Transcript:
Hello, everyone. This is Ryan Sallans, and this vlog that I’m providing is “Reflections on Eating Disorders and Trauma.” I hope that this can assist those that are currently struggling, or those that have family or friends that are struggling with some form of eating disorder.
When thinking about trauma and eating disorders, I like to describe trauma as a lightning strike to your central nervous system. So something traumatic happens to you in your life, and it sets you off kilter, and it makes you start to question your own life’s reality, and also start to question your voice, along with you having to explore what it was that happened.
Now with eating disorders, we can link this back to childhood adverse life events, such as abuse, sexual, emotional or physical. And this can be done by someone within a family unit, a friend, a stranger or acquaintance. When these forms of abuse happen, it takes away a part of us, and the reason for that is because of the trauma. Your limbic and to portal lobe system go into hyper-overdrive, where you can’t make sense of what you’re seeing and hearing around you. Your memory is actually altered from that adverse event, and then it’s hard to be able to understand how to emotionally regulate yourself, because everything within you is an enrollment.
So it begins there, that core part of your brain, and it goes down your spine. Your spine is the column that holds your central nervous system. It is a key to us being upright and human, actually. And so in these states of disruption is where the disorder becomes the place to actually calm. So for me, I began to become interested in eating disorders, actually, when I was diagnosed with anorexia nervosa back in 1998 by a psychologist on my college campus. After being diagnosed, I then joined student peer education groups on campus. One, because I wanted to connect with others who either were interested in the topic or also had their own forms of struggle. And two is, I am an educator. I am a community wellness person. I’m a public health-focused person, and so I wanted to understand more of the data and the science and the psychology behind it so that I could help others, so that they hopefully would not get as far if they’re starting to go down a path, or they’d get the warning signs quickly so that they can find help.
So with this traumatic event, what happens is, if you’re continually in the environment where things keep happening that reinvent that form of trauma, whether it’s an ongoing abusive relationship of any form of that abuse that I listed before, or you enter into a new environment, something happens, it’s like the past, it further shocks you off your system, and you then go back again to the disorder. Because disorder is that routine. It’s the one thing that you know. It’s the one thing you feel you have control of. It’s any of these forms of behaviors that we do that are considered “disinhibited behaviors,” where we’re actually causing harm to ourself. So it’s counterintuitive that we do it, but we do it because it’s the only thing that we know to keep us here.
So for me, when my anxiety started to raise my body, or my depression started to go rampant in my body because of my own forms of feeling off kilter due to past traumatic events, I would turn to what I knew, which was behaviors with around just always moving. The hardest thing with recovery is ending the daily routine or the weekly routine or the monthly routine. The hardest thing is to remove what it is that you felt provided you with some form of control and comfort, even though you don’t have control, and it definitely is not comforting, because of what is happening to your physical health as well as your emotional health and relationships with other people.
So what do we do? the traumatic events that have already happened. They’re within us. How do we stop these routines and how do we heal?
We take time. That’s what we do. We don’t beat ourselves up. We have to be brutally honest with ourselves, and we really have to let ourselves feel the grief, even though the grief is the hardest thing to sit in. It’s most lonely place to be. And so who wants to be there? I’d rather just go back to my routines and behaviors where I’m caught up in something else than to feel that grief.
But you have to feel the grief, because if you don’t, then you’re not going to be able to put a name to it. You’re not going to be able to let it go.
My own life, I fortunately recovered from the fear of me losing my life due to a low body weight when I was in my 20s, but my disorder still comes back, because trauma does pop up throughout life. So what do I do? Well, the first thing is to have awareness. The awareness allows us to continue to ask ourselves, why do we keep engaging in behaviors that harm us and that don’t make us feel good? And then it gives us the opportunity to continue to explore that grief and to break it down. To be able to look at the world differently and not feel so lonely.
It’s important to be in psychotherapy. It’s important to push yourself, and when things get uncomfortable, not to run away from them. But to recognize, like, if your therapist has something that actually makes you feel escalated and feelings of overwhelmingness, there’s something there that you can learn from. At least that’s I’m learning as I continue to do my own journey with a mental health provider, as I navigate not only the recovery from an eating disorder, but just, well for me, a very, very stressful job and a very stressful climate.
So continue to take care of yourself, continue to have awareness, continue to try to find forms of meditation and grounding. Continue to work on having the confidence in your voice, and if people hurt you, finding that confidence to speak up so that you can let it out and continue moving forward.
This world is a very difficult place to navigate, but where it becomes most free is when we actually do take care of ourselves and when we also allow ourselves to retreat. But when I say retreat, that does not mean isolate and disappear. That means retreat into ourself to find what it is that we are seeking so that we can come back out with a little more knowledge and wisdom.
Ryan Sallans, MA is a speaker, writer and consultant who specializes in gender and orientation development. Over the past 20 years, he has served corporations, healthcare institutions, federal agencies, universities, and community. An internationally utilized gender subject matter expert, Ryan interweaves personal narrative storytelling with scientific research and cultural studies.
From 2008 to 2020, Ryan served as a consultant, Lead Author and Subject Matter Expert for an extensive range of e-learning courses used around the nation to train healthcare professionals and staff seeking continuing education around serving gender and sexual minority patients.
His academic publications include personal narratives and viewpoints for peer-reviewed journals including the Journal of Ethics (2023), Journal of Ethics (2020), Journal of Ethics (2016), Journal of Ethics in Mental Health (2015), and Contemporary Sexuality (2012).
Ryan graduated from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln where he graduated Sigma Tau Delta Honors Society with a Bachelor of Arts in cultural anthropology and English, a Master of Arts in English, and a Master of Arts in educational psychology.
Ryan has authored the books Second Son (Scout Publishing, 2012), Transforming Manhood (Scout Publishing, 2019) and Finding Me: Finding We (forthcoming).