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.

Code: Man or woman, prince or princess, boy or girl is transformed into a frog. Clue: The crown on the head signifies a magical metamorphosis. Action Required: Find a human to accomplish three impossible tasks to free the frog-encased prisoner. Question: Are you the prisoner or the human who can free the prisoner? Or are you both?

Fairy tales are old. Most were not written by a specific author. They were created over hundreds of years from bits of story, myth, dream, culture, told and retold by storytellers, altered by the storyteller’s individualism and the response of the villagers in the telling.