Going Beyond the Reef: What Moana Teaches Us About Eating Disorder Recovery
- Andreea Cristina Tudor
- 2 days ago
- 15 min read
Updated: 1 day ago
I know that right about now you're wondering "How on earth do Moana and eating disorder recovery have anything in common?". Right after asking yourself "Has this therapist been staring at a screen for a bit too long?"
I'm sure that if you've watched the movie, you saw a touching story about a brave girl breathing life back into the world around her through defying her family's expectations of her, and venturing out into the unknown out of a sense of duty and care. And whether you loved it for the soundtrack, the visuals or Lin-Manuel Miranda's creativity, you saw a beautiful children's movie that felt deep for all the best reasons.
Since I've specialised in ED treatment, I also started seeing it as a roadmap for recovery. To be more specific, to me Moana's journey mirrors the psychological phases we go through in Enhanced CBT (CBT-E). Allow me to explain...
Recovery isn't about defeating a monster.
It's about connecting with who you were before the fire took over.
When you're deep in the cycle of disordered eating, life can feel very similar to Motunui Island once it gets hit by the blight. On the surface, everything works like clockwork: you feel in control, you are doing things that give you a sense of achievement, and dieting, numbers and rules create a sense of predictability that keep you safe behind the reef. But underneath it all, your world is getting chipped away at, little by little. Things that used to bring you joy may dry up, relationships may feel more frayed or superficial, and you are either starving or feeling so numb that everything matters less and less (apart from weight loss and appearance). A part of you knows change is crucial to save yourself, but the ocean looks terrifying and there's a huge, angry lava monster waiting for you on the other side.
If you're feeling too scared to challenge the weight loss mindset but also struggle to recognise yourself anymore, this post is for you. Let's talk about how the journey to restoring the Heart of Te Fiti is the ultimate metaphor for reclaiming your life, and why you have everything you need to ditch diet culture and feel worthy as is.
A gentle, guiding note: I have introduced images at various points throughout the article not just to jog our memory of the film, but also because some of the concepts mentioned are either heavy or may require some thought. I've used the images to give myself a visual break in between sections, and you are welcome to do the same. But tea, coffee or something comforting may work just as well!
The Island of Motunui:
The Safe (but Fading) Status Quo
In CBT-E, you and I will be looking at how an eating disorder (ED) keeps itself going in our day-to-day lives. We understand and deeply acknowledge that the rules, dieting, and compensation were once a place that got our needs met and kept us safe. They kept life predictable and gave us a sense of achievement; and eventually, over time they just became a way of life.
To me, that's Motunui. So many people buy into the island's comfort to the point where even Moana's parents tell her that everything she needs is on the island, and going beyond the reef is dangerous and forbidden. In our own lives, we might be faced with this when our parents and loved ones see us distressed at the sight of weight gain and body changes, and go on runs with us or encourage us to "watch our carbs and fats" because ultimately "The Island gives us what we need."
While you're in Motunui, this may also happen in your own mind. We might believe the echos of the villagers' voices and in the midst of a binge-restrict cycle, your brain might also say:
"Keep dieting and you'll be safe. Only then you'll feel confident enough.
Going to restaurants is dangerous since you never know what they put in the food.
Giving your body a break when you're tired is a slippery slope to laziness or losing discipline. What's another hour of exercise to the exhaustion?
Keep weighing yourself. You messed up there but you can get back on track, and you need to do it fast.
Keep everything as is (and keep optimising the routine). You'll be confident, safe, untouchable."
Just like Motunui, the ED offers a false sense of hope and security here. Because eventually, the coconuts turn black, the trees start dying and fish are nowhere to be found. If you've ever restricted or purged for long enough, you may have noticed that not challenging the routines that give us safety and achievement leads to:
Low energy
Lack of concentration and memory
Hair loss, dry skin, brittle nails
Stomach and teeth issues
Dizziness when standing up
Hormonal issues
Social circles shrinking
And the world becoming smaller day by day.
Being on the island becomes an experience of witnessing a slow fade. And staying means having to both listen to-, and ignore your body screaming that it's not doing well.
The Stolen Heart:
Who Were You Before the ED?
Before the island started fading, there was Te Fiti: the mother island who breathed life, colour and harmony into the world thanks to her heart (a small, green gemstone). As soon as Maui steals it, she collapses into the ash and darkness that slowly drain life not just from her, but from all islands around her too.
