...for people who experience it is the tendency towards theft than sometimes accompanies an ED. I think (not sure, too lazy to check now) that there's a higher incidence of this with bulimia and binge types than with restrictive types of ED's.
Essentially what's going on here is that we try to fill an emotional emptiness with food. And sometimes we try to fill it with things. Things that we take. The rush of the theft is momentarily distracting the same way that a binge is, and sometimes the two get mixed together and then we're shoplifting the food we will binge on.
Thing is, ED people are usually pretty convinced that they're no good. And compulsive theft just underscores that feeling. We're obviously bad, we think, because bad people steal. So if you have experienced this phenomenon, understand that it's not you being bad. It's that you're reaching out for anything at all that will shove away your feelings for a second or two. And understand that you are not alone. This is a really common thing, it's just even harder to talk about than all the rest of it which we already know is damn hard to talk about.
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