For many people with an eating disorder, feelings of isolation can be an everyday experience.

Experts by Experience often describe lives that gradually become smaller, quieter, and more inward. Over time, this can narrow a person’s world, reducing contact not only with friends and family, but also with parts of themselves. Social contact can feel impossible, particularly when shame or fear of being misunderstood are involved, or when energy and cognitive capacity are consumed by managing the illness itself. Experts by Experience describe a sense of being present but not participating in their own lives, watching from the margins while the lives of others continue around them.

Isolation does not always mean being alone.

When identity is reduced to an eating disorder, people can lose sight of who they are beyond the illness. A lack of understanding can leave individuals feeling invisible and profoundly alone.

Recovery involves rebuilding old connections and making new ones. This is where community begins to matter — through feeling understood, belonging somewhere, and knowing that you are not alone in your experience.

By Emma, EmpowerED Expert by Experience

Community begins with feeling understood, belonging somewhere, and knowing you are not alone

An eating disorder can feel very lonely. It makes me prickly and it’s difficult to approach. I lose my sense of self as I’m consumed by the eating disorder and simultaneously scare off those closest to me.

This can result in isolation. I feel I’m missing from my own life each time I say “no” to an experience. I decline everything from a biscuit shared amongst colleagues to a trip out because it would interfere with my eating schedule. As I recover, the eating disorder shrinks but I am left still feeling isolated and alone. There’s a hole left by my eating disorder. I no longer fit into the eating disorder identity but neither do I neatly fit back into who I used to be. The eating disorder tries to drive away other people, other life... it makes me small, disconnected and lonely.

However, by building communities we can be helped to bloom once again. Being fully connected is very important to recovery. Whether friends, family, health professionals or fellow volunteers, my communities are thriving and this is what recovery means. It means community.

By Molly, EmpowerED Expert by Experience