How Trauma Shapes Our Relationship with Food and the Body
Trauma doesn’t just live in our memories. It lives in the body and often shows up in how we eat, move, and see ourselves.
For many people, food and body struggles aren’t about vanity or willpower. They’re coping strategies, shaped by nervous systems that have been under threat. Whether the trauma was big and obvious or subtle and ongoing, the impact can echo in ways we don’t always recognise.
This post explores the links between trauma and disordered eating through a psychoeducational lens, helping you understand why your relationship with food and your body might feel complicated, and how compassion, not control, is the place to begin.
Trauma and the Body: A Quiet Connection
Trauma can fragment your sense of safety. For some, that disconnection shows up as feeling out of their body—numb, dissociated, or distant. For others, it can look like hypervigilance and a need to control the body, the food, or both.
Here are just a few trauma responses that often show up in food and body image work:
Dissociation: Losing time, zoning out while eating, or feeling disconnected from hunger and fullness cues.
Control: Using food rules, exercise routines, or rigid eating patterns as a way to create order or avoid feeling out of control.
Shame: Feeling deeply flawed, broken, or “too much,” which can lead to punishing behaviours with food or appearance.
People-pleasing: Adapting your body or eating habits to meet the expectations of others, often as a survival strategy rooted in attachment wounds.
These responses aren’t character flaws. They’re adaptations—ways you learned to feel safe, even if they no longer serve you now.
Why This Matters in Eating Disorder Recovery
When trauma is ignored, the focus stays on “fixing” behaviours, such as counting calories, stopping binges, or reducing body checking. But when we bring trauma into the conversation, the goal shifts. It becomes about safety, self-trust, and rebuilding a relationship with your body that isn’t rooted in fear.
You may still want structure, support, or specific goals. But instead of pushing through with shame or control, you can learn to meet yourself with curiosity. What need was that behaviour trying to meet? What part of you is still holding fear?
Understanding the trauma behind your patterns doesn’t excuse harm, but it can explain it. And from there, healing becomes possible.
Healing Takes Time—But It’s Possible
Healing your relationship with food and your body after trauma isn’t a linear process. Some days will feel clearer than others. But when you start looking at your patterns through the lens of nervous system responses, attachment, and self-protection, you can stop blaming yourself and start offering yourself something different.
Gentleness. Safety. Space to feel.
And the possibility of choosing connection over control.
Looking for Support?
My Coaching Workbook Collection is a set of practical, therapeutic tools for anyone navigating food and body image challenges—including those rooted in trauma. Each workbook offers guided exercises, journal prompts, and psychoeducation to help you understand your patterns and begin to shift them gently and sustainably.
If you're ready to move from self-blame to self-understanding, these workbooks are a good place to begin.
