Sometimes It's Wise to Leave Your Body
On why dissociation is a strength, and how we can honor that while building a more beautiful inner world.
There are days I look back on when I was in the thick of my eating disorder and can barely feel them. Moments that are blurry at the edges, like I was watching my own life through thick glass. I’ve even had multiple people describe situations to me that apparently occurred during that time, yet I can’t remember them.
It used to scare me — that not-feeling, not-remembering. But now I know: that was my body protecting me. That was dissociation, quietly stepping in when things felt too much.
Because sometimes, it’s wise to leave your body.
When the world around you is unsafe; when the sensory overload becomes too much; when it feels as if nothing and no one is able to ease the discomfort; when your body has been treated like a problem to fix…leaving can be the most loving thing your nervous system knows how to do.
For so many of us with a history of eating disorders, dissociation isn’t a random glitch in the system. It is the system. A survival response. A pause button. A shield.
This is true for dieting, too. If you think back to the times in your life when you became most fixated on your body, or most consumed by controlling what you ate, what else was true at that time? What were you feeling — why did dieting seem like the answer?
Dieting can be a form of escape — one that’s socially sanctioned and even praised.
When life feels chaotic or emotions rise like a tide we don’t know how to swim through, dieting offers the illusion of control. It gives us rules to follow, numbers to chase, a goal to obsess over — something to focus on that isn’t the ache underneath. For many, dieting becomes a distraction from pain, from loneliness, from trauma, from feeling too much or not enough. It’s a way to leave the body while appearing to be deeply invested in it.
You turned to an eating disorder when there was nothing else to turn to. It was a resource that helped you survive things that were really difficult to survive. So you found a resource when there wasn’t any. And that’s a strength. We can honor it for that while we’re working to find a new way to live in the world, to free you from those painful experiences.
It makes sense, doesn’t it? Restrictive eating and body control are ways we leave the body to leave the pain. We find ways to cope when we feel there is no other way to survive.
But underneath the calorie counting and body checking is often a quiet plea: make this discomfort stop.
So it’s imperative that we understand what we were escaping or coping with. Because when we understand what we were escaping, we can stop blaming ourselves for the ways we coped. We can see the dieting, the disconnection, the fixation on food or control — not as failures, but as signals. Signals that something underneath was too painful to hold without a strategy.
And once we know that, we can begin to offer compassion to the root, not just the behavior. We can start to ask: What did I need back then? What do I still need now? Not to fix or perfect, but to tend, to soothe, to finally be with ourselves in a way that doesn’t require escape.
Over the past few years, I’ve come to learn just how deeply dissociation is intertwined with trauma, and how those two things are also statistically significant across the disordered eating spectrum.
This week on the podcast, I’m joined by Monika Ostroff, Executive Director of the Multi-Service Eating Disorders Association, Inc (MEDA), to talk about Dissociative Identity Disorder, trauma, and disordered eating.
She brings clinical wisdom, lived experience, and profound compassion to a conversation that’s often kept in the shadows.
Monika helps us unravel the truth behind dissociation, why it’s borne out of trauma, and how important it is to take a strengths-based approach to treatment and healing.
We talk about why dissociation is more common than most people realize, especially in those who’ve been harmed in both visible and invisible ways. And for anyone familair with Internal Family Systems (IFS), Monika helps explain the differences between that therapeutic approach and the experience of dissociation.
Ultimately, we explore what it means to gently return to your body — not all at once, not perfectly, but piece by piece, on your own terms.
This episode isn’t about fixing. It’s about understanding. It’s about holding space for the parts of you that needed to leave — and honoring the courage it takes to come back.
🎧 Tune in to: “The Wisdom in Dissociation: When Leaving Your Body Is a Form of Protection,” streaming now wherever you get your podcasts.
Sending love to every version of you,
Abbie
Abbie, what's goin' on with paid subscriptions here for those of us already supporting you on Patreon?