Eating Disorder Recovery When Grieving: A Therapist’s Perspective

TL; DR

Grief is one of the most powerful threats to eating disorder recovery, and one of the least talked about. Written from personal experience, this blog explores how the sudden loss of a mother tested years of hard-won recovery from emotional eating and bulimia. And what it actually took to stay the course through unimaginable pain. The urge to numb grief with food or alcohol was real, and some lapses did happen.

But the key insight is that a momentary lapse is not a relapse. With support from a dietitian, a toolkit of genuine coping skills, and the DBT practice of radical acceptance, recovery remained within reach even in the darkest moments. The takeaway is both honest and hopeful. Even with support from eating disorder therapy, grief will test your recovery. There is no perfect way to navigate it, and being gentle with yourself during lapses is not a weakness. It’s what keeps a stumble from becoming a spiral.

How Does Grief Affect Eating Disorder Recovery?

On May 8^th, 2017, my mother died due to complications from cancer. It was an unexpected death. I still cannot believe she died. My mom was diagnosed in January and passed away in May. She had gone to the hospital for trouble breathing and never left.

I can clearly remember going back to my childhood home and seeing her sneakers in her room, waiting for her to return them. And I cried so hard seeing everything she had touched just days before, but left, never to feel her embrace again. I was one of those things she left.

It’s been several years now since I lost my mom. It was a year that tested me in so many ways: emotionally, physically, and spiritually. One thing I had to face was how my eating disorder and my longstanding recovery would play out through the worst thing that has ever happened to me.

Remaining in Recovery While Losing My Mom

I have my own history of emotional eating and bulimia nervosa. It started at a young age. Whenever I was sad as a child, my mom’s solution to cheer me up was a trip to the bakery for a giant cookie. My emotional eating and my hatred of being the larger kid were just some of the many factors that led me to a path of destructive behaviors of binging, purging, and restricting.

I’ve been through enough therapy and treatment that I am able to recognize moments when I find myself starting to eat mindlessly. I check in with what emotions or events are going on. I have, for the most part, overcome being an emotional eater. But then I was hit with an intensity of emotions that I had never felt before. The seven stages of grief are very real, and I definitely went through and felt each of them.

From my anger, sadness, and pleading to bring my mom back, to having brief moments of acceptance wash over me on a daily basis. My sadness felt like someone had placed a brick on top of my heart. Trying to breathe became difficult at times. I was angry, intensely angry, at cancer, the doctors, the hospital, at God, my mother, and at myself. We hear so often how eating disorders fester when we feel a loss of control. Losing my mother was the ultimate reminder, “you have absolutely no control over this.”

Moving From Numbness, to Acceptance, to Coping

In the early weeks and even months of living in a world where my mother no longer existed, I wanted comfort and distraction. I wanted food. And I wanted alcohol to numb. I wanted anything that would take this pain away. And in those moments of pure sadness, I consumed. I knew full well this wasn’t the way to handle my emotions. So I decided I needed to reach out to my dietitian because, yes, even professional eating disorder therapists need tune-ups. I remember sitting in my dietitian’s office crying because I gained weight and was feeling out of control with my body and my feelings.

I quickly felt hypocritical as an advocate for all bodies are beautiful and guilty because weight gain should not be something I should be crying about. But I had just lost my mother. Worse things have occurred other than gaining a few pounds. My dietitian reminded me that I know how to eat and that my body will go back to where it should be when I honor my hunger and satiety cues. But then she shocked me by saying, “Carolyn, maybe you needed to allow yourself to binge in those moments. So it happened. You binged. It’s done. Now, go back to your real coping skills.”

My dietitian gave me permission to accept my binges. She demonstrated compassion for me when I had no self-compassion. She was right. Sometimes we have to be okay with where we are at. My dietitian did not give me the green light to revert back to maladaptive behaviors. She pushed me back on a path of not beating myself up during a time when the last thing I needed was to hurt myself more.

So, How Do You Manage Eating Disorder Recovery In a Time of Grief?

Here are some of the things I had to accept (and avoid) during my journey through grief and eating disorder recovery.

Don’t go back to your eating disorder.

Just don’t. You know it won’t help, and when you are feeling low, why make yourself feel lower? But, if you skip a meal or eat a few extra cookies, just know that it is not a relapse. I do not consider my binging moments a relapse. They happened. I engaged, and then I stepped away. Be gentle toward yourself and give yourself permission to say, “It’s okay, it happened. Now, what can I do to get back to my recovery?”

Go back to your coping skills.

Maybe I could have engaged in binging and purging. Maybe I could have thrown my hands in the air and said: “What’s the point?” But I didn’t. In all honesty, I knew this wasn’t something I wanted. So, I made a list of things for me to do to help me through those really tough moments. I took time off from work and went figure skating with friends. The ice was always a very therapeutic place for me, and just being able to feel that cold air whip across my face made me feel happy.

