You Might Feel Worse Before You Feel Better: Eating Disorder Recovery Insight

Someone has to say it: on your ED recovery or wellness journey, it’s possible you may feel worse before you feel better. Below, I’ll share some insights into why this can happen and what this means for the recovery/wellness journey.

Why you may feel worse before you feel better

It makes total sense when you think about it. An eating disorder is a combination of survival strategies, and an inherent part of the eating disorder is most of our time and energy going into this one thing, “the eating disorder,” (associated thoughts, emotions, & behaviors) as a survival strategy; to organize our lives around these thought, emotion, and behavior patterns.

So it only makes sense it can be expected to feel worse before we feel better because to make any shifts to our patterns will cause a reverberating effect on every other pattern & habit in all areas of our lives. We feel this reverberating impact in our bodies/physical sensations, emotions, thoughts, and relationships.

I want to validate how overwhelming, distressing, even painful that can all be.

What this means for the recovery process

To feel worse before you feel better does not mean you are “doing it wrong,” or that the shifts you are making have been ineffective.

To feel worse before feeling better is not specific to eating disorders. This is common and often to be expected when healing, transforming, or working on your wellness from complex trauma and generational cycle breaking. Additionally, discomfort and pain, even some distress, is to be expected in life in general as we learn, continue to experience life, and whenever we come up against a growth edge. That being said, I want to reiterate and validate how painful it can feel when we are working on our emotion regulation and the particular physiological discomfort that takes place in eating disorder recovery.

If in time, despite your best efforts, you do not feel any relief, it can be a sign of ineffective therapy or treatment. If that’s the case, please let your doctor or therapist know.

Closing & transparency

Recovery and complex trauma healing is hard, to say the least, but it shouldn’t be elusive. My hope in sharing these insights is not to be discouraging but to be transparent, realistic, and validating. To remain connected to why you’ve committed to the journey and continuously aware of (and utilize) your supports and resources will be key.

Wishing you well & resourced on your journey!

Lindsay Valley

Licensed Clinical Social Worker (LCSW)