sb mountain.jpg

Food Complexes and Disordered Eating

Do you find that you are constantly thinking about food and the way your body looks? Do you analyze what you have eaten and think about what you will eat? Are you concerned with the way your body looks as opposed to the way it feels? Do these thoughts take up an inordinate amount of your headspace?

According to analytical psychologists Andrew Samuels, et al, a “complex is a collection of images and ideas, clustered round a core. . . and characterized by a common emotional tone.” This could mean that thinking about food impinges on or takes up a large part of one’s life, that there is an unhealthy focus on control over what is eaten, or that one eats past when one is full and is unable to attune to one’s bodily signals.

Our relationship to food and body is an important one and worth exploring. In my therapy practice, I offer a non-judgemental space where we can begin to get curious about the way we feed and nourish our bodies. We can ask questions about where some of these tendencies may have formed and how they served us. We can name intolerable thoughts and feelings and begin to shed light on experiences and ideas that feel shameful. Disordered eating, food complexes and even an uncomfortable immersion in diet culture are my areas of professional experience and study. I wrote my Master’s thesis, entitled, “A Depth-Psychological Exploration of Food Complexes: Origins in Disrupted Attachment and Treatment in Psychotherapy,” on this topic, linked here.

“Diets are the outpicturing of your belief that you have to atone for being yourself to be worthy of existing. They are not the source of this belief, they are only one expression of it. Until the belief is understood and questioned, no amount of weight loss will touch that part of you that is convinced it is damaged. A lifetime of suffering with food will fit right in with the definition you’ve formed about being alive. . . You won’t keep extra weight off because being at your natural weight does not match your convictions about the way life unfolds.”

— Geneen Roth