I spent time journaling, cuddling with my dog, and reaching out to friends and family when I needed to talk. I began nightly walks with one of my girlfriends, where we had heart-to-heart talks. Essentially, I made self-care a priority. You have to. The small lapses that I fell into never once trumped the real self-care that I was doing for myself. If I had beaten myself up for binges and weight gain, then it could have sent me on that spiral back to a full relapse. Self-care may mean forgiving yourself for your lapses. Forgiving myself helped me continue to move forward.

Death really sucks.

Losing someone you love is painful. It can be a torturous pain. There is no way around that. Losing my mother and thinking about her still to this very moment makes my stomach twist, my heart pound, and my eyes water. There will be bad days. I use a lot of radical acceptance in my grief, where I acknowledge this is how it is, and I have to figure out now how I continue to live in a world where my mom isn’t calling me. It’s hard to do.

Believe me, there are days I do not want to accept this. But if I have to pull from my DBT skills workbook, acting the opposite is what gets me through the rough days. I don’t want to accept that my mother is gone, but that is the reality. I do not, however, have to forget her and how she has impacted my life.

It’s okay to cry.

It’s okay to feel whatever it is you are feeling, and it is okay if those feelings come and go in minutes or if they last for days. There is no wrong way to grieve. During my grief, I went to Nashville for a vacation, I would go out on weekends with friends and laugh, and I eventually moved to California. I managed to feel happy on some holidays and cried on others. I did not stop living, but I allowed my grief to take space in my life.

In the end, going back to my eating disorder would just have caused more chaos in an already chaotic time in my life. I know it won’t give me control, it won’t make me happy, and it certainly will not bring my mother back. I have this blue butterfly pendant necklace that my mom bought me before I went into an intensive outpatient program. It gave me strength then, and I wear it now to continue to remind myself that my mother was every bit a part of my recovery and is every bit still a part of me. Now, why would I want to throw all that away?

To work with one of our compassionate therapists at EDTLA, we invite you to contact us. You don’t have to navigate grief or recovery on your own.

Grief Doesn’t Have to Derail Your Recovery. Eating Disorder Therapy in Los Angeles, CA, Can Help You Hold On

If loss has shaken the foundation of your eating disorder recovery and you’re struggling to find your footing again, eating disorder therapy can provide the steady, compassionate support you need to navigate grief without losing everything you’ve worked so hard to build. Working with a specialized eating disorder therapist during one of life’s most painful chapters means having someone in your corner who understands both the emotional weight of grief and the very real ways it can threaten your relationship with food.

You don’t have to white-knuckle your way through grief alone or wonder whether a lapse means your recovery is over. It doesn’t. Evidence-based therapy can help you rebuild your coping toolkit, practice self-compassion during the hardest moments, and find a path through loss that doesn’t require turning back to your eating disorder for comfort or control. At our Los Angeles eating disorder therapy practice, our experienced and deeply compassionate therapists specialize in supporting clients through the intersection of grief, trauma, and eating disorder recovery. Meeting you exactly where you are without judgment. Here’s how to reach us:

Contact Eating Disorder Therapy LA directly. We’re here and ready to support you through this
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Take the first step toward protecting your recovery. Even in, and especially during, the hardest seasons of your life

Other Services Eating Disorder Therapy LA Offers in California

When grief threatens to pull you back into old eating disorder patterns, having a skilled therapist who understands the deep connection between emotional pain and disordered eating can be what keeps your recovery intact. With supportive eating disorder therapy, you can expect to develop stronger emotional coping tools, navigate the unpredictability of grief without turning to your eating disorder for relief, and emerge from one of life’s hardest experiences with your recovery — and your sense of self — still standing.

At Eating Disorder Therapy LA, our compassionate team provides individualized, evidence-based care to clients of all ages and backgrounds, including adults, college students, children, teens, and caregivers navigating the full spectrum of eating disorders and related concerns. In addition to supporting clients through the emotional complexities that intersect with eating disorder recovery, we offer specialized therapy for Anorexia Nervosa, Atypical Anorexia, Bulimia Nervosa, Binge Eating Disorder, Avoidant/Restrictive Food Intake Disorder (ARFID), and Family-Based Treatment (FBT). Our team also provides support for Excessive Exercise, Body Image challenges, and Phobias Related to Swallowing, Choking, and Vomiting.

To make compassionate, high-quality care as accessible as possible during life’s most difficult seasons, our Los Angeles therapy practice offers both online counseling and group therapy for eating disorders, alongside small group FBT and ARFID consultations, eating disorder education, speaking and training, school programs, and clinical supervision for eating disorder therapists.

For further reading and support, we invite you to explore our eating disorder blog and Dr. Mulheim’s published books: When Your Teen Has an Eating Disorder and The Weight-Inclusive CBT Workbook for Eating Disorders (available in 2026). To connect with our team, call (323) 743-1122 or email Hello@EDTLA.com. We’re here to help you protect your recovery, no matter what life brings your way.