How to Support Someone With an Eating Disorder
When someone you care about is struggling with an eating disorder, it can feel like you’re standing at the edge of something you don’t fully understand. You may notice changes in their mood, their energy, or how present they feel with you. You might sense their distress without knowing how to reach them.
Many people who search “how to support someone with an eating disorder” aren’t looking for clinical instructions. They’re looking for reassurance. They want to know how to show up with care, without causing harm.
This is a story about that kind of support.
When Love Meets Fear
Imagine sitting across from someone you love. You can feel that something is heavy for them, but when you ask how they’re doing, they shrug or change the subject. You want to help, but you’re afraid of saying the wrong thing. So you stay quiet. Or you say something practical. Or you try to make things better.
Emotion-Focused Therapy (EFT) understands this moment well.
From an EFT lens, eating disorders are not about food. They are often ways a person learns to survive emotional pain, disconnection, or overwhelm when other options don’t feel safe. The behaviours are not the problem — they are signals.
And when someone is struggling, what they often need most is emotional safety, not correction.
What Emotional Safety Looks Like
Emotional safety doesn’t require the right words. It comes from how you are with someone.
It might look like:
Sitting beside them without pressing for answers
Letting silence exist without rushing to fill it
Saying, “I’m here, even if you don’t know what to say”
From an EFT perspective, healing begins when someone feels seen without being judged, and accepted without being fixed.
Listening for What Isn’t Being Said
Sometimes, the hardest part of supporting someone with an eating disorder is realizing that what they’re struggling with may not be visible. The pain often lives beneath the surface — in feelings of shame, fear, loneliness, or not feeling “enough.”
Rather than asking why something is happening, EFT invites us to gently wonder:
“What feels hardest right now?”
“What do you wish I understood?”
“What happens inside when things feel overwhelming?”
These kinds of questions don’t demand answers. They open space.
When You Feel Helpless
It’s common to feel helpless when someone you love is hurting. You might feel scared. Frustrated. Tired. You might wonder whether you’re doing enough.
EFT reminds us that connection itself is an intervention.
Staying emotionally present, even when you don’t know what to do, can help soften the sense of isolation that keeps struggles in place. You don’t need to carry the solution. You only need to stay reachable.
Avoiding the Trap of Fixing
Many people fall into fixing because they care. They want relief, for their loved one and for themselves.
But when the focus shifts to managing behaviours, the underlying emotional pain can feel unseen. This can unintentionally increase distance.
An EFT-informed approach shifts the focus from:
“How do we stop this?”
to:
“How do we stay connected while this is happening?”
That shift matters.
Encouraging Support, Gently
There may come a time when professional support feels important. From a non-triggering, attachment-based perspective, it helps to frame support as additional care, not a last resort or a sign of failure.
You might say:
“I wonder if having someone outside of us could help hold some of this.”
“We don’t have to figure this out alone.”
Support feels safer when it’s offered with respect for autonomy and timing.
Taking Care of Yourself, Too
Supporting someone with an eating disorder can bring up your own emotions, worry, sadness, even grief. EFT recognizes that relationships are systems. Your experience matters too.
You’re allowed to seek your own support.
You’re allowed to have limits.
You’re allowed to feel what you feel.
Caring deeply doesn’t mean carrying everything alone.
Supporting someone with an eating disorder isn’t about saying the perfect thing. It’s about staying emotionally open in moments when fear urges you to close off.
From an Emotion-Focused perspective, healing grows in relationships where emotions are met with curiosity, compassion, and steadiness.
If you’re walking alongside someone through this, your presence, imperfect, human, and caring, already matters more than you may realize.
