Anorexia - the Ultimate “Protector” - and Discovering What it’s Protecting From

I was recently asked a question that I found myself really thinking about for quite some time. I had so many immediate ways to answer it and yet it felt like something I needed to take my time to articulate as the answers are so complex, though so familiar to me. The question was: “What are the most common exiles and protectors I have encountered in people with anorexia?” This is Internal Family Systems (IFS) language for asking “what are the most common deepest, darkest, most painful things that are lurking inside someone with anorexia and what are the most common protective mechanisms, or defenses that they generally turn to, to maintain their eating disorder?”

I want to try to answer this by offering a general overview of some of the patterns I have encountered repeatedly in my work, because of course there is no single internal system that sits underneath all anorexia. It would be reductive and inaccurate to suggest that everybody with anorexia has the same exiles (hidden, deep down wounds), the same protectors (defenses etc.) or the same story.

There are always surprises in this work. Human beings are extraordinarily individual, and eating disorders are extraordinarily complex!

What follows is based on over a decade of working with people with eating disorders, alongside my own deep exploration and study of how we can support people not only to recover behaviourally, but to heal, understand and ultimately learn to live differently with the parts of themselves that became organised around the eating disorder.

When I think about anorexia through a parts-based lens, there are certain patterns I see again and again. So, as I was asked such an IFS/ parts-informed question, I’ll attempt to answer it from that perspective (using the language of “exiles” and “protectors” having now hopefully defined them well enough for those unfamiliar with these terms); based on a broad range of insights from my experiences and reflections. 

The Parts Anorexia Seeks To Exile

As alluded to by my definitions above, deep underneath the eating disorder there are often very vulnerable “exiled” parts of a person’s internal system (or psyche, or personality - depending on what language you prefer), that I have found often carry experiences of being disgusting, ugly, unlovable, unacceptable, stupid, inadequate, different, or simply not good enough.

There can be many reasons these parts developed. There is a misconception that sexual trauma is a primary factor that sits underneath anorexia, or that if we look deeply enough we will inevitably find it. In my experience that isn’t always the case. These exiled beliefs can develop through many other pathways, and very often they do. However sexual trauma can sometimes be one of them. Experiences of sexual abuse, violation, unwanted sexualisation or feeling unsafe in one’s body can affect the relationship a person develops with their body, sexuality, visibility and sense of self.

In other cases the trauma is much more subtle and less events-based and more to do with relational and attachment wounds, or experiences of rejection, abandonment, inadequacy or othering. 

Many of my clients report having experienced themselves as being physically different from their peers, or perhaps they did not fit conventional beauty standards, or received unkind messages about their appearance. Sometimes they felt socially different. They may have been highly sensitive, deeply intuitive, neurodivergent, socially awkward, or in other ways experienced themselves as somehow unlike the people around them.

And we also cannot underestimate the environment in which these beliefs develop too. Societal and communal narratives around bodies, weight, desirability and what a person is “supposed” to look like can be enormously powerful. These messages exist in secular society, but frum communities are certainly not protected from them. In some environments they can arguably become even more difficult to challenge because there is sometimes less open conversation about body image, eating disorders, sexuality and the harm caused by appearance-based judgement.

There can also be a misleading idea that because people dress more modestly, body scrutiny somehow becomes less significant. But covering more of the body does not automatically remove body shame, comparison, judgement or the pressure to look a certain way. Comments about weight, size, attractiveness, shidduch desirability and dieting communicate very powerful messages about whose body is acceptable and whose is not.

Sometimes these messages are so normalised that people do not even recognise them as body shaming. They may be framed as concern, health, tznius, attractiveness, marriageability or simply “how things are”. But for a sensitive young person who is already carrying vulnerability around belonging, worth or acceptability, those messages can become incredibly potent.

Whatever the origin, what ends up happening is the evolution of parts carrying an extraordinarily painful message:

That there is something about me that is fundamentally unacceptable.

And Then the Protectors Arrive…

Initially, they come offering something incredibly compelling! “We can fix this. We can make you acceptable. We can make you beautiful. We can make you lovable. We can make you successful. We can make you better than everybody else.”

Anorexia can offer something that feels like a superpower. You can be thinner than everyone else. You can eat less than everyone else. You can tolerate hunger when other people cannot. You can exercise harder. You can have more discipline and more control.

Suddenly, the very person who once felt inferior can experience themselves as exceptional.

This can gradually develop into another protective position: “Look at them. They are out of control. They eat so much. They have no discipline. I am different. I am better.”

These protective parts can be an extraordinarily powerful protection against shame. If I can move from feeling beneath everyone else to feeling above them, I never have to experience the unbearable vulnerability of being at the bottom again.

This is why anorexic protectors can become so terrifying when recovery begins. They are not simply saying, “don’t eat”, they are saying, “If you eat, you will become disgusting again. You will become unlovable. You will lose the one thing that makes you special. You will lose your edge. You will fail. You will be out of control. You will go back to being that person.”

