05 Sep 2025

Navigating Body Image, Disordered Eating & Dissociation: Skye’s Story

In this blog, lived experience advocate Skye shares her journey with an eating disorder and dissociative amnesia.

Content Warning: This piece discusses trauma, dissociation, disordered eating, and experiences of sexual assault in vague but potentially distressing terms. Please take care while reading and prioritise your wellbeing.

I never cared that my body existed outside of the conventional beauty standards. There were two reasons for that.

The first was simple: when I looked in the mirror, I saw my family. My big nose, my frizzy hair, the softness of my frame – they were all echoes of the people I loved. My mum, radiant in lace. My dad, his curls like coiled springs. My aunties, uncles, cousins – we all shared something. A nose, a laugh, a shape. I thought they were beautiful, so I must be too.

I understood that other girls in my class looked different to me, but it never bothered me at all. I had maths homework to finish and a shift at McDonalds after school.

The second reason was harder to explain. I have dissociative amnesia, which means I’ve lived most of my life a few steps outside my body. Something happened when I was young that made the world too sharp to touch directly, so my mind found ways to soften it. I floated. I fuzzed around the edges.

It’s hard to have any sort of strong feelings about your body when you’re barely aware you have one. My looks were the last thing on my mind – if I had anything on my mind at all.

As a kid and early teenager, the dissociation wasn’t too bad. I could go to school and work just fine. However, when I was 17, I experienced a sexual assault that too closely mirrored what had happened to me as a child. I just absolutely fell apart. I went somewhere far away from my body, deep inside the fog inside my mind.

Shortly after this, I moved into a homeless shelter, and it got even worse. There would be full months where I had no sense of consciousness, but my body would still be moving without me. I was fully on auto pilot. I would come back to in the middle of a shift, or near the end of a party at a random person’s house I’d never met but had apparently befriended several weeks before.

It’s no surprise that during this time I wasn’t aware of my eating behaviours. After about six months of this, I came back into my body for the first extended period of time. I realised then how different it felt to be in my body, how hungry it was, and I became concerned for myself.

I did what any kid with no support system would do: I Googled it.

Just a few words. A quiet search for something that might help. I wasn’t thinking about weight, or shape, or mirrors. I just wanted to feel better. To stay alive. But this was before filters, before trigger warnings, and the first thing I found was a forum I should never have clicked on.

Disordered thoughts for eating and sexual assault aren’t really that different at all. They stem from the same feelings of shame, guilt and disgust. I had already been primed to blame my body, to hate it, to wish it away, and the ideas on these forums complemented these perfectly.

I was in such a disordered place that the comments on this website seemed entirely logical to me. I believed that my body was wrong, and it did deserve to be punished. And so, I punished it. That’s what my main focus was. Just acting out against myself to feel anything, even if it hurt.

At first, it wasn’t about how I looked. But eventually, like so many things, it became about that too.

I stayed like this for several years, either filled with self-hatred or entirely dissociated. It was really hard to get help for my disordered eating, because I would forget my appointments, or be so triggered during conversations with my doctor that I would dissociate before I could get the words out. It was almost impossible for me to advocate for myself.

I eventually started treatment for my dissociative amnesia, a mixture of talk therapy and neuro-feedback, and after a while I was in my body enough to finally start talking to my therapist and doctor about it. It was really hard, as I found that no matter who I spoke to would assume I had a binge eating disorder because I was in a larger body.

It took me four years to get the correct diagnosis: bulimia nervosa. It took me another three to go into remission, because I was too dissociated to implement sustainable habits for my recovery.

About two months after I was classified as being officially in remission, I experienced another sexual assault. I thought I would be sent all the way back to the start, but to my surprise I had built resilience and had the tools to ground and regulate myself to avoid relapsing.

I have now been in remission for three years. I don’t know if I will ever be fully recovered, but I do know that right now, I’m here, inside my body. That’s more than I’ve had for the last ten years.

For me, it’s enough.

Get Support

No matter how the eating disorder developed, recovery is possible, and Butterfly is here to help.

For confidential and free counselling, call the Butterfly National Helpline on 1800 ED HOPE (1800 33 4673) or visit www.butterfly.org.au to chat online or email, 7 days a week, 8am-midnight (AEST)

You can also call 1800RESPECT – 1800 737 732, for 24/7 support for people impacted by sexual assault, domestic or family violence.

Lifeline can also be contacted on 13 11 14, for 24/7 crisis support and suicide prevention.

Beyond Blue can also be contacted on1300 22 4636, for 24/7 mental health support