Anorexia – an abusive relationship

Blog entry

Published on 22 October 2025

Author: Fiona, mid-20s with anorexia and autism

 

My mum has often compared my struggles with anorexia to someone trying to break free from an abusive relationship. I think she is right. 

To begin with, anorexia promises happiness, or at least relief from some difficulty or pain in your life. it comes with flowers and smiles and you are lured in, believing you have found a way to… cope. Something that can fill a need, make you feel safe, wanted, enough. 

It may work for a while, it may bring you a sense of calm and containment and you may even believe you feel better with it. But quickly, the tides change. It has manipulated you into thinking it is all you need, to the detriment of everything and everyone else in your life. 

It shuts you off from your loved ones and the things that genuinely bring you comfort and happiness with the false promises of relief if goals are met, but the ever moving goal posts mean it takes more and more time and energy to even get close.

Before long, it is controlling your every move. Everything you do ‘isn’t enough’, is wrong, anorexia is unpleasable. You restrict more, you exercise more, you do everything it tells you, and maybe once in a blue moon, it’ll praise you. You will be so overwhelmed that you finally pleased it, you go for more, more, more. But it’s never enough.

The more you give in, the stronger it gets.

It’s gets to a point where you have no friends, no one to talk to. Anorexia has convinced you that you don’t need friends. Your worthless, you don’t deserve friends. You have anorexia, you couldn’t possibly want anymore.

People around you notice the change, you’ve become withdrawn, sad and anxious. Consumed. You push them away – not because you don’t want their help, deep down you know their words of concern are true, but because you are terrified to go against the anorexia, the thing that once calmed the pain has become the source.

It takes time, it takes that final push when you realise the anorexia for what it is. You try to leave, but it comes back, promising things will be different. You believe it because after all, it did help at one point… maybe it will again, maybe it’s changed?

It hasn’t. You fall back, you get worse, you realise what a horrible mistake you’ve made but your too deep. You try to fight but it has the ultimate power. Your stripped bare of everything, your personality, your laugher, your happiness. Your left a shell. Nothing but an empty shell who is both terrified of this thing but also protects it with your life and lie for it to you closest friends.

Overtime, you will hopefully gain strength. Be this from others stepping in, or from your own self. You will fight. You will realise you deserve more. 

But the anorexia will still be there, there will still be all the memories it replays with rose tinted glasses, and you will still be tempted to go back. 

Recovery is a process of understanding that the thing that once eased the pain is not the solution, it never was. It is a process of learning different ways of coping, and strategies to see through the rose tinted glasses and not go back to the anorexia, even when it seems like the only thing that will help.

Recovery is also about mourning, grieving the years spent at the mercy of the anorexia. The years subjected to the torment, being trapped in its talons, unable to engage in life or with loved ones and confused as to why things went from idyllic to torture so quickly.

Recovery is about strengthening your voice against the anorexia, standing up to the lies, the temptation and the anger. It is scary and feels impossible at times, but it feeling impossible doesn’t mean it is impossible – just difficult. The strength to recover is unlike any other. 

 

I can promise you one thing though: to survive the grips of the abusive relationship of anorexia means you are strong enough to survive the recovery. I promise.