Childhood Sexual Abuse & Weight Release: Making the Connection

Were you sexually abused as a child or teenager?

Is food your go-to source of comfort when upset?

Have you struggled with your weight and body confidence for a long time?

If so, you’re not alone.

There is a high correlation between early sexual trauma, emotional eating, and body image and weight concerns. If you can relate, you may be surprised to learn that your ongoing struggles most likely have little to do with food and exercise, although these are important. The reasons behind your emotional eating challenges are both neurological, rooted in your nervous system’s response to stress, and psychological, rooted in your conscious and subconscious trauma-based beliefs.

If you have a history of sexual abuse and struggle to release weight and feel confident with your body, you may have experienced the following:

• You equate being thin with receiving unwanted sexual advances and feel vulnerable to sexual assault. These fears may be conscious or hidden in your subconscious mind, and, as you release weight they surface. You feel anxiety, experience panic attacks, or simply feel unsettled and don’t know why.
• You feel uncomfortable being noticed, even in a positive way. After years of protecting yourself behind extra weight—your pounds of protection—you feel uneasy or self-conscious receiving compliments.
• Because food, in fact, helped you cope, you experience a sense of loss or fear at the thought of no longer eating certain foods that have felt like your friends. Food was a source of comfort when people were either unavailable or dangerous.
• You spent years detaching from your body to cope with the sexual abuse and have trouble creating a trusting and loving connection with your body today. Dissociation is a defense mechanism often used by sexual abuse survivors. They psychologically remove themselves from their bodies during the abuse and “watch” what’s happening from above. If you relate, understand that this helped you survive. But you’re safe now and can learn to reclaim your right to a positive and connected relationship with your body today.
• When you experience trauma-based feelings such as fear, anger, helplessness, betrayal, shame, or guilt, it triggers binge eating. Even minor stress can feel overwhelming because it brings to the surface those old feelings, causing an overreaction. Once those old feelings and pain are released from your mind and body, however, handling life’s stress becomes easier because you stop bringing trauma-based feelings from the past into today’s challenges.
• You’re ever alert for danger. This is because childhood abuse affected your developing nervous system as a form of protection. You were in danger so, as a survival mechanism, your brain responded to help you always be on the lookout. But today it’s hard to easily distinguish manageable from unmanageable situations. Even minor stress can feel destabilizing. For example, you may experience an increased heart rate, a sinking feeling in your gut, or rapid breathing. That’s not easy to deal with, so you turn to food to ground yourself. You’ve probably discovered that certain foods—especially high fat and sugary ones—help ease the uncomfortable fear-based sensations in your body and soothe your overwhelming emotion.

While the above responses to not apply to all sexual abuse survivors, they do apply to many. Early in my career I specialized in childhood sexual abuse and worked with many clients who experienced the above fears and struggled in this way. If this applies to you, I hope my writing this helps you to not feel alone and make sense of feelings and thoughts that may seem confusing to you.

Using food to numb your feelings and gaining extra weight were ways you tried to protect yourself. Food helped you cope with a dysregulated nervous system and painful feelings, and gaining weight helped you feel emotionally safe. That’s not a lack of willpower. It’s resourcefulness.

For many of my clients—and maybe for you—emotional eating and extra weight is the symptom. To heal and gain confidence with your body, you must get to the root cause as to why weight may help you feel emotionally safe and why you have used food for comfort. (Curious as to why I use the term release versus lose weight? Click here.)

 Shift your attention. Instead of focusing only on diet, food, or exercise, encourage yourself to go deeper and begin an emotional eating healing and trauma-informed healing journey.

And remember, you were just trying to take care of yourself in the only ways you knew. Be gentle with yourself, okay? You did the best you could.

(Photo Credit: Cheron James on Unsplash.)