When Recovery Feels Worse Than Your Eating Disorder

Something that comes up often with clients, and that I remember very clearly from my own journey, is this phase of recovery that I find does not get talked about very much outside of individual sessions.

You are eating more regularly.
Maybe you are weight-restored, or at least no longer actively losing weight or weight suppressing.
You are going to therapy, reading the books, maybe even journaling or meditating.
You are not engaging in all of the old behaviours all the time.

On paper, it looks and feels like you are doing everything right.

And yet inside, you feel:

• Flat, numb, or empty
• Deeply anxious
• Hopeless or irritable
• Disconnected from your body, your life, and even the people you love
• Often more distressed than you did while right in the eating disorder

This can be such a confusing, disheartening stage. Clients will say to me that if this is recovery, they do not want it, or that they thought doing the work was supposed to make them feel better, but they just feel awful.

If this is where you are, I want you to know that:

• There is nothing wrong with you.
• You are not doing recovery wrong.
• And this phase, as excruciating as it can feel, is often a sign that you are moving into much deeper healing than you were able to access before.

 

Why Recovery Can Feel Worse Before It Feels Better

With most illnesses, the treatment either feels better in our body (drinking water when you are thirsty) or at least better in our mind (doing painful physio because you know it is rebuilding your strength).

With eating disorder recovery, the picture is more complicated.

The eating disorder, as harmful as it is, has usually been

• Your numbing agent
• Your sense of identity and specialness
• Your way to feel in control and good enough
• Your main coping strategy when life felt unbearable

So when you start

• Eating more
• Resting more
• Letting go of rigid exercise
• Allowing your body to change

you are not just getting healthier. You are also stripping away the thing that has been containing your anxiety, shame, loneliness, and so much else, for years.

All of the feelings that the eating disorder was holding at bay start to surface.

In some ways, the very fact that you are feeling more right now, even though really difficult and painful feelings, is evidence that the eating disorder’s grip is loosening. Your system is no longer entirely numbed and dissociated. This is incredibly vulnerable, but it is also where real recovery begins.

It is as though you have been living in an emotional ICU on life support (as I wrote about in my ICU metaphor post), and now the machines are gradually being turned down. Your own heart and lungs are learning to work again. It is life-giving in the long run. It also feels terrifying and raw in the short term.

 

The Lag Between Behavioural Recovery and Emotional Recovery

I sometimes talk with clients about two tracks in recovery:

• Behavioural and physical recovery: eating enough, weight restoration if needed, reducing behaviours, increasing variety of foods, more rest.
• Emotional, spiritual, and relational recovery: how you feel about yourself, your body, food, relationships, and life; your sense of meaning and connection; your ability to soothe and care for yourself.

These two tracks do not progress at the same speed.

For many people, behavioural changes happen first, often because

• Treatment teams insist on it for medical safety
• Family or loved ones are watching more closely
• There are meal plans and concrete goals
• It is easier, in a way, to focus on food and weight than on grief, shame, trauma, or loneliness

So you might reach a place where

• You are weight-restored
• You are eating more flexibly
• You are not using behaviours as often

but your internal world has not yet caught up.

Your nervous system still expects you to be hyper-vigilant about food and weight.
Your inner critic has not softened; it has simply shifted targets, perhaps now telling you that you are failing at recovery.
You may be grieving the loss of the eating disorder identity without even realizing that this is what is happening.

This gap between what you are doing outwardly and how you feel inwardly is one of the main reasons this phase feels so terrible. Your body and your life have begun to move on; parts of your mind and heart are still catching up.

 

Grief: The Missing Emotion in This Phase

Something that rarely gets named explicitly, but is so often present here, is grief.

You might be grieving

• The thin ideal self you fought so hard for
• The fantasy that being a certain size or disciplined enough would finally make you safe, loved, or admired
• The predictability and numbness of the eating disorder routine
• Years that feel lost to illness
• Relationships that are changing as you recover, especially if they were built around dieting, gym culture, or shared body hatred

Sometimes this grief shows up as sadness. More often, it shows up as

• Irritability (everyone is annoying, and you cannot quite say why)
• Cynicism about recovery (this is pointless, I will never really feel better)
• Nostalgia for the early or most intense part of the eating disorder (at least you felt special, focused, in control then)

If no one has ever said to you, of course you are grieving, it can be very easy to misinterpret these feelings as proof that recovery is not right for you.

In my experience, both personally and with clients, when we can start to frame some of this heaviness as grief, there can be a tiny softening. It does not make the pain go away, but it makes it feel just a little more human, a little less like failure.

 

The Perfectionistic Flip Side of the Eating Disorder

I have also written before (see my post here) about how perfectionism and the inner critic can simply change costumes in recovery.

Instead of

• You must earn your worth by how little you eat or how much you exercise

it becomes

• You must follow your meal plan perfectly
• You must be body positive all the time now
• You are not allowed to have urges or slip-ups anymore
• If you still feel anxious or sad, clearly you are doing something wrong

So instead of feeling relief as symptoms decrease, you might feel like you are just as trapped as before, only now the rules are about recovery instead of weight and food.

This makes so much sense to me. If you have spent years, maybe decades, organizing your life around conditions for being good enough, that energy does not disappear overnight. It simply looks for a new target.

