How Marriage Counseling Can Support Eating Disorder Recovery in Salt Lake City, Utah
Guest Blog Post
Eating disorder recovery doesn’t happen in isolation, even though it can often feel that way. For many women in Salt Lake City and across Utah, relationships play a powerful role in both the struggle and the healing process. While I specialize in eating disorder treatment at Maple Canyon Therapy, I’ve seen how deeply a marriage or partnership can be affected when someone is navigating disordered eating.
I’m not a couples therapist, but I regularly witness how valuable couples work can be in recovery. Because of that, I invited Marcus Hunt, a couples therapist based in Utah, to share his perspective. This post grew out of many conversations about the overlap between relationship dynamics and eating disorder healing.
Eating disorders impact your relationship
When you’re in the midst of an eating disorder, it can be hard to see how much it affects your relationships. Many women I work with in Salt Lake City and throughout Utah tell me they believed their struggle was “just about food” or “only impacting them.” But eating disorders rarely stay contained. They shape how you show up with your partner, how connected you feel, and how safe or distant your relationship becomes.
Eating disorders are often all-consuming. They pull mental and emotional energy away from connection and toward anxiety, rules, and self-criticism. They also tend to involve secrecy and isolation not because you’re trying to hurt anyone, but because shame, fear, and exhaustion take over.
Isolation can happen in subtle ways. Maybe you start avoiding social events that involve food. Maybe depression or anxiety makes it harder to engage. Sometimes the distance even extends to your partner. This isn’t about blame or guilt — it’s about recognizing a painful reality: it’s incredibly hard to stay emotionally connected to someone who is constantly battling negative thoughts and exhausting coping behaviors.
Eating disorders impact your self-esteem and relationship
People with eating disorders don’t view themselves in a positive light. They are consumed with how terrible they feel about themselves. Those with eating disorders have higher instances of depression, anxiety, and low self-esteem. They tend to speak negatively about themselves, and their partners feel helpless on what to do because nothing seems to make a difference. A spouse or partner of someone with an eating disorder might not see all the negative things you believe about yourself. The self-hatred people with these disorders experience ends up putting up walls to other people in their lives because they don’t believe they deserve the love they are being offered or else they just can’t feel it at all.
An eating disorder can feel like a third member of your relationship. There’s research that shows that eating disorders increase marital dissatisfaction and intimacy problems.
Your relationship impacts your eating disorder
If your partner doesn’t have an eating disorder there are a lot of things they don’t understand. When you don’t feel understood in a relationship, it can be painful. It’s also true that there are certain things that a spouse or partner can say or do to trigger anxiety or other difficult emotions that relate to the eating disorder. People with eating disorders might feel uncomfortable with you commenting on their physical appearance or weight. Comments about food and how the person with an eating disorder is eating can cause increased motivation to engage in eating disorder behaviors. Praising weight loss in a relationship can reinforce to the person with an eating disorder that their partner would be more attracted to them the less they weigh. The same is true when a partner is critical of weight gain or food choices. Someone with an eating disorder might feel shame about comments on weight gain and may eat in secret.
When someone is in eating disorder recovery, the most support they need will be from their partner. When your partner inadvertently does or says things to trigger your eating disorder behaviors or negative feelings about yourself, they are not supporting your recovery. They likely have no idea that what they are doing affects you, and you might not know how to talk to them about it.
Eating disorder recovery is hard to do alone
Many people who struggle with eating disorders, would rather not involve their families in their recovery. They are convinced they won’t understand, that it’s not necessary or they don’t want to feel like a burden. Healing happens within relationships. Your partner or spouse needs to be involved in your recovery in order for you to heal and remain in recovery. You may also be ambivalent to involving your partner in this process because you are unsure you want to recover and are afraid if you involve your partner you won’t have any control to engage in eating disorder behaviors.
