Dreams play a crucial role in eating disorder recovery, offering valuable insights and opportunities for healing. Understanding the connection between them and eating disorders can aid individuals on their journey to wellness.

Five Ways Dreams Relate to Eating Disorder Recovery

1. Emotional Processing:

Dreams serve as a platform for processing complex emotions associated with eating disorders, such as anxiety, guilt, and shame. Exploring this content helps individuals work through these emotions in a safe and symbolic way, facilitating emotional healing.

Eating disorder recovery requires deep work. Suppose this treasure was your dream image. How would you understand it? Would you go surface or deep?

Dreams go deep. With understanding, you can benefit from your dream images. If you attend to your dream images and wonder about them, you have an opportunity to go more deeply into the meaning this image holds for you. This is more than an intellectual exercise.

Feelings are lost or unknown, forgotten memories and physical sensations echoing your past come into consciousness. What your eating disorder represses has an opportunity to ascend to awareness. That's when you have a genuine healing opportunity.

This is the story of how one mother, with Jesus imagery in her dream, reconnected to her authentic self during a time of conflict with her adult daughter.

Q: Why are inner explorations and investigations of dream images called work?

A: Because we are construction workers. We build bridges. We gather raw materials from our psyches, discover their relevance and shape them to form bridges between our unconscious and conscious.

We create a means of transporting what is deep within us to our day-to-day perceptions. We learn to tolerate emotional disruption as we adjust to greater meaning and understanding in our lives and the world.

Dreams, In eating disorder recovery, reflect your authentic self and true current experience.

Dreams move through blocks. An eating disorder blocks or distorts complex or subtle emotions. With an eating disorder, a person feels fear, anxiety, strong needs for someone else often misinterpreted as love, reassurance near a sense of safety when praised or given gifts that contribute to her belief in herself as a person of high status, if only for a moment or a few days.

The power of the eating disorder is not total. Feelings of dread and the need to isolate, because she is apprehensive about being with others, penetrate the emotional blocks created by the eating disorder. She can be inconsistent in her relationships with others and inconsistent, even erratic, in her ability to concentrate or maintain interest in her activities.