Mothering and Recovery Eleven
Recap
Active eating disorders don’t reduce stress in a biological sense. The circadian rhythm and levels of glucocorticoids (our stress hormones) are negatively impacted.
Creating energy deficits in the body causes dulled and dysregulated thoughts, emotions and motivation. That gets interpreted as feeling less stressed for those on the eating disorder spectrum.
Intermittent fasting and orthorexia used by social-influencer tradwives are ways of masking stress but don’t realize actual biological stress alleviation.
Bela Kellogg’s review of online non-influencer tradwives showed they experience financial precarity, feelings of inadequacy, inequality, anxiety, lack of support and burnout.
Using tools to impair the cognitive recognition of stress in the body short-circuits a person’s ability to determine whether those stressors could be eradicated.
Close to half of all mothers experience trauma during the birthing experience. Those with eating disorders have a very high rate of co-morbid PTSD as well.
PTSD is a memory disorder where NLP and EMDR help to consolidate previously unconsolidated memories of trauma.
Untreated PTSD creates its own drive to knock down brain function, so treatment for PTSD is important.
Stress management is us knocking down or manipulating executive functions in the brain to create either the mistaken sense that we have de-stressed, or to realize a temporary physiological reprieve from stress.
From meditation and exercise to weed and psychedelics, it’s not possible to identify ahead of time what thing suits which person, or who might benefit or be harmed.
Attitudes towards one brain manipulation tool over another are entirely culturally-defined.
Pulling on the levers of our living chemistry is just part of being human. But when we have to lean on a lever hard to “stay sane” or “manage stress,” we are in trouble.
Choose brain manipulation tools wisely and apply external clamps, including social settings, to maximize benefits while limiting harms.
The label “mother” isn’t an additive label for women, but rather a subtractive one. By contrast, “father” is an additive one for men.
It’s likely motherhood is more tough these days because there is a fundamental fissure in how we define that role in a capitalist system.
Child development is a long process. It’s seen as burdensome because any reduction in waged labour for mothers is counter to supporting a never ending growing Economy.
The loss of longer interbirth intervals, alloparenting, and opportunities to learn to parent in a multi-generational tribe has greatly ratcheted the inherent stress, isolation, devaluation, and inequality for mothers today.
A universal stressor for mothers is unequal distribution unpaid labour (childcare and housework). Equal distribution of that unpaid work can greatly lower the amount of stress that may still need to be managed.
Attending to the logistics of contingencies for ill health and death of mothers, no matter the family circumstance in which they find themselves, also removes stressors thereby lowering the need for stress management.
Techniques
As already repeated multiple times, restriction is no longer a brain manipulation tool available to you as a mother if you want to recover from an eating disorder.
Once you’ve attended to any underlying PTSD with treatment and you’ve become aware of any internalized bias and stigma that has inadvertently led you to frame your role as mother in ways that add to your stress, then you begin the work of negotiating adequate fairness in the division of the unpaid labour of childcare and housework. You also attend to financial and legal documentation requirements to ease your concerns around your children’s wellbeing and your own ability to support their needs if any external circumstances change for you and/or for any other wage earning adults who are in the mix.
You work to refer to your role as mother as unpaid labour even though that pushes up against the dominant cultural framing that it must be treated as a calling existing in some beatific state beyond labour. That it is unpaid labour is not a judgment on the appreciation and love you have for your children. Unpaid labour is not synonymous with “drudgery;” it represents the inherent responsibility of that work as opposed to the pursuit of anything attempted during your times of leisure.
Clamps and Replacements
Eating is a social bonding space for humans. That we have many more meals alone than in a group in our modern world is yet another aberration when compared to tens of thousands of years’ worth of energizing our bodies and our connections to others at the same time.
To help keep you refeeding and recovering, commit to having breakfast and dinner as a family (I’ll get to challenges around shift work in a moment).
Eat with your children in the morning. There are countless studies on the mental health and developmental benefits for children eating breakfasts with the family.[1],[2],[3] Even if you’re focused on feeding a baby on solid food, make space for eating as well at the same time, even if it’s a protein bar in one hand while the baby spoon is in the other.
Eat dinner with your family together in the evening. As with breakfast, electronic devices should not be present because it turns out the benefits of these communal meals are nullified if electronic devices (TV, smartphones, etc.) are present.[4],[5],[6]
While it’s great that the children will benefit from these communal meals, it really can’t be overstated how protective a communal meal will be for a mother attempting to reach remission from an eating disorder. Communal meals really act as a clamp on the cycle of food avoidance in the pursuit of a knocked down prefrontal cortex.
Reality vs. Ideal and How to Bridge the Gap
The reality of trying to get out of the house in the morning or to co-ordinate evening schedules for a communal evening meal often requires you crack open multiple calendars and have daily family meetings to try to figure out how to make it all happen day by day.
Usually, with afterschool activities, commutes to and from offices, schools, daycares and afterschool care, on top of shiftwork for the adults, and a universal level of sleep deprivation for every member of the household, everyone gets in energy as and when they can.
It’s worth the effort for you and your children to chip away at the organizing challenge to up the number of family meals together throughout the week. Often breakfasts are a bit more straightforward as there are fewer “before work” and “before school” activities that mean family members have to blast out of the home before everyone else.
In the interests of fair division of unpaid labour, make sure that preparing food for breakfast involves the whole family (when appropriate) and that the adults split the effort of organizing the meals and perhaps preparing it all the night before, or whatever works.
