You probably don’t spend a whole lot of time thinking about your nervous system, especially as something that can help you with eating disorder recovery. If you think about it all, it’s probably as a vexation: a part of your make-up that can spin out of control, making you feel frightened or miserable. (Racing heart? Pit in your stomach? Clenched jaw?)
When you are distressed, threatened, or unhappy your nervous system is responsible for taking this news to all parts of your body. In doing so, it’s executing orders from your brain for your body to either take some kind of action to make things better, or to shut down so you won’t feel the pain when it feels like there’s no hope of making things better any other way.
Nature intended for your nervous system to be self-righting. In other words, when you’re experiencing too much or too little stimulation, it’s supposed to swing into action to bring you back into a manageable zone. This is called self-regulation. It turns out that Nature can only supply the raw material for self-regulation. Humans must also have the right kind of input from caregivers early on in order for the inborn capacity to blossom and develop properly. “Input” includes caregivers who themselves are able to self-regulate and who can be adequately tuned in to the needs of growing children for comforting and reassurance.
If you didn’t receive enough of this security–making input, you will experience what we call nervous system dysregulation. If your emotions feel unmanageable, or if shutting down feelings altogether seems like your only option, you’re experiencing a dysregulated nervous system, a system that can’t right itself. Your eating disorder symptoms have been recruited to fill in for missing self-regulation. The intention is to feel better or at least to feel less bad.
One of the most fundamental achievements required for sound and solid eating disorder recovery is the establishment of missing self-regulation. So you’ll probably be happy to know that’s possible even if you didn’t get the right ingredients n childhood. And you can learn to engage your nervous system to help! The same nervous system that can take a sense of alarm or distress to all parts of your body can also take messages of calming and quieting. You may already be doing this without knowing it if you engage in practices such as yoga, meditation, visual imagery, or certain breathing exercises. These may be all you need to prompt your natural capacity for self-regulation. For others, in whom early disruptions were more severe or traumatic, it may require more focused work with a clinical specialist to get the capacity for self-regulation going. The important thing to know is that it is possible for anyone.
Check in next time if you would like to know more about the kinds of approaches that specifically aim at helping you develop the capacity for self-regulation.
Warmest regards,
Susan
