ARFID Survival Strategies
A Look at the Trauma Produced with Food Sensory Issues
This past weekend, I met up with a colleague to catch up. Sometimes it can be hard to decide where to go, because a sit-down restaurant can feel a bit formal, especially when you are meeting earlier in the day, so a coffee shop is a common place to meet up with someone casually. I picked out Beanchain Coffee in Mesa (super cool place on Southern and Alma School, they focus a lot on employee welfare and rights), but it brought up a bit of fear in me, because I don’t actually like coffee.
I was nervous because I wasn’t sure there would be an option that I would enjoy drinking (that wasn’t an issue by the way, notice the lovely pomegranate flavored energy drink), and I was recognized a slight fear of being noticed as different, and worse yet, being seen as childlike. Having grown up with ARFID, and often feeling overwhelmed with the sensory experience of many foods, I had often been shamed for having “a palette like a toddler”. This predicament growing up, where I may not have felt comfortable with a lot of menu options, left me with a couple choices about how to handle it.
The choice my family would have preferred would have been for me to ignore my discomfort and have what others were having. It would have required a lot of internalized distancing from myself, to where I may have trained myself to ignore my body sensations, which probably would have led me to not knowing how I was feeling and may have led to dissociation.
Dissociation is the experience of not feeling “in your body”, where you might feel separated from yourself, almost like you are a passenger just watching yourself live life. Our bodies do this to distance us from pain when we cannot escape it. When we are repeatedly forced to dissociate, it starts to bleed into areas of our life where there is no danger and becomes a dissociative disorder.
I think a lot of people who get overwhelmed in their senses develop a tendency to dissociate, because the world just exposes us to more painful experiences. Also, we tend to be pressured, by parents, friends, supervisors, or society, to have to stay and endure the overwhelming experience. So, you might see this in people who shut down or say “I don’t know” a lot when asked how they feel. They have been trained to stop paying attention to how they feel, because doing so was dangerous. On a grander scale, they have been trained to people-please on a really foundational level.
For the most part, I didn’t do this when faced with food or drink experiences I found overwhelming. I chose the other option: to put my comfort first. It sure bothered my family growing up, because it looked like a child refusing to eat something made for them. Which would then turn into me crying at a table for hours, being scolded, parents threatening me, and getting spanked. Was that option better? I honestly don’t know.
I know that it had resulted in me feeling ashamed of my body, questioning “why can’t I just get over it?”, feeling scared of new foods, and the avoidance of many eating experiences. I would genuinely say it created a trauma response within me towards food and eating, similar to the trauma response created when one dissociates.
On a more positive note, the way I chose to respond to my food sensory overwhelm helped me pay attention to my own comfort, and learn to advocate for it. Like in restaurants, I am super comfortable with asking for certain toppings or sides to be removed or replaced. I also am more comfortable than most in saying no, and not succumbing to peer pressure, because I have practiced so much with food and honoring my comfort.
What option would you have chosen if this was you? If you have a loved one who struggles with food or sensory issues, what perspective did you not realize? What do you think you can do to help?
If this experience is something you have struggled with, what option did you choose? Would you have chosen differently? Now that you are probably looking at therapy to help you, what aspects from the way you handled it do you need to heal from? What do you wish your family would have known? How do you wish society would change?
For me, I still would have chosen to honor my body and comfort. I think it gave me important skills to help me in other areas of my life. I just wish that society wouldn’t shame people for their food preferences. I wish my parents would have ignored parent shaming from society and their family, worked on healing their own relationships with food, and I wish they would have respected my body’s comfort. If food preference shaming didn’t exist, and the resulting family conflicts never happened, there would have been no trauma response in my choice, just the benefit of growing into an adult with confidence and the ability to stand up for myself.
