What is Trauma? (and how does trauma play into EDs)
Some people just don’t get it. Eating disorder? But why? She has a nice family, big house, good school. She was never fat. Never neglected or abused or obscenely wronged. Whatever happened to her that was so traumatic?
It’s true. I never severely suffered or struggled in life. And yet I, like millions of others, landed an eating disorder regardless. Genetics has a lot to do with it. But what often activates these genetics is our society. The values and labels and ideals that are permeating our membranes with such subtle force, we don’t recognize the inadvertent trauma they are causing. We don’t see it, because we are so in it. We are so embedded in it, that it is embedded in us, so ingrained and encoded with its norms and rules and ideals that we are blinded to how much damage they can do to those that buy into it. Like a child with our face pressed up against a window, the pane becoming blurry with the stream of our breath, we can’t see much beyond our own nose.
Constantly we are bombarded by the message that we are not enough. That we cannot possibly be happy or fulfilled or loved unless we are actively working to fix and improve ourselves everyday. Our feeds are filled with “transformation Tuesday” pictures. Magazines make millions with articles like “how to get a thigh gap”, “10 best celebrity bodies” and “18 foods that are making you fat.” Instagram is saturated with fitspo and thinspo hashtags like #flexfridays and #bodygoals and #strongnotskinny (when it’s usually a little white girl who happens to be both). Capitalism and consumerism are dependant on having a population that buys into this belief, and that will continue to buy products in the name of self improvement.
fitspo
Keeping up with the latest trends, in fashion, in fitness, buying meal plans and gym memberships and vegan, paleo keto diets, only to jump on the bandwagon to try the next one when this one inevitably doesn’t work. And rarely is it the diet or the product that is blamed. Rather it is the person, their lack of willpower or strength or dedication. No, the program is never wrong, but the person who failed to execute it successfully, because, god forbid, we are only human. Eating a carb free diet for three weeks, it is a moral failing of that person to eat three slices of pizza. Oh the shame the horror! Your mind should have greater restraint to adhere to the latest diet books advice than to honor your body’s innate biological needs to function healthily.
Of course we fail. We fail and we blame ourselves, berate and beat up on ourselves. To simply “let it go” or to let ourselves go would be like giving in or giving up. And we are not quitters. But perhaps the most challenging part of living up to these body ideals and fitness goals and diet regimes and other norms of success and worth, is that they are coupled with a message of being pursued and achieved rather effortlessly. Or at least guaranteed if you follow a basic equation: follow the diet or put in the work, and you will get x reward. But in reality, this formula does not exist.
Blood sweat and tears are wiped up before the shot is taken and the picture is posted. We suffer silently. We wake up and run fasted miles, drink turmeric lemon water, pose for the after photo sucking in our gut and standing with our butts back to make our thighs look smaller, and smile. There will never be a photo of the moment in the run you cramped up and had to walk, or the clumps of hair you found in your shower drain, or the fight you had with your mother about missing your grandpa’s birthday to go to the gym.
The trauma is the silent struggle. The constant reminders of the ways that we don’t measure up. That there is some deficiency in our character or being that deters us from getting whatever it is that will make us feel enough, whether that’s getting to a certain weight, eating according to a certain diet, making xxx amount of money, or having xxx number of followers.
The trauma is that we can be blessed with so much, a good family, a nice home, a good education, and still feel lost and inadequate. The trauma is that we can be living, working, and hanging out with people at all hours of the day who unbeknownst to us are entrapped in the same self-defeating cycle. The trauma is that we might all be relentlessly unhappy caught in this limbo of consumerism, and yet feel utterly alone. The trauma is that we stay silent or ignorant or both.
The trauma is that we continue to live in this perpetual state of okayness, of almost-but-not-quite, of conditional and unsustainable happiness. And we will continue to live like this, and allowing this kind of trauma to wash over us, until we have the insight to call it out for what it is. It is so easy to get caught up in a current of not-enoughness. It’s much harder to swim against it and make your own waves. But when you get there, and leave the undertow behind, all you need to do is float.
