"But I Had a Happy Childhood": Why Your Eating Disorder Still Makes Complete Sense
This one comes up with almost every single person I work with.
But Victoria, I had a happy childhood. My parents loved me. I don't have any trauma. So why do I have an eating disorder?
This episode is my answer. Because trauma is not only what happened to you. Trauma is also what didn't happen to you. The absence of the big stuff does not mean your emotional needs were met. And unmet emotional needs in childhood are trauma, just not the kind that gets talked about enough.
This episode is for you if:
- You have always said "but I had a happy childhood" and wondered why that hasn't explained or healed things
- You feel like you have no right to struggle because nothing that bad happened to you
- You have done the therapy, the journaling, the work, and still feel it in your body
- You want to understand why your eating disorder was created in the first place
- You are ready to grieve what you didn't get, without blame, but with truth
In this episode, we cover:
✨ Why trauma is not only what happened to you, it is also what didn't happen to you
✨ How unmet emotional needs in childhood create the same nervous system wounds as more obvious trauma
✨ What a "happy childhood" can actually look like beneath the surface, and what it communicates to a developing nervous system
✨ Being sent to your room when upset, and what that taught you about big emotions
✨ How early body shame can begin long before magazines or social media
✨ Early sleep separation and why your nervous system may have been in low-level survival mode from the very beginning
✨ Enmeshment and codependency: what it looks like to grow up not knowing where you end and your parent begins
✨ Erika Commissar's research on the first three years of life and why it matters so much for eating disorder recovery
✨ Why the myth of quality over quantity time does not hold up for babies and toddlers
✨ Why talk therapy alone often cannot reach wounds that formed before you had words
✨ Four practical things you can begin with: permission to grieve, somatic work, writing to your younger self, and understanding the eating disorder as a messenger rather than an enemy
✨ Victoria answers a listener question from someone who is pregnant and exhausted by the fight
Powerful quotes from the episode:
💬 "Trauma is not the event itself. It is the wound that the absence of what should have been there leaves inside of you."
💬 "Your eating disorder was not a malfunction. It was an incredibly intelligent adaptation."
💬 "A child doesn't think my parents are struggling. A child thinks there must be something wrong with me."
💬 "You can spend years understanding it intellectually and still feel it in your body like it is the most real thing in the world. Because the body keeps the score."
💬 "If you keep telling yourself you had a happy childhood and there is nothing to heal, you are leaving your inner child out in the cold. She is in there. She has always been in there."
If any of this is landing in your body rather than just your head, that is the work beginning. She has been waiting. And you can go back for her now.
Much love. 💛
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