Childhood trauma and anorexia nervosa: From body image to embodiment.

Contemporary understandings of anorexia nervosa are framed by the body image paradigm. The body-image framework considers that women's bodily experiences are reflected through distorted mental images of their bodies or disordered thinking and behavior around food and eating. Body image has come to symbolize all that can go wrong with women's relationship with their bodies, food and eating. The problem with this approach is its failure to consider the experience of women who survived childhood abuse. Women's bodily disturbances are not easily discernible through objective measures as they lie within the inner subjective realm of the embodied 'self', and embodied emotional experience. Consideration of the different ways that women inhabit their bodies inform this paper's examination of the conceptual framework embodiment as an alternate to the body image paradigm.