Refeeding Syndrome

What is Refeeding Syndrome?

When people become sufficiently malnourished—when they’re starving to death—they’re obviously deficient in calories, protein, fatty acids, and muscle mass, to name a few. If you were to encounter such a person, your natural reaction might be to feed them. A lot. In fact, you might take them to the biggest all-you-can-eat buffet you know.

In many cases, however, that “kindness” on your part could kill the starving person, despite your doing what seems like the obvious “right thing.”

Why? Refeeding syndrome. In someone who is starving, they’re not just lacking food. They also have deficiencies and imbalances in glucose, vitamins, electrolytes, minerals, and more factors that are vital to the function of every cell and organ of the body.

Additionally, starvation can affect levels of insulin and digestive enzymes necessary to process food when it does become available.

In a starving person, eating a lot often can suddenly raise the levels of glucose and other nutrients, which disrupts the fine balance and complicated interaction of a great many chemicals that enable us to stay healthy. This imbalance can be fatal.

Imagine that: if lack of food is the problem, supplying abundant food may not be the solution we had anticipated.

Carefully Giving People What They Need

And so it can be with people who have suffered from insufficient Real Love all their lives. It would be a gross understatement to say that such people suffer from an emotional nutrient imbalance equivalent in severity to physical starvation.

Unloved people are afraid, feel alone, judge the behaviors of everyone incorrectly, believe the world to be a frightening and lonely place, and so on. They’re emotionally starving and often very sick.

Now imagine that we suddenly introduce an abundance of Real Love to such a person. We need to consider some of the potential side effects of this:

• Real Love can disrupt someone’s entire notion of what is true in life, which can be very disturbing emotionally and even physically.
• When people find Real Love and realize what is possible in relationships, this discovery can create a sense of having been neglected and even betrayed all their lives to that point, which can lead to depression and other mental disorders.
• Real Love can call into question every interaction and relationship in a person’s life. Ironically, with the introduction of Real Love, some people might feel more ALONE, realizing that every past “connection” may have been far less than they had supposed.
• Real Love introduces a concept that most people have never seen. Some of these people simply refuse to believe that such a condition is even possible, while others believe it might be possible but not for them. They can be overwhelmed with a sense of futility.

I am NOT saying that we shouldn’t love someone who is suffering from a lack of that feeling. Of course that’s what they need, but we also need to understand that their response may not be the sudden hope and joy that we might have anticipated.

Real Love is another world for most people, and giving them what they need requires loving and teaching that is individually tailored to them.