When Safety Looks Like Control: Understanding Trauma Responses Through Food and Body
For many people, eating difficulties or body image struggles aren’t really about food or appearance. They’re about safety.
When someone has lived through trauma, whether emotional neglect, abuse, bullying, medical trauma, or chronic unpredictability, the body often becomes the place where the story settles. And for some, control over eating, weight, exercise, or appearance becomes the strategy that helps them feel contained, organised, or protected.
This isn’t a flaw. It’s a survival response.
Why Control Can Feel Like Safety
Trauma often involves experiences where you had no power, no choice, or no way to protect yourself. In the aftermath, the nervous system searches for anything that can create predictability.
Food and the body are easy targets because:
They are accessible
They create routine and structure
They offer measurable focus
They give a sense of “I’m doing something” when everything else feels overwhelming
Restriction, rigid routines, or body-checking may offer temporary relief from anxiety. Tracking, controlling, or shrinking may create the illusion of order.
But although these behaviours feel protective, they’re not sustainable, and they ask the body to carry more than it was ever meant to.
How Control Shows Up in Everyday Life
Control around food or body image isn’t always dramatic or obvious. It can look like:
Needing to prepare or eat food in a very specific way
Feeling “not right” if routines change
Measuring worth through discipline or restraint
Obsessing over appearance to feel in control of emotions
Using exercise as a way to numb or escape
Feeling calmer when the body is smaller or more “managed”
These aren’t signs of weakness. They are signs that the body has learned to survive through structure when emotional or physical safety is once felt uncertain.
The Cost of Safety Through Control
While control can feel grounding, it often comes with hidden losses:
Emotional numbness
Disconnection from hunger, fullness, or bodily cues
Anxiety when routines are disrupted
Shame when control slips
A life that becomes smaller, narrower, and more ruled by fear
Trauma teaches the body to brace. Healing teaches the body to soften.
Rebuilding Safety Without Control
True safety doesn’t come from rules—it comes from internal resources.
Here are gentle places to start:
1. Build emotional safety before behavioural change
You can’t let go of coping strategies until you feel supported. Slow is safe.
2. Map what control “does” for you
Does it soothe anxiety? Create predictability? Offer identity? Once you name the function, you can meet the need more directly.
3. Develop new ways to regulate your nervous system
Small practices can help the body feel grounded, such as:
orienting the room
slow, paced breathing
warm drinks
sensory comfort
gentle stretching
co-regulating with safe people
4. Practice flexibility in low-stakes moments
Tiny experiments help widen your window of tolerance without overwhelming you.
5. Bring compassion to the parts that cling to control
Those parts kept you alive. They deserve gentleness, not judgment.
You Don’t Have to Let Go of Control All at Once
Healing isn’t about abandoning the strategies that once kept you safe. It’s about expanding your capacity, so they’re no longer the only strategies you have.
Control helped you survive.
Safety will help you live.
Looking for Guided Support? Explore the Coaching Workbook Bundle
If you’re beginning to understand how trauma has shaped your relationship with food, body image, or control, the Coaching Workbook Bundle offers gentle, structured support.
This therapist-designed bundle includes five fillable, printable workbooks covering:
body image and self-acceptance
emotional eating and self-compassion
stress and nervous system regulation
intuitive eating and body trust
HAES®-aligned wellbeing
Each workbook includes reflective prompts, CBT-informed tools, and practical exercises to help you build safety from the inside out—without relying on control.