In recovery, the Heart of Te Fiti is your True Self. For some, it might be their child self, the one who was never aware that weight or body shape/size were ever a thing to question in the first place. It might be the part of us who thought "this is a really weird thing to be commenting on" when we first heard a negative comment about the body; before the noise ever had a chance to normalise a weirdness that should have never been normalised. For others, it may have been the first time they experienced unconditional acceptance and treasuring offered by others in a way that helped them realise how much more their True Self mattered over their appearance. It may be none of those things, and instead it may be your humour, your passions, and your ability to breathe life into your world and others'.
Whoever your True Self may be, it's important to recognise that for different reasons, she may go into hiding as we go through life and start feeling unsafe to walk around without a shield. And when that inner beauty gets used against us, an eating disorder often forms as a way to build a new identity and set of values to keep you safe. It becomes a shield for your True Self, but makes your entire worth depend on numbers, body shape and weight. It paradoxically becomes your protector and your identity thief. And you know that keeping it around leads to destruction.
Gramma Tala:
Channelling Your Inner Wisdom
So, how do you actually find the courage to cross the ocean into recovery?
You need a strong catalyst. In therapy, we think of it as finding and connecting with your wise mind: your deep, inner wisdom who knows that the eating disorder is selling you enticing-but-destructive-and-conditional lies out of the fear that nothing else will work to restore confidence, self-acceptance and kindness.
In the film, Gramma Tala is the embodiment of wise mind. She's the one who holds all the knowledge about the tribe's history. She constantly holds perspective and knows that their tribe's purpose was never to stay on the island. She knows they used to be voyagers. That they were always meant to venture out into the ocean together, hunt and face the creepy creatures of the waters together. And she never sways away from her beliefs, no matter howmuch or for how long the islanders call her "the village crazy lady". That knowledge, and that level of conviction helps Moana carry her Gramma's wisdom everywhere she goes moving forward.
Psychoeducation is the knowledge that helps us channel our wise mind in CBT-E. Like Gramma Tala, we talk about 2 massive truths:
You (and our society) weren't always like this. There was a time in your own early childhood (and in our human history) when we weren't questioning the shape or weight of our bodies and instead were eating intuitively, flexibly and having a two-way trusting relationship with our bodies. There was enough space and flexibility for all body types, and people saw each other for who they were rather than appearance ratings.
The journey will include hurdles and may feel terrifying at times. Gramma Tala acknowledges from the get-go that crossing the barrier reef involves facing difficult emotions and challenges. She encourages Moana to meet this not with perfection or certainty, but with an openness to feel the fear, try out lots of different skills and learn as she goes. She has the perspective to know that the storms are ultimately the best opportunities to sharpen Moana's skills and resilience.
Moana experiences several moments of fear, doubt and defeat: as she's contemplating crossing the barrier reef again after getting hurt, and as the ocean's challenges overwhelm and exhaust her. Every time, Gramma Tala comes through and reminds her:
"Who are you meant to be?"
and
"There is nowhere you could go that I won't be with you."
That gives Moana the strength to reconnect with her purpose and continue her journey in restoring the Heart of Te Fiti. This is often how we feel both when we start Stage 1 of CBT-E, and as we navigate the messy middle.
Maui & The Magic Hook:
Deconstructing Diet Culture and External Validation
Gramma Tala urges Moana to go find Maui, the demigod of wind and sea that is "hero to all", and convince him to restore the Heart of Te Fiti.
Moana goes through so much effort to deliver the perfect speech and convince him to help her, only to meet the real Maui. A charismatic, powerful, shapeshifting dude who is so enamoured with being everyone's hero that he stole the heart of Te Fiti to be loved and venerated. He is the one reasponsible for the blight and yet he believes he's doing everyone the biggest service. And he believes he is nothing once his magic hook gets damaged and he loses his ability to shape-shift, aka once he becomes no different to any other human.
I see him as the perfect representation of Diet Culture and Patriarchy. To me, he represents that loud, societal voice that your worth is entirely dependent on your appearance, your achievements, and your ability to shape-shift into whatever mold society demands today. And we see how hollow it is to be him live with these beliefs because of how low he feels when it all gets taken away.
In CBT-E, we recognise how much the ED's beliefs got reinforced by societal messaging and led to overly valuing shape and weight over who we are at our core. It didn't start with us as individuals, that conditionality that if you don't possess the power of the "magical fishhook" (aka the perfect body, the perfect control, the lowest weight), you are either not enough in some way, or worthless.
And think about what happens on the boat: Moana spends a lot of time convinced she needed Maui to fix the world for her, that everything would be solved once he changed his mind. She initially buys into the idea that he had all the power and that without him, she would not be able to restore the heart of Te Fiti. But the more she got to know Maui and the way he operates, the more she realised:
Maui has no incentive to change. He gets rewarded for acting the way that he does, and his beliefs around worth are also conditional. Changing would mean losing power, examining and challenging his blind spots, and accepting that deconstructing everything would mean opening himself up to feeling even more worthless until he finds alternatives. He only agrees to help her in the end because there's something in it for him: getting his fish hook, his power back. And he still tried to throw her off the boat once they make the pact.
