbing
If emotions feel dangerous or unfamiliar, it’s easier to ignore them sometimes by overeating, undereating, or disconnecting from food choices altogether.
Some may gravitate toward highly processed or hyper-palatable foods that provide dopamine hits, numbing stress or discomfort.
Low Self-Worth and Subconscious Self-Sabotage
Trauma can instill deep-rooted beliefs of unworthiness.
Feeling undeserving of care, nourishment, or well-being can lead to neglecting nutrition, skipping meals, or engaging in self-destructive eating patterns.
Attunement Barriers: Disconnecting from Pain
Attunement refers to being in harmony with one’s emotions and bodily sensations. For individuals who have experienced trauma, there can be significant barriers to attuning to their feelings, especially pain. This is not by conscious choice and operates initially outside of someone’s conscious awareness. The (often unconscious) fear of confronting painful emotions may lead to avoidance strategies, such as emotional eating, to maintain a sense of safety. This avoidance, while protective in the short term, prevents the processing of underlying emotions, perpetuating self-destructive thoughts patterns and behaviors, and hindering healing.
The Paradox: Feeling Good Feels Bad
For some, positive experiences or emotions can trigger discomfort or anxiety, especially if they are unaccustomed to feeling good or associate positive feelings with vulnerability due to common experience of fear related to distrust as a result of trauma experiences. This is a self-protective coping mechanism. This paradox can make the pursuit of well-being challenging, as the very state of feeling good may feel foreign or unsafe. Consequently, individuals might revert to familiar coping mechanisms, like emotional eating, to manage this discomfort.
Pathways to Healing
Develop Emotional Awareness: Engaging in therapies that focus on identifying and expressing emotions can help individuals become more attuned to their internal states. Techniques such as mindfulness and grounding exercises can enhance present-moment awareness and reduce dissociation.
Seek Professional Support: Working with mental health professionals trained in trauma-informed care can provide a safe space to explore and process painful emotions. Therapies like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) and Cognitive Emotional Behavioral Therapy (CEBT) have been effective in addressing the emotional underpinnings of disordered eating behaviors.
Practice Self-Compassion: Cultivating a compassionate relationship with oneself can reduce the reliance on maladaptive coping mechanisms. Recognizing that it’s okay to feel pain and that it’s a natural part of the human experience can facilitate emotional processing and healing.
By addressing the barriers to emotional attunement and embracing the full spectrum of one’s feelings, individuals can move towards a healthier relationship with food and their emotions, paving the way for genuine well-being and overcoming barriers to forming self-loving habits to support healing, for a lifetime of lasting well-being.
How to Reconnect with Your Body and Emotions
Healing from trauma and dissociation isn’t just about eating differently it’s about rebuilding trust with your body and learning to tune into what it truly needs.
Start with Interoceptive Awareness (Not Just Food Tracking)
Instead of focusing solely on what you eat, focus on how food makes you feel.
Before eating, pause and ask: Am I physically hungry? What does hunger feel like in my body?
After eating, check in: How does this meal make me feel energized, sluggish, satisfied, anxious?
Keep a journal not just of food but of sensations, emotions, and energy levels.
Build Emotional Awareness Without Judgment
If identifying feelings is difficult, start with basic awareness:
Use a feelings chart to name emotions.
Set an alarm every few hours and simply ask, What am I feeling right now?
Practice self-compassion there’s no right or wrong way to feel.
Regulate Your Nervous System Before Changing Food Habits
If you’re in a chronic state of fight, flight, freeze, or fawn, nutrition changes will feel overwhelming.
Try grounding techniques before meals: deep breathing, body scans, or even holding something cold to bring awareness back to the present.
Polyvagal exercises, yoga, and somatic therapy can help reconnect body and mind.
Redefine Nourishment Beyond Food
Healthy eating is about more than just food. Nourishment also includes:
Rest and sleep
Emotional support and self-compassion
Safe movement and play
Spiritual or personal growth
When food is the only source of comfort, the relationship with it can become unhealthy. Expanding what nourishment means to you can reduce food-related stress.
Seek Trauma-Informed Support
If trauma and dissociation are significant barriers to change, trauma-informed nutrition counseling, therapy, or somatic healing can be invaluable.Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) can help reframe food-related thoughts. Mindful and intuitive eating approaches focus on reconnecting with hunger/fullness cues without rigid dieting.Somatic therapy can help rebuild body trust and awareness. Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (BDT) combines CBT with mindfulness practices and offers skills training to better tolerate and manage distressing emotions, increase awareness of present experience and help reduce dissociative episodes. Sensorimotor Psychotherapy integrates body-centered interventions with talk-therapy improving the connection between body and mind.
Final Thoughts
If you’ve struggled with making dietary changes despite knowing what's healthy, it’s not a lack of willpower it may be an adaptive response to past trauma. Healing your relationship with food starts with healing your connection to yourself. By fostering emotional awareness, nervous system regulation, and self-compassion, sustainable health behaviors become natural extensions of self-care rather than battles of self-control.
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