I Didn’t Realize I Was Doing This To Avoid My Feelings

By: Jennifer Rollin, LCSW-C, Therapist And Founder of The Eating Disorder Center

When I was younger, I told myself that I restricted food because I wanted to lose weight.

That was true to a degree. My eating disorder convinced me that becoming thinner would solve a lot of my problems.

What I could not recognize at the time was that the eating disorder was serving another function. Underneath all the thoughts about “discipline,” “health,” and weight loss was something deeper. Restricting food helped me to temporarily numb out from emotions that felt overwhelming.

I would not have seen it that way back then. If someone had pointed it out, I probably would have brushed it off. My eating disorder seemed entirely focused on food and my body. Looking back now, I can see how much emotional and mental space it consumed. When anxiety showed up, I focused on calories. When I felt lonely, I concentrated on food rules. When difficult questions about my life surfaced, I redirected my attention to controlling what I ate.

Food restriction gave me something specific and measurable to focus on when my inner world felt chaotic.

What is striking to me now is that I believed I was moving closer to happiness. I thought that if I could achieve the “ideal” body, according to society's ridiculous fatphobic standards, confidence and peace would naturally follow. I imagined that self-acceptance was waiting for me somewhere on the other side of weight loss.

But that was only part of the appeal. The other part was that the restriction allowed me to temporarily disconnect from what I was feeling.

When your body is underfed, hunger becomes impossible to ignore. It demands attention. The planning, tracking, calculating, and obsessing take up enormous amounts of mental energy. In my case, that energy was often borrowed from emotions I did not know how to handle. Restriction became a way to shift my focus away from feelings that seemed too painful, complicated, or intense.

As I learned more about emotional avoidance, I started noticing this pattern everywhere.

Eating disorders are not the only example. Dieting, drinking, overworking, doomscrolling, and other compulsive behaviors can serve a similar purpose. While these behaviors are complex and can be connected to many factors, including trauma and experiences of oppression, they can also function as a way to create distance from difficult emotions.

Some people turn to alcohol. Others turn to restricting or bingeing. Some bury themselves in work. Others spend hours scrolling through social media. The specifics may differ, but many people are trying to accomplish the same thing. They are trying not to feel something.

The problem is that emotions do not disappear simply because we avoid them.

I often think about emotional avoidance as trying to keep a beach ball underwater. At first, it seems possible. You can push it down and keep it there for a while. But the ball is constantly pushing back. The pressure never goes away. The longer you hold it beneath the surface, the more energy it takes. Eventually, you get tired and the ball shoots back up.

Our emotions work in a similar way. Anxiety does not disappear because we ignore it. Grief does not fade because we refuse to acknowledge it. Loneliness remains present even when we distract ourselves from it. We can delay these emotions, but we cannot make them vanish.

Another challenge is that emotional numbing does not only affect painful feelings. Many of us imagine we can shut off anxiety, sadness, or fear while keeping access to joy and connection. In reality, it rarely works that way. The same mechanisms that dull emotional pain often reduce our ability to experience pleasure, excitement, wonder, and closeness with others.

When I was deep in my eating disorder, I thought I was protecting myself from difficult emotions. In some ways, I was. At the same time, I was disconnecting from many of the experiences that made life meaningful. My world became smaller and flatter. I felt like a shadow of myself. I spent so much energy trying not to feel pain that I also limited my ability to fully feel anything else.

That is one of the hidden costs of emotional avoidance. The behaviors we rely on for relief often create the very emptiness we are trying to escape. We scroll because we feel disconnected, only to feel even more disconnected afterward. We drink to get away from anxiety and wake up feeling worse the next day. We seek control through food and end up feeling trapped by the very thing that promised we’d “feel in control.” 

We reach for these behaviors because we want relief. What we often get instead is distance from ourselves.

One of the things that helped me was not learning how to get rid of uncomfortable emotions. It was learning that I could experience them without falling apart. Anxiety felt less threatening once I stopped treating it like an emergency. Sadness became easier to tolerate when I stopped believing it needed to be fixed immediately. The emotions I spent years running from became more manageable once I allowed them to be there.

I understand why people reach for their phones, pour another drink, throw themselves into work, or look for another distraction. I understand because I did those things too. But I have learned that reducing pain by shutting down emotionally comes with a significant cost. Eventually, you are not just avoiding painful emotions. You are limiting your ability to fully engage with life. On top of that, you are left dealing with the compulsive behavior itself and the influence it can begin to have over your life.

The goal was never to feel good all the time. The goal was to be fully alive. And being fully alive requires a willingness to experience the entire range of human emotions, including the uncomfortable ones.

You cannot selectively opt out of grief and remain fully available for love. You cannot avoid vulnerability and remain fully open to connection. You cannot spend your life holding the beach ball underwater without eventually exhausting yourself.
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Sooner or later, it rises.

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Jennifer Rollin, MSW, LCSW-C (she/her), is an award-winning eating disorder therapist and the founder of The Eating Disorder Center, a specialized therapy practice for eating disorders and body image concerns. Jennifer uses ACT, CBT, and DBT to help clients find freedom from eating disorders and body image struggles.  Jennifer is recognized as a leading eating disorder expert and was named one of the top professionals in the field by a premier treatment center. She is the recipient of the Best of Bethesda Award for Best Individual Therapist (2025) and the Best of Rockville Award (2020–2024). She helps clients to live full, meaningful lives, beyond food and body image concerns.

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The Eating Disorder Center is a premier outpatient eating disorder therapy center founded by Jennifer Rollin. We specialize in helping children, teens, and adults struggling with anorexia, binge eating disorder, bulimia, OSFED, and body image issues. We provide eating disorder therapy in Rockville, MD, easily accessible to individuals in Potomac, North Potomac, Bethesda, Olney, Silver Spring, Germantown, and Washington, D.C. We also provide eating disorder therapy in Arlington, Virginia and virtually throughout Virginia. Additionally, we offer eating disorder therapy virtually in Florida, Pennsylvania, and California. We provide eating disorder and EMDR trauma therapy in Rockville, Maryland and virtually throughout Maryland and Virginia. We provide eating disorder recovery coaching via Zoom to people worldwide. Connect with us through our website at www.theeatingdisordercenter.com