By BodyMatters therapist Rebecca Stern
In late May, I went to the ‘At Home with an Eating Disorders’ conference which was three days packed with workshops and talks to assist people caring for a loved one going through an eating disorder. One of the presenters, Dr Linsey Atkins spoke about the practical strategies to assist people to manage the intense anxiety that prevails before, during and after a meal that people struggling with their relationship with food often experience.
If one imagines how they feel when an intense dose of anxiety has just been pumped through their body, it is like being transformed 10 to 40 (or however many) years into childhood during one of those typical childhood tantrums. There is no reason or logic available, just intense emotion which seems to be unending. I think we have all had those moments where emotions take over and we are transformed back into childhood. Just because we have become adults, doesn’t mean we can’t have a cathartic wail every now and again. However, these feelings can prevail when food becomes an object of fear, particularly because there is no escaping it, it is something people just have to do every day to survive!
So keeping this image of the vulnerable child in mind, Dr Atkins suggested that strategies which would be useful during these distressing meals are strategies which would soothe a child. This makes sense, because if you think about the distress that one can feel following a meal, the sheer panic and anxiety, it is as if the logic part of you which develops in adulthood gets switched off when emotion mind gets turned off. This explains why appealing to reason often does not work during times of intense distress and rather, strategies which soothed us as children will be much better resources! Dr Atkins spoke about colouring books for adults and said these can be incredibly cathartic and really take one’s mind of the distressing meal which just took place. The book she spoke about was ‘colour yourself calm’, which as you can see from the front cover has really detailed pictures, it is not hard to imagine that one’s mind will be turned towards keeping in the lines rather than the meal just consumed. This is certainly not an ad for a book, there are plenty of ways you could download similar patterns, which you could easily find by googling the word, ‘mandala’. I think that sometimes as adults we forget some of the wonderfully soothing and playful activities we used to engage in as children. I still find making my own homemade cards from my childhood stencil books very relaxing.