Why Daughters of Narcissists Are Prone Toward Eating Disorders

It’s All About Salt

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My father was a narcissist and it affected his heart. I am not a doctor, but I learned a fair amount of medicine in the course of watching two parents die. One of colon cancer and the other of heart failure.

Their diseases were connected. And they are connected to my disease. Which was an eating disorder for almost three decades of my life.

I was severely bulimic — throwing up five to 10 times a day — for long stretches of my life. I still have to be careful if I lean over too soon after I eat. Because my body was so trained for so many years to regurgitate when I lean over that it sometimes forgets that’s no longer what we do when we put food in our stomach.

I began seeing a therapist when I was 15 to discuss my eating disorder, which had firmly taken hold by then. I had come to quite like my eating disorder and was not interested in letting it go. It helped me survive. I understood this instinctively. Which is how I came to it as a survival method.

I was bulimic to survive.

Because my body was desperately attempting to regulate the jangly electrolytes flying around inside me in response to the insanity in my household. My blood pressure was tied to my dad’s. And his was off…