Honoring Lent While Honoring Your Recovery
Blog Post by Contributing Editor Heather Clark, LPC, LCPC, CBTP
Welcome to Lent! It’s the time of year when many Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Protestant churches spend 40 days preparing their hearts for Easter. Typically, this starts with confession of and repentance from sin - recognizing our brokenness - and continues with a focus on increased connection with God. The three main spiritual practices of Lent are usually fasting, prayer, and financial giving, but most people tend to focus on the fasting part, which can be challenging when you’re in recovery from disordered eating!
So let’s take a closer look at what fasting actually is. The purpose of fasting is to humble yourself, to intentionally seek the Lord, and to be attentive to how God might be speaking into your life. One of the clearest themes about fasting from cover to cover of the Bible is that God is far more concerned with the inner heart of fasting than the outer expressions. There’s good news here - fasting does not have to involve food to be spiritually impactful!
You’ve probably noticed that when discussions about Lent have come up, different emotions bubbled up for you - maybe anxiety, confusion, or shame. Or maybe the part of you that wants to hold onto your disordered eating actually got excited. These emotions are helpful information, letting you know that fasting food is too tangled up psychologically with your eating disorder. And how you feel makes sense, because fasting food can be dangerous in recovery.
Because restrained eating is a foundational symptom of almost all eating disorders, the association in the brain between the disorder and the physical experience of fasting is very strong. This means that fasting food can be a dangerous trigger, regardless of the reason for the fast. Additionally, the mental gymnastics of navigating those triggers would likely get in the way of the spiritual purpose of the fast anyway.
So this year for Lent, let’s focus on the heart instead of the food! If we focus on the purpose of the fast - humbling, seeking, listening - then there are many things we can forego that can serve as regular reminders to connect with God. Try fasting from things like:
Social media (this is a hard one for lots of people!)
TV or YouTube
Make-up or shaving
Spending time in front of the mirror
Alcohol
Shopping (other than basic necessities)
Caffeine
Sleeping in late or hitting the snooze button
Staying up late
Chances are, even if you choose a non-food fast and really zero in on the intention behind the fast, you’ll still have a lot of food-fasting-talk swirling around you for the next 40 days or so. This can be really hard to navigate, and maybe it’s time to up your support level. If you’re looking for a safe, supportive environment to navigate recovery during Lent, Rock Recovery’s therapy groups might be a good fit for you.
When I talk about this with clients, they often say that they’re afraid that fasting from something else won’t have the same effect. Maybe that’s your fear, too. Here’s my personal opinion on that: There are lots of medical and mental conditions people have that prevent them from fasting from food. I don’t believe that God would withhold the fullness of connection with Him from those people, just because of their conditions. There’s nothing magical about fasting from food. It’s all about your heart.
And if you’re looking for a therapist who deeply understands the unique ins and outs of your Christian life and background, then Every Body Psychotherapy might be a good fit for you. Book a free, 15-minute phone call here.
If you’re a church leader wondering how to best lead your Christian community through Lent in a way that’s sensitive to disordered eating, check out this blog about that very topic.
Heather Clark, LPC, LCPC, CBTP
Owner/Therapist, Every Body Psychotherapy
About the Contributor: Heather Clark (she/her) is the owner of Every Body Psychotherapy, a therapy practice that specializes in the treatment of eating disorders, trauma, and more. Heather is a Licensed Professional Counselor who specializes in treating disordered eating through a trauma-informed, weight-inclusive lens. Her specialties include binge eating disorder, bulimia, anorexia, body dissatisfaction, chronic dieting, intuitive eating, and orthorexia. In addition to working with eating disorders, she also enjoys counseling those dealing with trauma, anxiety, self-worth, shame, self-compassion, and Christian spirituality/spiritual trauma. Heather is passionate about the Health At Every Size(R) philosophy in her work work and her life. Heather’s approach is rooted in respect for her clients' instinctive ways of surviving, while fostering a spirit of gentle, curious experimentation to find new, more sustainable ways to move forward. Heather is also a Certified Body Trust Provider, which helps equip her to support folks journeying toward liberation with food and body, as well as a deep sense of being at home in their bodies.