If none of this is feasible given your responsibilities for paid and unpaid labour right now, then here are two options for creating communal eating. If you have paid work, then buddy up with a person or two in your office to have a communal breakfast before work starts (not just a coffee). Do the same by taking lunch breaks together. If you’re a stay-at-home mom, then get out to any of the coffee shops where they have mom and baby mid-morning/kid friendly atmospheres, and commit to having a muffin or sandwich along with a coffee while you’re there. You’ll likely get to know other moms who go there at the same time, and it will end up as a communal meal for you. If you’re spending time with your kid and you’re offering them a snack or a meal because they’re hungry, eat with them—even if it’s in the car on the way to a soccer practice. There are plenty of other posts on this site on keeping snacks around everywhere. Remember that the thought of food is hunger [look at Extreme Hunger One and Two and The Experience of Hunger]
If the thought of food pops into your head, your body needs energy. If it’s been a bad busy stressful day, don’t say to yourself “I’ll get back to eating tomorrow,” eat immediately.
If you need more reminders and guidance, then look up all the posts under Challenges and the Brain Retraining posts as these things apply no matter the roles you are trying to navigate.
Above all, set whatever reminders you can that tell you: “Avoiding food or using any of my usual techniques around food/exercise/etc. to try to ease the stress in my life, doesn’t work. My stress is biologically unchanged by doing these things and I’m using the wrong tool to knock down my brain function—dangerous to my health and wellbeing.” If it’s post-it notes scattered up around your home and car, or daily reminders on your phone, or an affirmation in the mirror when you’re brushing your teeth each morning, it all serves to make the flawed bias explicit: “I feel better when I avoid food so that means I have eased my stress.” — and you haven’t.
Replacing with Other Tools
As I mentioned in an earlier section, it’s the human condition to knock down the executive functions of our brains. The hierarchy of good to bad tools is purely cultural which means if you have judgments around any particular approach, it won’t have much behind it. However, it’s still challenging to determine what is suitable when there’s really no assurances ahead of time that any one person will benefit from any particular tool or not. To lower the chance of negative impacts, always remember that doing any knock down of executive functions in groups may help to place appropriate clamps and improve the benefits while lowering the risk of any costs.
When researching everything for this paper, I came across a good chunk of research on wine moms. Some suggest that the trend is an expression of feminist freedom (rejecting the framing that drinking as a mother is an irresponsible behaviour to be shunned) and also drinking in social situations absent the presence of any men is much safer for women and lowers the risk of negative outcomes (drinks being spiked with gamma-hydroxybutyric acid (GHB—the date rape drug), being taken advantage of, being a victim of robbery/assault/sexual assault/violence…). If alcohol is consumed in social settings for you, and you find the lowered inhibition actually allows for you to connect with your hunger and eat more, then it may have value. However, alcohol is one of our more blunt force executive function knock-down tools and it might be best to start with some of the tools I list below for replacing your go to of food avoidance/exercise etc.
For repeated emphasis, the following tools are completely off the menu for anyone on the eating disorder spectrum: restricting food, exercise, and substances that might be used to help you avoid food intake. There are still plenty of options that might help you disconnect from stressors even if they don’t actually lower your physiological stress levels: meditation, arts, crafts, music, walks that are about very purposeful slow observations of nature (you have to watch it doesn’t just end up as power walks/exercise), being around unstressed animals, connecting with others (socializing, volunteering, classes for things like languages, home repair, cooking…), stretching, or resting and napping away from electronic gadgets.
These ideas are all well and good, but it’s important to emphasize that you need help as a mother to have the leisure time that’s required to enact any of these things. Don’t get caught in a trap of wishing, hoping, or expecting that your partner, or alloparents, will swoop in. Have the discussions and negotiations and hash out solutions that are going to give you true leisure time to a level that is equal to your partner, if one is in the equation, or involves alloparents giving you true leisure time and not just time to complete more unpaid labour.
Hopefully at the end of this long, multi-part piece you have come away with a better sense that 1) mothering challenges are systemic and not your failure as a mother, 2) the stress is endemic to our modern Economy and only so much can be done to change up situations to ease that external stress, 3) having ways of knocking down executive function in the brain is universal but also specific to whether you get overall benefits or costs from one tool over another, and 4) pursuing your recovery benefits you and your children.
Kameyama N, Morimoto Y, Hashimoto A, Inoue H, Nagaya I, Nakamura K, Kuwano T. The relationship between family meals and mental health problems in Japanese elementary school children: A cross-sectional study. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. 2021 Sep 2;18(17):9281.
Pearson N, Biddle SJ, Gorely T. Family correlates of breakfast consumption among children and adolescents. A systematic review. Appetite. 2009 Feb 1;52(1):1-7.
Ramseyer Winter V, Jones A, O’Neill E. Eating breakfast and family meals in adolescence: the role of body image. Social work in public health. 2019 Apr 3;34(3):230-8.
FitzPatrick E, Edmunds LS, Dennison BA. Positive effects of family dinner are undone by television viewing. Journal of the American Dietetic Association. 2007 Apr 1;107(4):666-71.
Nelson JJ. Are we happy now?: assessing the role of electronic technology in family ritual and parental well-being (Doctoral dissertation).
Robinson CA, Domoff SE, Kasper N, Peterson KE, Miller AL. The healthfulness of children's meals when multiple media and devices are present. Appetite. 2022 Feb 1;169:105800.
Image in synopsis: Flickr.com: Devine-studios
