Have you ever shared something deeply personal about how you feel, only to have someone dismiss it, question it, or tell you that what you’re experiencing “can’t possibly be true”?
For many people, this kind of invalidation is a common occurrence when they share their experiences. And for individuals with ARFID (Avoidant/Restrictive Food Intake Disorder), it can be a daily reality. Their lived experiences—especially around food and eating—are often doubted, dismissed, or ignored. Read our blog Affirming Supports for Interoception, Feeding Challenges & ARFID.
This isn’t just frustrating. It’s a form of injustice that impacts not only emotional well-being but also interoception, which is our ability to sense and understand signals from inside the body.
In this article, we’ll explore:
- Why felt safety around food is crucial for people with ARFID
- How epistemic injustice undermines trust in one’s own body
- What hermeneutical injustice means and how it affects self-advocacy
- What we can do to meaningfully support people with ARFID
Interoception, ARFID, and the Need for Felt Safety
Interoception is the sense that helps us notice and interpret internal body signals like: hunger, fullness, thirst, or the feeling of safety and calm. For people with ARFID, interoception is a key piece of the puzzle.
When supporting someone with ARFID, helping them achieve felt safety around food is essential. Felt safety means that their body—not just their mind—feels safe when engaging with food. Without this foundational sense of safety, progress around nourishment and eating becomes nearly impossible.
But here’s the challenge: people with ARFID often have their experiences dismissed, which erodes their ability to trust their body’s signals. This is where injustice comes in.
Epistemic Injustice: When Lived Experience Is Denied
The philosopher Miranda Fricker coined the term epistemic injustice to describe situations where someone’s knowledge or lived experience is not taken seriously. In other words, they are not seen as a credible knower of their own body and mind.
For people with ARFID, epistemic injustice often looks like this:
- A child says, “This food makes my throat feel like it’s gagging.”
- An adult responds, “You’re fine. Just swallow. Take one more bite.”
Despite clear expressions, whether through words, pushing food away, gagging, crying, or running from the table, their internal experiences are denied.
Over time, this teaches the person to doubt their own body. They begin to question whether what they feel is “real.” This disconnect erodes interoceptive awareness, making it harder to use body signals as reliable guides for safety, nourishment, and wellness.
Hermeneutical Injustice: When There Are No Words
Fricker also identifies a second type of injustice: hermeneutical injustice. This happens when people don’t have the words, frameworks, or opportunities to make sense of their own experiences.
For individuals with ARFID, this is all too common. Why?
- ARFID is often defined, researched, and written about by people who do not have ARFID themselves.
- The official diagnostic language (like in the DSM-5) may not capture the lived experience of ARFID.
- Supports are often designed from an outsider’s perspective, not the insider’s.
As a result, people with ARFID may not have access to accurate language that truly reflects how food feels in their bodies. Without the right words, it’s much harder to advocate for themselves or have their needs understood.
Why This Matters: Interoception and Justice
Epistemic and hermeneutical injustice aren’t just abstract academic concepts. They show up every single day in the lives of people with ARFID:
- When body signals are dismissed, interoception takes the hit.
- When people aren’t seen as experts on their own bodies, trust in those signals erodes.
- When language doesn’t exist to describe their experience, self-advocacy becomes almost impossible.
This is why ARFID cannot simply be viewed as a “feeding problem.” It’s far more complex. It’s an interoceptive issue, and it’s a justice issue.
How To Support People with ARFID
If we want to support individuals with ARFID, we must:
- Believe their experiences. Take their words, actions, and signals seriously.
- Validate their interoception. Reinforce that what they feel in their body is real and meaningful.
- Expand the language. Co-create terms and descriptions that reflect lived experiences of ARFID.
- Recognize them as experts. People with ARFID are the ultimate authorities on how food feels in their bodies.
When we do this, we not only support their nourishment and wellness—we help rebuild trust in their interoceptive awareness and protect their right to be seen, heard, and believed.
Final Thoughts
At its core, supporting someone with ARFID means respecting their inner truth. It means creating felt safety around food, validating body signals, and dismantling the injustices that silence or distort their experiences.
Because people with ARFID are not just struggling with food. They are navigating a world that often tells them their bodies are wrong. And that is a justice issue we all have the power to change.
Want to learn more about ARFID and interoception?
We hosted another live course talking all about epistemic and hermeneutical injustice and how it affects those in the ARFID community.
You can sign up for the on-demand course HERE
In case you missed it…we’re also re-releasing our ARFID Part 1 course again!
If you didn’t catch Part 1 of our ARFID & Interoception course, it’s available for purchase again, CLICK HERE TO PURCHASE