Healing Eating Disorders with Hypnosis
Eating disorders can be debilitating. In a society that focuses much of its socialization around food, struggling with disordered eating behaviors can affect every area of your life and lead to isolation, cause a laundry list of health issues, and prevent professional success. Our society’s hyper-focus on food and the prominence of diet culture has led to the majority of us living in disordered eating patterns. If you’ve found yourself reading this blog, chances are you either struggle with your relationship with food or you know someone who does.
Maybe you know you have an eating disorder and you’ve tried to self-manage but you can’t quite do it on your own. Maybe you just know your relationship with food isn’t right but you’re not sure what’s going on beyond that. Maybe you have a diagnosis but what you’ve tried hasn’t worked and you’re looking for something different to try. No matter what your situation with disordered eating is, hypnotherapy can help.
Simply put, eating disorders are ways of attempting to control our thoughts and feelings through controlling our food. This leads to a complex cycle of struggle: overwhelming want to unrealistic self-restriction to overindulgence to self-deprecation and guilt to doubt and overwhelm. Hypnotherapy is a tool that helps us figure out why we need to control our thoughts and feelings in the first place, reprogram our mentality surrounding our relationship with food and our bodies, and create sustainable, long-term change by breaking the cycle.
When we’re in a hypnotic state, we’re able to access our subconscious thoughts and feelings. This is helpful with addressing eating disorders because while the behaviors may be happening on a conscious level, the things we’re trying to control with the behaviors are often being suppressed to the subconscious. This is why many people struggle to fully heal their relationship with food and eating if they don’t intentionally address the root issues. By putting ourselves into our subconsciousness we can build awareness of our triggers, teach ourselves to have self-compassion so failure doesn’t feel so final, address and rewire our self-sabotage impulses so we can stop giving into them, and address and heal the issues that are causing the behaviors in the first place. The goal of seeking help for eating disorders is to stop the behaviors, but moreover it’s to somehow stop viewing food as good or bad, and hypnotherapy gives us the tools to do that.
Many people also find it helpful to combine a shorter-term hypnotherapy regimen with a psychotherapy routine. This combination offers the benefits of hypnotherapy plus the ability to talk through the things that may be unlocked for us during hypnosis, like past traumas, roots of our self-image issues, and societal programming we need to undo. If you’ve tried or are currently trying traditionally psychotherapy and think you need an extra push to make real change, or if you’ve never tried psychotherapy and just want to start trying to repair your relationship with food and eating and your body, we have a special focus on these issues at Blooming Lotus and would love to help you kick start your journey. You can learn more about our program here, and you can schedule a free consultation with us here. Regardless of your situation or how you got to it, you deserve to live a happy, healthy, and fulfilling life. We can’t wait to help you succeed.