She can't change him: what he thinks, how he acts, how motivated he is to change. And more importantly, she doesn't need Maui to change to reclaim her life. Yes, it's more frustrating when he won't change, and it would feel way nicer to go through this with someone who has her back and thinks like her. But she can do the task with or without him.
In recovery, we acknowledge the grief of having to make change when friends, family or society glorify diet culture. The loneliness of choosing a different path. But in this solitude, many realise they can steer their own boat, regardless of what others are doing or thinking. And in time, they also start experiencing Diet Culture for the dated, patriarchal ideology it is.
Learning to Wayfind:
Practicing the Skills of Recovery in the Open Ocean
Moana didn't wake up knowing how to navigate the ocean to restore the Heart of Te Fiti. The first time around the boat got sunk by the first big wave that came, destroying the boat and temporarily overwhelimg her. And when she ventured out again, she was faced with endless challenges that got her to figure out in real time how to wayfind, how to fine-tune her navigation skills, and how to keep going in the face of uncertainty.
This is the messy middle of CBT-E, where we break down dietary rules through behavioural experiments: challenges we design to test out the ED's worst fears and see if the worst-case scenarios actually happen. For Moana, wayfinding looks like:
"If I hold the sail this way, what happens to the boat?"
"If I follow this star, where do I end up?"
In recovery, your wayfinding may look like:
"If I eat this fear food, does my world actually fall apart?"
"If I don't weigh myself today, does the anxiety eventually get better?"
"If I have this tough conversation instead of avoiding and using exercise as a way to cope, will I be able to manage it?"
"If I sit with the urge to compensate, will I gain all the fat I think I will?"
On that journey, you are likely to experience storms. You may have harder days where the urges are more intense, or body image may be lower or harder simply because the ED gets louder when we stop obeying its rules. But just like Moana, every time you survive a rough wave, you are gathering data, and you are showing your brain that you are capable of handling discomfort, navigating the unknown, and reading the stars without the ED telling you what to do.
The Kakamora & Tamatoa:
Facing the ED Urges and Beliefs
Do you remember the Kakamora, those cute-yet-vicious little coconut pirates Moana and Maui fight off? To me, those are the daily ED urges and triggers. They pop up out of nowhere, try to swarm you on your boat and steal the heart back. They are annoying, persistent, sedating, and so overwhelming that it often feels easier to just give them what they want than to fight them all off. But as viewers, we can see that they are small, so they have to work together to be powerful. If taken one by one, or if not engaged with, enough distance gets created for us to move away from them and protect the heart.
Later on, Moana and Maui also dive into Lalotai, the Realm of Monsters, to retrieve Maui's hook. This gets taken by Tamatoa, the giant, shiny crab with barnacles on his teeth (side note: ew!!) who was weirdly obsessed with shine and superficial glamour. I see Tamatoa as the ED's core beliefs: out of his whole 5 minute screen time, he spends 3 of them singing an entire song about how it's better to look shiny and beautiful than to be good on the inside. He preys on insecurity.
Diving into the Realm of Monsters and facing Tamatoa is uncomfortable work. This is when in treatment we look at deeply ingrained beliefs underneath the ED and challenge them. Discovering what the ED believes and why it evolved to hold onto those beliefs so tightly is the only way we can then challenge them.
Confronting Te Ka:
Facing the ED's Terror and Rage
Oh my God, are we ready for this? We ventured out into the ocean, realised we don't need others to restore the Heart of Te Fiti, fought off the Kakamora and Tamatoa and finally learned we may just be resilient enough to do this. I'm tired, overwhelmed and proud just thinking about everything we've done so far.
So it's just about the perfect time to meet Te Ka, right? Who wouldn't be psyched to meet the monster of fire and ash that's guarding the barrier islands of Te Fiti right about now (cue sassy eye roll).
Every recovery journey I've had the privilege to witness has a moment like this, where self-doubt creeps in at the sight of Te Ka in the flesh, beyond the legends and warnings.
Knowing what she has to do, Moana first tries to fight her way through using Maui's brute strength and magical hook. But Maui's hook gets cracked, and predictably, he gives up and flies away out of self-preservation. Moana is left entirely alone with Te Ka dark, knowing that this raging lava monster wants to destroy her.
In therapy, this is that exhausting, terrifying wall you hit when you try to fight fire with fire. Using rage and force against a bigger rage and force is like using old coping mechanisms to fight the ED. You quickly realise that relying on external control, willpower, giving into diet culture, or people-pleasing will exhaust you without being able to restore the Heart of Te Fiti.
