"Eating disorders are dissociative by nature.
It's very difficult to be connected to your feelings while you're engaging in eating disorder behaviors.
So it makes a lot of sense that people develop eating disorders as a way of keeping themselves as ‘safe’ as possible."
— Monika Ostroff —
This episode has been living rent-free in my head for almost a year and a half.
If you missed it the first time, I’m so glad you’ll be able to tune in today. And if did tune in, I know it will illuminate something new the second time around (it has for me).
My guest is Monika Ostroff, the executive director of MEDA, a clinician with over 25 years in the eating disorder field, and someone with her own profound lived experience with both anorexia and dissociative identity disorder (DID).
Before this conversation, DID was not something I knew much about. I came in curious. I left feeling like my entire framework for understanding eating disorders, trauma, and survival had quietly shifted.
Before you hit play, please know that you do not need to have DID for this episode to feel like it was made for you.
So much of what Monika unpacks — why disordered eating develops, what it’s actually doing for us, how trauma shapes our relationship with our bodies and ourselves — applies across the board. This is one of those conversations that has a way of making people feel deeply seen.
In this episode, we get into:
What DID actually is and how it’s almost nothing like what you’ve seen in media
The striking overlap between DID and eating disorders, and what it tells us about both
How eating disorders function as a trauma response, and why that framing changes everything
Why the “control freak” narrative misses the point entirely
What it looks like to treat an eating disorder as a survival skill rather than a character flaw
The way trauma quietly disconnects us from our bodies, and what the path back actually looks like
What it looks like to approach an eating disorder with compassion instead of shame
The single piece of wisdom that reoriented Monika’s entire relationship with herself
Monika is one of the warmest, most clear-eyed humans I’ve ever had the pleasure of talking with. I think you’re going to love her.
If something in this episode resonated — whether you have a trauma history, an eating disorder history, or you're just someone trying to understand yourself better — I would truly love to hear from you.
Drop a comment below. This community is one of the best parts of this work, and I mean that.
