Sound the Alarms! Raise Awareness! Children and Eating Disorders!

When we are kids, every experience creates a thought pattern or pathway in our brain. These paths are paved by the emotional impact our experiences have on how we feel about our environment, our safety in it, our overall self-worth or body image. As we become adults and situations occur that trigger the memory of childhood experiences, our brain retraces those old familiar pathways and we relive the emotions of the experience all over again.

Similar to how a flash of an image will remain on a television after the power goes out or if the same image has been displayed over a long period of time, when an event happens in our life that essentially shuts our power off or if we have had the same images (and words) repeated over a period of time, our brains have lasting images or pictures that leave an emotional imprint. The effects of these “pictures” may not be immediately visible, but they can affect us throughout our lifetime.

Over the course of our lives we will experience many events. When those experiences are difficult, we have to contend with what is actually happening as well as the painful beliefs and conclusions the experiences generates. Our feelings about the event are usually directly related to the pictures we formed in our youth when we felt some sense of separation or lack. When we feel separated from (or lacking) of what we need we are unlikely to know how to respond in a balanced way. Our feelings and fears have a profound impact on motivation, our self-worth and our sense of nourishment.

When an adult who is supposed to love and protect a child instead betrays or uses them, it creates feelings of separation. The child then internalizes their feelings and thinks that something wrong with them. This causes their self-esteem to plummet and feelings of shame or fear to take root. These roots present enormous obstacles to attaining a sound mind, a healthy body image and a sense of spirit. If a child is told that they are too fat or made fun of by being poked in the belly or hears people in their lives make self-depreciating comments, that child feels separate, their power goes out and their minds create devastating emotional images. And like the television image that lasts, these pictures on the child’s brain causes them to be stuck in that emotional event. As an adult, their feelings of fear and anger are tied up in the sense of separation and they attempt to fill or deny that emptiness with eating disorders or other addictions.

For example, on certain reality television shows where little girls around the age of five or six participate in “beauty pageants,” these children are dressed and made to look and strut as if they are in their twenties. The mothers tend to restrict the daughters diet and the entire focus of the child’s life is on her appearance. It is not uncommon to hear one of the little girls tell her mother that she does not like a certain costume because it makes her look fat. Rather than replying with something like “you look beautiful inside and out,” the mother usually agrees, makes further depreciating comments or comparisons, switches the dress and adds high heels to make her daughter look taller and thinner.

There is little doubt that these girls are being affected emotionally. These young girls are being brought up in a manner that is likely to lead them to believe that their only value is in their body image. In addition to immense feelings of separation and comparison, these children may feel as though they are not in control their bodies and lives. Such feelings almost always lead to lifelong attempts to regain control by controlling their weight - eating disorders can manifest in a number of ways including food restriction, obsessive monitoring, starving, bingeing and purging.

However, eating disorders are less about food and more about feelings. Persons with eating disorders typically use food to fill or deny (binge or withhold) emptiness or unprocessed emotion that remains from the “pictures” and neurological pathways they developed earlier in life or as a means to cope (or not cope) with stress. Most of these young girls will probably never learn the tools for addressing their emotional challenges in a healthy manner. In lacking the coping skills necessary to address the many stressors in life, especially when they have lived in excess and faux celebrity such as these children, they are likely to develop a gravely unhealthy coping skill -- an eating disorder.

Not only is emotional harm being done to the girls on these shows, but a horrible message is also being sent to other children. They are being taught that only the thin are beautiful and recognized and that the totality of their value is in their body image. Rebecca’s House has been working in recovery for numerous years. Not only are eating disorders on the rise, we need to sound the alarms and raise awareness because the children getting diagnosed with eating disorders are getting younger each year. Recently one of our clinicians did an assessment with an eight-year-old female, which resulted in the diagnosis of anorexia. Needless to say, it will be a struggle for this child to overcome the “pictures” that have led to her fear of food or weight gain. Sound the alarms!

This is National Eating Disorder Awareness week, however, eating disorders are not a fad or a holiday; they are an epidemic. Please join Rebecca's House in Raising Awareness every day, not just for a week.