How Marriage Counseling can be helpful in eating disorder recovery
Marriage counseling is not just for people struggling in their marriage or relationship. It’s for everyone that wants to improve their relationship. Eating disorders impact the relationship and can be something that comes between the two of you. marriage counseling can help.
1. Marriage counseling can help your partner know how to support you
Couples therapy is a good place to have hard conversations that seem impossible to have on your own. It’s difficult to open up about what you need or what you don’t need from your partner. This can be a space to talk about what the partner may be doing to trigger eating disorder behaviors. Everyone is doing their best and in a world that is focused on diet culture and weight loss, your partner might not realize they may be contributing to the struggle. It’s also important to focus not on the things you shouldn’t do but on the things that will be helpful. Being open about how your partner can help you cope without using an eating disorder behaviors can be a critical part of recovery.
2. Marriage Counseling can help you find the strengths in your relationship
When you are struggling with an eating disorder, you might feel like you are to blame for the relationship struggles. The goal of couples therapy is not to make you feel like everything is your fault. Eating disorders do impact the relationship but recovery can also bring you closer together as a couple. Your relationship doesn’t only surround your eating disorder but there are things you are doing well in your relationship. Couples therapy also focuses on doing more of the things that you are doing well in the relationship. There have been times when the eating disorder wasn’t interfering with the relationship and focusing on how you managed in those situations is a key element of couples therapy.
3. Marriage Counseling can aid in you overcoming the challenges of an eating disorder together
As we talked about earlier, recovering from an eating disorder alone is hard to do alone, and it makes a big difference to utilize your partner for support. If you have someone that loves and cares about you in your life, you can get through a lot of things together. A central part of successful eating disorder recovery is utilizing the support you have. Both of your needs in the relationship matter and working together to overcome an eating disorder will allow your connection to grow. Connection is a key element in recovery from addictions and mental health disorders. Connecting more with your partner than your eating disorder can do wonderful things for both recovery and the relationship.
4. Marriage Counseling can combat the secrecy of the eating disorder
Eating disorders thrive in secrecy. They are able to be successful by isolating and not sharing their struggles with other people. Your eating disorder will at times see your partner as a threat because that connection can move you away from using harmful behaviors. Being open and honest with your partner about your emotions, and desires can stop your eating disorder from taking over. Couples therapy can help you address these areas and learn to communicate your needs and emotions. This is not a natural thing for most of us to do. Couples therapy is about learning tools and ways of communicating with each other that go beyond eating disorder recovery.
Eating disorder recovery is hard, and you deserve to do it with someone that loves you. You might think they don’t understand what you’re going through but trust me, they can learn to get it the best they can. You don’t have to experience it to be able to give good support and safety. You deserve to be cared about, and couples therapy can help you overcome the challenges that your eating disorder may have handed to you.
Ready to Start Marriage Counseling in Salt Lake City or Online in Utah?
Marcus Hunt is passionate about couples therapy. He loves helping couples learn to talk to each other and to connect in ways they used to. Marcus enjoys working with two people that are trying to figure things out and are doing the best they can. He wants to help you connect with your partner on what is important to you. Whatever you are struggling with, he is confident that couples therapy can be helpful to just about everyone that is in a committed relationship and is willing to do the work to get the kind of relationship you want. You can begin marriage counseling by visiting Marcus Hunt Therapy.
About the Author
Marcus Hunt is a marriage and family therapist who loves working with couples to get the spark back in their relationship. Marcus Hunt provides couples counseling, marriage counseling, and mental health therapy for men. He is an EMDR therapist and works to help people work through trauma. Marcus Hunt provides services through online therapy.
Looking for eating disorder therapy in Salt Lake City?
If you have come to realize your eating disorder is taking over your life, I want you to know you don’t have to keep suffering. Eating Disorder Therapy can help. Maple Canyon Therapy has an eating disorder therapist specializing in eating disorder treatment. To begin eating disorder therapy, follow these steps:
Complete online forms and meet with an eating disorder therapist in Utah
Begin eating disorder therapy