"This can be hard for onlookers to understand, but for people who have lived through trauma, chronic emotional invalidation, or unsafe relationships, self-blame can become an organizing principle. It offers a painful kind of order. If suffering is my fault, then at least it makes sense. Over time, that belief does not stay confined to memory. It begins to shape behavior."
"It begins to shape behavior. This is where eating disorder behaviors take on a different psychological meaning. Restriction can function as penance. Bingeing can become a way to escape relentless self-accusation. Purging, over-exercise, and rigid control over food can operate as attempts to "undo" the perceived wrongdoing of having needs, appetites, or vulnerability at all. From the outside, the behavior may look self-destructive."
Self-blame frequently underlies eating disorder behaviors more than a desire for thinness or perfection. For many people with trauma, chronic emotional invalidation, or unsafe relationships, self-blame becomes an organizing principle that makes suffering make sense. That belief transforms into behavioral strategies: restriction as penance, bingeing as escape from self-accusation, and purging, over-exercise, or rigid control as attempts to undo perceived wrongdoing. These behaviors function internally as corrective or ordered responses, even when they appear self-destructive externally. Effective recovery requires addressing entrenched self-blame and the psychological meaning of behaviors, not merely interrupting eating-disorder symptoms.
Read at Psychology Today
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