Thoughts on Eating Disorder Recovery, Part 1

I do a lot of reading these days, not just the fun, leisure stuff, but also other’s thoughts on eating disorder recovery. I left a comment on one post that’s had me thinking yesterday saying that I would start sharing my responses here now that I was starting to feel better, and yet, I’m just not starting to get around to it.

The post* was addressing how long it can take for an individual with an eating disorder to recover. More specifically, it talks about the purposes that eating disorders have, and how that affects the time that it takes to heal.

Some of them struck me far more than others. Some of them were things that I had definitely experienced at various times - not necessarily at my proudest moments either. Others made sense but didn’t really fit. But then, people aren’t jigsaw puzzles all cut into the same 50, 500 or 1000 pieces; broad descriptions therefore aren’t all going to fit for one person the way that they do for another - this is a good thing; it’s part of what shows everyone that they are unique (and, to a very real extent, it’s that realization that unites us more than it divides us).

Just as that’s true for the symptoms of eating disorders and the ways that individuals use anorexia, bulimia and compulsive eating differ, I think so do the realizations that factor into recovering from those disorders.

1. They protect a person from being aware of what they cannot bear to know or feel.

Personally, I never felt protected by anorexia. Even at the times when I was at my worst - in high school, in my early 20s and my late 20s - I always felt more vulnerable. In abusive relationships, I knew that what was happening was wrong; I knew that I hurt and no matter how much I hated myself, I know that that I deserved better. The problem I had was that I didn’t know how to say, “stop” or “no” or “that hurts” or “don’t” when someone else was being cruel because I knew that I was being more cruel to myself (of course, that always led to my behaviors becoming more extreme and pervasive and accelerated the process). There was little that I shut out, and, when I’m completely honest about it, I know that when I said that I was numb it was wishful thinking. I always wanted to starve the way that I felt, but it always seemed to get bigger the smaller I got.

2. They give a person a sense of control when the person has little real control over what’s important to them.

From the standpoint that I have now, I have a very clear sense of the false sense of control that I had from anorexia. I knew that there were situations that were completely beyond my control but that I couldn’t get out of. Rather than just stumbling through them, I did look for something that I could control and chose what I did or - in my case - didn’t eat. It didn’t start out that way; it didn’t really even start out with a conscious effort to lose weight (though I was aware, at first, that the weight was coming off).

I think that on a lot of different levels, I was trying to operate from the perspective of “the only thing that you can control is yourself - your own actions and reactions;” the problem was that my chosen path was to try to control it by not showing that I had reactions. The problem that was even bigger than that was that it often prompted reactions from others that weren’t what I wanted either.

* All quoted text comes from How Long Does It Take to Recover from Buliimia or Anorexia? Part II