Eating Disorder Treatment: Every Experience Is Different

While I’m working on this blog, I spend a fair amount of time looking at what others have to say about both eating disorder recovery and about treatment across the spectrum - for binge eaters, for anorexics, for bulimics, for those whose eating is disordered but who don’t meet the general criteria for a traditional diagnosis based on the DSM standards. It may or may not be something that’s good for me, and I’m not really here to debate that; it’s just a statement.

I see a lot of references to people who think that the only real treatment option is in-patient care - that without it, no one is going to be able to heal. There was a time - long long ago when I was first diagnosed as anorexic that I wanted to believe that was the case. For me - and others it seems - there are other options that are equally effective.

Eating Disorder In-Patient Experience: “Her post dispells (sic) myths and fantasies about early recovery. I’m especially glad that her vivid examples make clear that in-patient or residential treatment is the beginning, not the end of recovery.

I’ve heard from too many people who believe that ‘going in-patient’ is both a last resort and also a complete treatment experience after which a person with an eating disorder will be ‘cured.’”

That comes from a treatment practitioner’s blog, and it’s referencing a 2005 post in another blog about what inpatient treatment is all about, what it’s really like - how going into the hospital or a treatment facility is still viewed by many as an end-all and be-all solution for those who find themselves in a life-threatening position.

There’s irony there to be sure: all eating disorders are life-threatening and life-impacting. Not everyone is able to get in-patient treatment because many insurance companies will not cover it, and yet they recover with years of therapy, medications, nutritional counseling. I was admitted to a psych unit while I was anorexic, but it was because of my depression mostly, not my eating disorder and no one knew how to really deal with what was going on for me (arguably, the services didn’t seem to be much of a benefit to anyone there, but that’s another story).

A lot of the time, I think that eating disorder treatment is as confusing and complicated as living with the disease is: while there are some behaviors that are common across the board, everyone’s impetus is unique. Why then does it seem that treatment is something that we want to create a one-size fits most/all approach to?

The very first therapist who I met with (back around 1990-1991) and I didn’t connect, didn’t mesh and - quite frankly - didn’t like one another at all. I was young; I had my sense of what was what and, like most people at 16, I believed that I knew what was going to be best for me. She - just like my parents and the adults at my high school - thought that the trick was for me to conform and to make myself fit; no one seemed to get that I was killing myself by doing just that. Anorexia was, for me, at that time, a way to connect - a way to fall in line with everyone else and what they were doing (unfortunately, as was the case with everything then, I was determined to do everything as well as I possibly could).

The problem was that I didn’t fit. The challenge was that I knew where I wanted to go in my life and I knew who I was. What I needed was to learn to be comfortable with that; what I was told was that it was just a cover and that all the “work” we were doing in therapy was to get me to figure out who I was. Over time, we both became more stubborn. Yes, I started eating, but only because, well, it was a step towards getting out of my parents home and living on my own - but that was just a starting point, a bandaid on the symptoms that covered them up but did nothing to make them go away.

Just as everyone with an eating disorder had that one trigger that set everything into motion, there’s that one trigger that sets things moving in the other direction - for some it’s hospitalization, for others it’s the blunt statement “you will die, you know” for others it’s just the realization that living with an eating disorder isn’t really living at all.

Tags: anorexia, eating disorder recovery, eating disorder treatment, hospitalization, therapy