The work here is not to become perfect at recovery.
The work is to gradually build a different kind of relationship with yourself altogether – one that is softer, more forgiving, and more sustainable than either the eating disorder or perfectionistic recovery.

 

What Helps in This In-Between Place?

I wish I could offer a short list that would make this whole phase go by quickly and easily. It rarely is. But there are some things that can make it more bearable and more meaningful, and that can help you keep going long enough to reach the deeper freedom on the other side.

 

Naming Where You Are

Simply naming that you are in that stage where you have changed a lot of behaviours, but your insides have not caught up yet, can be strangely relieving.

• You are not back at square one.
• You are not still sick enough that nothing has changed.
• You are in an in-between, liminal space that almost everyone who recovers passes through, and that we just do not hear about enough.

You might even try saying to yourself

Of course this feels awful. I have taken away my main coping strategy, and my new ways of coping are still very young. This is exactly how it would be expected to feel right now.

 

Allowing, Rather Than Fighting, Your Feelings About Recovery

It is very common to feel

• Angry at recovery
• Resentful about weight gain
• Bored without the eating disorder rituals
• Afraid that you will always feel this way

Many people then add a second layer of suffering on top: I should not feel this way. A grateful, good recovering person would not think these things.

If you can, see if you might begin to allow your actual feelings to be there, without making them mean something terrible about you.

You might try something simple, like the Yes practice I have written about before:

• When a painful feeling about recovery comes up, say silently to yourself, Yes
• Not Yes, I agree that this is hopeless, but Yes, I see that this is how I feel right now
• Notice what happens in your body as you do this. Is there even a slight softening in your jaw, your shoulders, your belly?

 

Strengthening Your Healthy Self, Not Just Weakening the Eating Disorder

In the early phases of recovery, so much focus (necessarily) goes into reducing behaviours and challenging rules. This is important.

But this in-between stage usually calls for something deeper: strengthening the part of you that is more than the eating disorder.

This might look like

• Doing inner dialogues between your eating disorder self and your healthy self
• Journaling from your future recovered self to your present-day self
• Reading books, listening to podcasts, or doing practices that nourish your sense of self-compassion, spirituality, or meaning (I have listed some of my favourites on my Books page)

However, this is not about fixing your feelings quickly. Rather, it is about gradually building an inner relationship where, even when you feel awful, there is a wise, loving voice available to sit with you in it.

Over time, this inner relationship – between your wise self and your hurting parts – often becomes the very thing that makes recovered life feel richer than life ever did even before the eating disorder.

 

Looking for Clean Pain vs. Stuck Pain

In another post I wrote about how the pain of staying in the eating disorder and the pain of recovery are different.

Stuck pain is the pain of staying where you are, of repeating the same cycles, of not moving forwards when a deep part of you yearns to, of fear being in control. It tends to feel heavy, hopeless, and familiar.

Clean pain is the pain of growth – doing something new that is aligned with your deeper self, even though it feels terrifying. It often comes with a small flicker of pride, meaning, or rightness, even if it is mostly fear in the moment.

When you feel miserable in this stage of recovery, you might gently ask yourself:

Is this the pain of going against my heart, or the pain of stretching towards it?

If it is clean pain – if some small part of you knows that this is hard because you are changing – see if you can honour that. You do not have to like it. You do not have to pretend it is easy. Just recognize it for what it is: evidence that you are moving.

 

Bringing in Support That Matches This Phase

Sometimes what is needed here is simply time and company – people who can sit with you in the I feel awful and I am still choosing not to go back.

This might mean

• Naming this stage with your therapist and asking specifically to work on meaning, self-worth, relationships, or grief, not just food and weight
• Letting your recovery coach, if you have one, know that you do not just need accountability right now; you need help tolerating the emptiness and confusion
• Reaching out to a friend or partner and saying that you do not need advice, but it would help to have someone know that this is hard

If your treatment to this point has been very behaviour-focused (which is often necessary at first), this might be the time to widen the lens and bring in more body-based work, trauma-focused therapy, or spiritual and existential support, if that feels right to you.

You are not asking for too much. You are asking for what this stage of healing actually requires.

 

You Are Closer Than You Feel

In my own journey, there was a long stretch where I remember feeling forlorn that I was eating more, that I was not doing certain behaviours as often, but that I hated my body and felt like a stranger to myself. It was easy to believe that this was as good as it would ever get.

Looking back now, that season, as bleak as it felt, was much closer to recovery and healing than I realized then.

It was the time when

• My eating disorder could no longer fully numb or distract me
• My new ways of relating to myself were still young and shaky
• All of the deeper questions I had been avoiding began to rise to the surface

It was not the end of my recovery.
It was the middle (and I like therapist Carolyn Costin's distinction between being in recovery and being fully recovered that she shares in her video here).

If this is where you are, please know this:

• Feeling miserable at this stage does not mean recovery is wrong for you
• It means your system is re-learning how to feel, and that is a tender, courageous process
• You are allowed to be angry and sad and bored and scared and still keep going

You do not have to feel grateful for recovery in order to keep choosing it.
You do not have to feel body positive to honour your body’s needs.
You do not have to be convinced that you will reach the summit in order to take the next gentle, doable step.

Your job right now may simply be to show up for the life you are slowly reclaiming, one day at a time, and to offer yourself as much gentleness as you can while you do.

With so much love and faith in you,

 

Support For Your Journey