You have to face the scariest part of the ED: the rage, the betrayal, the trauma, and everything else that made the ED so strong in the first place. And you have to do this all armours barred, with the skills you built while taking a leap of faith on your own resilience and inner wisdom.
"I know who you are":
Recognising the ED as a Separate Entity
Moana gets past Te Ka to the shores, ready to restore the heart to Te Fiti, only to realise: Te Fiti is gone. There's a huge gap where she used to lay, and Moana does not know what to do. She sees Te Ka charging at her. She can see the screaming, she can see the rage and pure will to destroy her, and she realises something beautiful. Under the rage lies deep terror of further betrayal, mistrust in anyone, pain for being cheated and lied to after gifting trust so freely. The rage becomes sooo understandable because why would anyone dare to meet trust, kindness, harmony and the power to breathe life into everything with lies, theft and connivance. Who wouldn't be raging, terrified and struggling to trust anyone after all that?
Moana doesn't pull a weapon. She doesn't meet the rage and need to detroy with similar intensity. She realises Te Ka is actually Stolen-Hearted Te Fiti.
Moana raises the stone, asks the ocean to part so they can meet, and sings:
"I have crossed the horizon to find you
I know your name
They have stolen the heart from inside you
But this does not define you
This is not who you are
You know who you are
Who you truly are."
There is so much healing that happens right there, when Moana sees the Te Fiti behind Te Ka. She helps Te Ka realise she is safe enough to not be needed anymore, and to make space for Te Fiti to come back again. Moana is essentially saying:
"Te Fiti, you are so important to me
You matter more than my safety and comfort. You matter more than others' opinions.
I have jumped through more hurdles than you can think of
I have gone through fire to be here and now I see you
I see how much they have betrayed you. That shame lies with them
I see why you are here, Te Ka. Anyone would feel the same
But that betrayal, what others have done for you to be here, does not define you
Te Fiti, you are not rage, terror, fury and destruction
We both know this pain is awful, and we both know who you truly are.
I know your heart and we both know that if you had it, you would meet this differently
Can you let me in enough to help? "
And with that, Te Ka stops charging, and instead slowly approaches Moana to press foreheads. Moana places the heart back into its rightful home. The lava cracks away to reveal Te Fiti.
Moana does exactly what we would do in CBT-E. We externalise. We see the ED voice as a terrifying monster that evolved to help us cope through a time in our lives where no other options made sense or were available. We understand what needs the ED is trying to get met, how it may be doing that unhelpfully, and how to meet these needs in a way that feels fulfilling and life-restoring. We offer intense compassion to the hurting parts that evolved to protect the real you, we drop all weapons and put the heart back where it belongs.
The Return to Motunui:
Stage 4 and Becoming Voyagers
Phew, that was an adventure, wasn't it? And with it, some of the last questions that come with every great story emerge: "What now?".
Moana doesn't stay in paradise with Te Fiti. She actually goes back home to Motunui where she has to embrace a whole new identity. She doesn't shrink back into the old, safe, shrinking rules the islanders follow, and she doesn't hide behind the reef. She takes the villagers and encourages them to ship out into the ocean. They fulfill their destiny and become voyagers again.
This is the Maintenance and Relapse Prevention stage of CBT-E.
Long-term recovery means embracing a whole new identity and being vulnerable enough to stand by it in the face of people who have known you to act differently for a long time. It means pushing back against pushback and doing what you know is right even if others may disagree. It means applying those skills continuously until they replace old routines and habits. It means moving forward trusting that you know how to read stars, you know how to adjust sails and that if a wave ever capsizes you, you are a voyager and you can always find your way back.
Final Notes and Thoughts
You may be sitting at the shores of your life right now, staring out at the scary ocean of recovery and feeling overwhelmed by everything it takes to cross the barrier reef. It is a lot to think about, and luckily, you don't need to know it all or to have it all mapped out. All you need to do is to look at the ships hidden in the cave.
Your ancestors, your biology, and your own inner wisdom already have the answers. Your ED might be loud right now, but it's a fire that is trying to protect you, even if it's harming things too. And most importantly, your heart is there too. I'm here for when you're ready to piece everything together and let go of the ED.
Note: If you made it to the end of this post, thank you for reading this. Making things creative and visual is something I always love doing as creative writing has always been one of my passions. I hope this resonated with you or made you think of things a bit differently, but if it didn't I just wanted to reassure you: unlike Papa Freud, I did not have any substances before thinking of all these things.
If this made you feel seen, I would love to connect with you and think about how we may work together. You can book your free intro call with me below.