That last piece can be particularly pertinant. For some people, there is no middle ground internally. There is this person, the controlled, thin, disciplined, successful version of me, or there is that person, the rejected, disgusting, unacceptable exile I can never allow myself to become again.

As anorexia becomes more entrenched, however, this is no longer only a cognitive system, it becomes deeply tied into the nervous system. There are tangible fight, flight and freeze responses around food. Certain foods, eating particular amounts, gaining weight, feeling fullness or seeing the body change can begin to produce genuine somatic threat responses.

It can become almost phobic. If someone has a severe spider phobia and suddenly discovers a tarantula crawling over their body, we would not expect them to calmly reason themselves out of their physiological response. Their body has already registered danger and will start reacting. Increased heart rate, temperate change, digestive responses, rigidity, mind blurring… 

For someone with entrenched anorexia, food, fullness, weight gain or a perceived loss of control can become encoded with a similar sense of threat. This means there are cognitive protectors, emotional protectors and somatic protectors operating simultaneously. That’s a very powerful and very flooding experience. People can’t “just stop” all this with willpower, pressure or threat of consequences. 

These protectors become constant companions. They calculate calories, doing complex and constant maths. They compare bodies. They monitor food. They negotiate. They threaten. They reassure. They plan. They tell the person what they can and cannot eat. They can become some of the loudest and most familiar voices in a person’s internal world. In a strange way, they can become friends.

So one of the hardest realities of eating disorder recovery is that behavioural recovery and internal recovery do not necessarily happen at the same speed. Someone may begin eating more. They may stop exercising compulsively. They may follow a meal plan. They may practise opposite action. And meanwhile the voices inside them may still be screaming.

Sometimes they actually become louder because the person is no longer obeying them. We need to appreciate how exhausting this is. Someone can appear to be “doing well” behaviourally while internally fighting an enormous battle. 

This is why I feel so strongly recovery has to involve the creation of safety at multiple levels. There needs to be an understanding of the exiles and, eventually, an ability to bring compassion, connection and love to the parts carrying shame and unworthiness. In my experience, that work can take years.

And often, particularly at the beginning, the person has absolutely no interest in going there. They may say things such as: I don’t want to be fat. I want to be attractive. I’m just not hungry. I don’t like food…. And we have to respect that that is genuinely where their system is at. We can’t push or force this work; it really does require patience and constant attunement to our clients and all their parts. 

I also feel that the incorporation of significant somatic work is essential to this process of helping someone develop a relationship with their protectors enough to feel ready to have them soften enough - and ultimately to heal or unburden the exiles they are guarding. 

Emotional regulation, nervous-system regulation, increasing tolerance of consuming food and feeling fullness, and all the accompanying bodily sensations; and sometimes work that looks remarkably similar to working with a phobia. With titrated exposures, plenty of resourcing and paced in a gentle and attuned way that doesn’t overwhelm their system and cause protectors to come in at full force and shut the whole process down. 

This may require distress tolerance tools such as the use of breath, sensory grounding techniques, a lot of co-regulation and support from trusted others (be it a therapist, nutritionist/dietitian, or friend or family member). With plenty of preparation, these gently held exposures can gradually teach the body (and all the somatic, cognitive and emotion-led parts) that eating is survivable and that the feared consequences do not mean annihilation.

When done before the client feels ready, safe and resourced enough to regulate if and when their protectors arrive as fear, overwhelm, shutdown or refusal, what inevitably happens is that those protectors win over and the client will not manage to eat as required. Or perhaps they will because they are pressured by those around them, and then their system associates eating with that pressure as well as everything else, and their nervous systems become even more dysregulated and the protector parts can react even more ferociously.

At some point we become ready to address the clients’ relationship with these protectors themselves. I don’t believe these parts need to be fought, humiliated or eradicated. I believe that to help them soften, we must be curious about them, we must understand them and befriend them. When we do this we can learn more about how to address the needs they are hoping to meet, and have much more of an opportunity of updating these well-meaning misguided bodyguards, so that our clients feel safe and happy, without such intense and dangerous adaptations to try and achieve that. 

There can be enormous respect and gratitude for what they have tried to accomplish. We want our clients to be able to say to them, “wow. I see what you’re doing. I understand what you’re protecting.You are telling me something incredibly important about my wounds. You have worked unbelievably hard to keep me safe. You tried to give me acceptance, desirability, achievement, control and belonging when I didn’t know how else to find them. And I don’t want to need your advice anymore, because the way you are protecting me is also hurting me.”

That final balance is incredibly delicate, because ultimately we have to understand and navigate not only what the eating disorder is taking from somebody, but what it is still giving them. Even somebody who is medically very unwell may still experience thinness, restriction, control or the anorexic identity as giving them something psychologically more valuable than what it is currently taking away.

Until we understand that equation, simply asking someone to give up the eating disorder can feel like asking them to surrender the very system that has kept them safe. Recovery, therefore, isn’t simply about removing anorexia, it is about slowly helping the person build enough safety, worth, connection, regulation, identity and internal compassion that they no longer need anorexia to do those jobs for them.