When Food Rules Feel Like Safety: Understanding Eating Disorders Through a Trauma Lens
If you’ve ever felt like food rules make life feel safer, you’re not alone.
For many people with eating disorders, controlling food isn’t about vanity; it’s about safety, predictability, and coping. When the world feels overwhelming or unsafe, food rules can become a way to find structure and calm.
But while these rules may offer short-term relief, they often come at the cost of long-term wellbeing. Understanding why they develop, and how to gently unlearn them, is the heart of trauma-informed recovery.
Why Control Feels Like Safety
From a trauma-informed lens, eating disorders are often not just about food, they’re often about regaining control when control once felt impossible.
If you’ve experienced relational trauma, emotional neglect, or unpredictability growing up, your nervous system may have learned to seek safety through control.
Food, numbers, or routines can then become anchors in a stormy emotional sea. They create order where chaos once lived. But this sense of safety is conditional; it depends on maintaining rigid rules, which can leave little room for flexibility, pleasure, or connection.
As the Butterfly Foundation explains, eating disorders are complex mental illnesses often rooted in a mix of biological, psychological, and social factors, including trauma and emotional regulation difficulties.
The Trauma Connection
Trauma doesn’t just live in the mind; it lives in the body.
When we don’t feel safe, our bodies stay on alert, hypervigilant, tense, and anxious. Following food rules can temporarily quiet that alarm system.
In Schema Therapy, this often connects to early patterns like Vulnerability to Harm, Mistrust/Abuse, or Emotional Deprivation. These schemas tell us the world is unsafe, people can’t be trusted, and we must protect ourselves through control.
Over time, the eating disorder becomes a protector, a way to avoid fear, shame, or chaos. But what once felt like protection slowly becomes a prison, no more flexibility or freedom in sight.
From Food Rules to Emotional Safety
Healing means learning new ways to feel safe, not by shrinking your life, but by expanding your capacity to feel and connect.
This might look like:
Understanding the emotional purposes behind your food rules
Building awareness of body sensations and triggers
Practising self-compassion for the parts of you that still seek control
Developing new, safe relational experiences in therapy and beyond
The National Eating Disorders Collaboration (NEDC) reports, trauma-informed care helps individuals rebuild trust in their bodies and relationships, which are key components of lasting recovery.
You’re Not Broken! You’re Adapting
Food rules often begin as creative adaptations to unbearable emotions or uncertainty. They show your system is trying to keep you safe, just in a way that’s no longer serving you.
Recovery involves thanking those old rules for how they helped, and slowly creating safety that doesn’t rely on them anymore. That might mean eating regularly, learning co-regulation with others, or letting yourself rest without “earning it.”
Healing from trauma and eating disorders takes time and gentleness. But every small moment of safety you build, through breath, boundaries, or nourishment, is a step toward freedom.
Final Reflection
Food rules may have once kept you safe, but true safety comes from connection to your body, to others, and to your authentic self.
Through trauma-informed therapy, it’s possible to understand where your food rules came from, honour their purpose, and gently replace control with trust and compassion.
You don’t have to fight for safety anymore. You’re allowed to feel it.
If you would like to explore where your food rules may be coming from, reach out to one of our pscyhologists to start your recovery journey.
You can find more resources on the InsideOut Institute.
Note: The information provided in this blog is for educational purposes only and is NOT intended as medical /psychological advice. Please consult a healthcare professional for personalised guidance
