Solidarity conversations: A feminist narrative lens on bulimia and abuse

Literature often frames bulimia through biomedical models of disease, emphasising biological, psychological and behavioural deficits, and treatments focused on symptom reduction. This paper reimagines so-called “bulimic episodes” as potential acts of testimony or protest against multiple structures of oppression. Drawing on feminist, narrative therapy and anti-oppressive frameworks, I propose an alternative language to bulimic episodes, using the metaphor of tides as a way of redefining bulimia. Application of this metaphor demonstrates how stepping away from conventional conceptualisations affects what is possible in therapeutic conversations. Through my own lived experiences with bulimia and in vitro fertilisation, I examine how medicalistion can reduce agency by centring body-focused narratives, particularly those emphasising weight policing and body image regulation. I argue that prioritising externalising conversations when bulimia raises its tides can unintentionally replicate neoliberal discourses of food and body management. By expanding the ethics of externalising practices, I propose a nuanced, justice-informed approach that incorporates the “absent but implicit”. This perspective moves away from battle metaphors and from dichotomies of “oppressor” and “survivor”, which dominate traditional recovery narratives, including some feminist cultural models of eating disorders. Instead, I invite possibilities for navigating people’s fluid and varying relationship with bulimia while engaging with other meaningful aspects of their lives. Through detailed examples of both individual therapy and supervision, this paper offers alternative therapeutic pathways to respond to bulimia’s tides. These are grounded in feminist ethics, encouraging agency, solidarity and multi-layered understandings of bulimia.