Why Can’t I Trust Myself?
On Alexithymia, Eating Disorders, and the Body You Learned to Override
You've probably been told to "listen to your body" more times than you can count. Trust your gut. Notice what you're feeling. And maybe you've nodded along — while privately thinking: I have no idea how to do that. When you check in, what you find isn't clarity. It's noise. A restlessness you can't name. Signals that you've learned to ignore because the cost of being wrong felt too high.
You Didn't Stop Listening by Accident
For many people who develop complicated relationships with food, the disconnection from internal signals didn't come from nowhere. It came from a very intelligent adaptation.
Belonging, feeling acceptable, lovable, not too much and not too little, is one of the most fundamental human needs. And for a lot of people, early on, belonging required a kind of self-editing. Shrinking desires. Performing okayness. Hitting a standard, visible or invisible, that felt like the price of admission to love or belonging or being enough. Perfectionism isn't vanity, it's often a survival strategy dressed up as a personality trait.
How This Shows Up in Relationships
The same adaptation that learned to override internal signals around food tends to show up everywhere — and nowhere more clearly than in close relationships.
If you learned that your needs were too much, or that expressing them risked the connection, you probably got very good at reading other people instead. Anticipating what they need. Adjusting to the room. Making yourself palatable. This can look like empathy from the outside — and it is, partly — but underneath it is often a kind of chronic self-abandonment. You become so attuned to others that your own signal gets crowded out entirely.
This shows up as overaccommodating — saying yes when you mean no, sweeping conflict under the rug, finding that you've organized your entire emotional life around keeping someone else comfortable. Or it shows up as a loss of self so gradual you don't notice until you're deep in a relationship and question who you are in it.
This feels familiar because it is. It's the same move you learned to make with your own desires: not suppressing them exactly, but sliding past them so quickly they barely registered. Conflict, like hunger, like want, like need, became something to manage around rather than move through. The relationship stays intact on the surface. But something underneath quietly accumulates.
When the Body Becomes Unreadable
This is where alexithymia enters, and it's worth naming precisely because it's so frequently missed. Alexithymia involves difficulty identifying and describing feelings, and trouble differentiating between emotional and physical sensations. The line between "I'm anxious" and "I'm hungry" and "I'm exhausted" and "something is wrong" becomes genuinely blurry. Not because you're not paying attention. Because the signals themselves stopped translating cleanly, somewhere along the way.
What makes this hard to recognize is that many people who experience it are extraordinarily articulate. They can explain their patterns, describe their history, reflect thoughtfully on all of it. The words are there. What often isn't — or isn't reliably there — is the felt sense underneath. The ability to land inside an experience rather than narrate around it from a safe distance.
You can be completely fluent in the language of feelings and still have no idea what you're actually feeling right now, in your body, in real time.
The Logic of It
Eating disorders are often, at their root, attempts to adapt to situations that felt unmanageable — to create legibility and control in a body and world that felt chaotic or demanding or unsafe. When you can't trust your internal signals, it makes a certain sense to find external ones. Rules. Rituals. A system that feels more reliable than the confusing noise inside.
Understanding this doesn't mean staying there. It means you're not broken. It means there's a logic to what developed — and that logic can be worked with, slowly, in the right context.
The Insight Trap
Many people I work with arrive having already done enormous amounts of self-reflection. They've been in therapy. They've read the books. They can trace every pattern back to its origin. And they're still stuck — which feels, in a particular way, like its own kind of failure. I know all of this. Why isn't it helping?
Because insight and felt experience are not the same thing. Knowing why something happens doesn't automatically give you access to the feeling underneath it — and it's the feeling that needs somewhere to go. The words can become their own form of distance. Intellectualizing is another defense mechanism that protects us from an uncomfortable feeling by way of describing an experience from the outside rather than metabolizing it from within.
What Actually Moves Things
Here's something the research supports and that I've seen repeatedly in this work: saying things out loud to another person — things you might not have even let yourself think clearly in your own head — can actually change the signals your brain sends back to you. Not because the insight is new. Because something shifts when we speak into a relationship rather than into the privacy of our own minds.
For someone who learned to override their internal experience in order to belong, this is quietly significant. For many people, repair happens in relationship, not just through reflection alone. It's about finding — slowly, with someone who can hold the weight of it — that your experience can be spoken. That you can feel something, name it imperfectly, and not lose the connection. That the self you learned to edit is actually survivable to know.
Hope is part of this work too — not a feeling you're supposed to conjure, but something that can be held by someone else while you're still building it. Old adaptations loosen slowly. That's not failure. That's how change actually works.
If This Sounds Like You
You don't need the right words. You don't need a diagnosis or certainty or readiness to give anything up. You just need to recognize something of yourself here, and feel even a little curious about whether it could be different.
That's enough to start.
I see individuals in my Manhattan office and remotely. If any of this resonates, I'd welcome a conversation — reach out for a free consultation, no intake paperwork required.
