Our culture, deeply uncomfortable with death, dying, and grieving, encourages us to stifle our feelings. Mourners are advised: keep busy, be strong, give it time, he’s in a better place, time heals all wounds, snap out of your depression and get out more. They’re told that they are never given more than they can handle and to keep a stiff upper lip (I imagine that keeping a stiff upper lip is a person’s attempt to quiet the trembling lower lip).
Frozen grief can best be described as grief on hold, partial grief, suppressed grief, complicated mourning, survivor guilt, and unfinished business. Sometimes, absence makes the heart grow frozen.
Why do emotional eaters freeze grief? Emotional eaters, obviously, are not the only people to freeze grief. However, emotional eaters are prone to derail, detour, and divert difficult feelings through food. And grief is the most difficult of feelings!
Emotional eaters believe if they open their hearts to feel their pain, it will never end. “If I ever started to cry, I would never be able to stop,” Estee, an anorexic woman, declared. Simon, a bulimic man stated, “My Dad has been dead two months. I should be over it already and shouldn’t really feel sad anymore.”
Estee and Simon’s beliefs about grief reveal common traits of people with eating disorders: impatience with themselves, the conviction that strong feelings are scary and should be avoided, black or white thinking, and critical and perfectionistic commandments to the self. Emotional eaters prefer a quick fix rather than tolerating the process of digesting either food or feelings. No wonder they turn to the numbing and anesthetizing substance of food in an attempt to cover up their sorrow and anger and “just get over it.”
Grief is painful, it is supposed to be! Grieving is the process of untangling the loss of emotional connections to people or experiences that have great meaning to us—and that hurts.
Unfreezing Grief: Restarting the Process of Mourning
When we are in pain, we naturally seek to protect ourselves from the hurt. And so, after a deep loss, people often sleep, drink, eat, shop, lose themselves on the computer, or engage in any number of activities to dull the ache and fill up the empty space within. But when eating disorders, or other addictions, become an ongoing pattern and a way to chronically avoid pain, then grief becomes frozen. The substances quell the pain from the outside in. Real and lasting relief comes from unraveling our emotions from the inside out.
Grieving is ambiguous. It concludes, it continues, it intrudes, it retreats, it pounces, it ebbs, it flairs up, it settles down. Perhaps, we need to learn to contain within us the contradiction that life does go on, there are still pleasures to be enjoyed, and yet we are forever altered by having lost and suffered.”
Healing grief does not mean you have forgotten the person or thing you lost. It means that the grief finds a place to live in your heart, where you are enriched by loving memories and not tormented by anguished ones.
Grieving is ambiguous. It concludes, it continues, it intrudes, it retreats, it pounces, it ebbs, it flairs up, it settles down. Perhaps, we need to learn to contain within us the contradiction that life does go on, there are still pleasures to be enjoyed, and yet we are forever altered by having lost and suffered.
The first step of thawing grief is to tell the story of your loss to safe and empathic people you trust. Sorrow needs to speak.
Thawing grief includes:
• Recounting the story of what happened and describing the impact it had on you when it occurred.
• Imagine the effect this loss will have on your life as you move forward.
• Consider the connection between your loss and your history of bingeing, purging, starving, drinking, taking drugs, or any other addiction.
• Allow yourself to feel the physical impact of your story: do you want to eat, drink, run away, or cry.
• Crying is our natural healing process of releasing emotions that well up. Tears are a gift from deep inside.
• Remember and re-experience the good memories, if any, connected to this loss.
• Acknowledge the pain and hurt of the bad memories.
• Recognize whatever unfinished business is connected to this loss.
• Accept the fact that your life does go on despite your loss and grief.
• Decide to get help if depression/anxiety/self blame/or any addictions are ruling your life.
• Integrate a ritual, memorial, to honor your loss.
• Cultivate other secure relationships, such as a support group or therapy, which will encourage you to take good care of yourself without the crutch of emotional eating.
Grieving the Loss of An Eating Disorder
As emotional eaters begin to recover, they need to grieve the loss of their best friend and enemy (their frenemy) of bingeing, purging, starving, and chronic dieting. People often experience grief when they recover from their eating problems because they lose a tried and true way of soothing themselves, a meaning and focus to their lives, a well worn way of coping with stress, and the magical belief that weight loss was going to solve all their problems, repair their self-esteem, and help them feel happier. Grief includes the realization of how much wasted time, energy, money, and obsessing has consumed one’s life.
Eventually, through the process of healing, we need to part from our eating problems, honor the help they have provided, wave goodbye, and go our separate ways. This farewell does engender grief as the question remains: Who am I without my eating disorder?
The more you run away from intense emotions, the more your eating problems run after you. Grief must be witnessed to be healed. Therapy can help to unfreeze grief. You learn that your pain is not the whole of who you are. Tears thaw grief. Shared pain is soothed pain.
By Mary Anne Cohen
