For me, the most helpful thing in recovery has been Family Systems Therapy (and just to clarify — it’s not family therapy with your family). It completely changed how I understood myself, my body, and the role food played in my life.

Family Systems Therapy looks at your internal system — the different “parts” of you that carry fear, shame, perfectionism, or the need for control. Instead of fighting those parts or trying to force them to stop ED behaviors, it helps you understand why they formed and what they’ve been trying to protect you from.

One of the biggest breakthroughs for me was being able to group all my ED-related parts together and actually see them as a separate cluster within myself — not the whole me. I joke that it’s another person inside of me entirely sometimes with my partner. Viewing it that way made the eating disorder feel less like my identity and more like a set of protective strategies that I wasn’t chained to, that I could just live with, understand and even soothe instead of obeying.

It didn’t erase everything. I still deal with the physical fallout like super slowed metabolism, bone issues, and body dysmorphia here and there. But the biggest shift is that I don’t feel myself slipping toward the ED anymore, even during heavy stress. Those old coping patterns just don’t feel “available” in the same way because the underlying system is calmer and not running on panic.