Lost in Eating Disorder Pain and Suffering: Sometimes I Forget
Dear Readers,
Sometimes I am so happy and deeply involved in the recovery work I share with my clients in my private practice that I momentarily forget the depth and vastness of the pain and suffering lived daily by people entrenched in their eating disorders.
Joy in Recovery Work
The eating disorder recovery path, even though challenging to every aspect of a person’s way of being in the world, is a joyous experience for me. This must be why I do this work. Being with someone who is climbing out of the prison of an eating disorder and blinking from the light of the new world she enters is an incredible joy.
Sharing with her the always unpredictable turns of her life as she heals and develops is a never ending growth experience for me as well as my client. As she brings her healthy and united sense of herself to face the world and follow the genuine lead of her heart and soul I feel privileged and grateful to share in her journey.
In the day to day of my professional world the people I meet who are affected by eating disorders, for the most part are on their healing path. They come to me because they are ready to begin. Or they come to me because they have begun and want to go beyond their current limits.
Suffering
Then I’ll receive a phone call or an e-mail from someone in the depths of their eating disorder who reminds me of all those people who not only suffer, but suffer in ignorance. Ignorance creates a hurdle difficult to leap.
Ignorance
Ignorance itself is an interesting word. It could mean that information is ignored. Or it could mean that information about something isn’t available or accessible.
So, if a person with an eating disorder is ignorant of dangers in her behaviors, is it because she doesn’t know the dangers or is ignoring the dangers? If she is ignoring the dangers, is this a conscious choice or is she ignorant of her ignorance?
I’ll give some examples of dangerous ignorance in my next post.
Bingeing on Eating Disorder Recovery (not a typo)
This title is not a typo. I don’t mean bingeing during recovery. I mean actually bingeing on the recovery process itself.
Fear and Hope
If you have an eating disorder you enter psychotherapy with fear and hope. You fear the loss of your eating disorder, and you fear that therapy won’t work to end your eating disorder.
You hope you will get rid of the burden of the eating disorder and you hope you will keep your life as it is so you will have access to the eating disorder when you need it.
Binge Method of Sabotage
One way to combine your fear and hope is to binge on getting well so that you sabotage your recovery. You do this by rushing into goal-oriented behaviors.
You have a list of positive goals that you tell yourself you will work to achieve, but you don’t get very far. This is the life of a person with an eating disorder. You know what you would like to be able to do or not do, but you cannot make those activities real and steady in your every day life.
Does this sound familiar?
Goals
Get adequate sleep.
Eat three meals a day.
Clean and organize home.
Get back to the gym or walk every day.
Get back to classes.
Stop all bad habits (booze, drugs, negative or abusive relationships, shop lifting, lying, postponing etc.).
Fix everything that is broken – clock, watch, car, windowpane, and chair leg.
Organize money and papers. Pay bills.
Clear out clutter.
Write apology and thank you notes.
Come out of isolation and be with people.
Be responsible at work or go back to work in a responsible way.
Start the project that is meaningful to you that you never really get into.
Bingeing on Recovery
Nothing is wrong with these goals. But bingeing on recovery involves sailing into action on all these goals immediately. You clear the decks and begin to set your life straight.
But you’ve only been in therapy for a week. You haven’t even established a solid relationship with your therapist yet. You haven’t healed any wounds or developed coping skills based on newly acquired strength.
You haven’t cleared your mind or your perceptions of the eating disorder distortions that affect your ability to think and make reasonable judgments. You are bingeing.
You are filled with hope and determination. You exhaust yourself with activity and frighten yourself by removing defenses.
Binge Aftermath
When your momentum, fueled by hope and fear, hurls you into a situation where you are more exposed and available to the world with which you cannot cope, you crash. (You always crash after a binge.)
Then you criticize yourself for failing. At the same time, you are home in the familiar zone of binge aftermath with your eating disorder intact.
You binged on your recovery. You feel miserable that you failed and relieved that you failed. That’s effective sabotage.
How to Understand
Nothing is wrong with that goal list. Nothing is wrong with you. You are using the skills, knowledge and energy you possess to move forward with your life and cooperate with the aims of your recovery.
But you are still governed by the force and the limitations of your eating disorder. You act out your symptoms with therapeutic goals as well as food.
Relationship with Your Psychotherapist
Your therapist will encourage you to take it easy, slow down, go gently into your work by being present for the therapy itself. Early in therapy you’ll most likely think that she is being easy on you.
You’ll think that she doesn’t understand how competent you are and how you have the ability to do these things. You’ll believe that she doesn’t appreciate how important these tasks are or the urgency involved in getting them done.
You may feel offended or angry or superior or all three, just as you do when anyone attempts to interrupt you in a binge.
Real Challenge in Beginning Recovery
Your challenge is to let yourself be present with this unknown person, this therapist and discover if he or she is trustworthy, is reliable, and is warm, caring and firm at the same time.
The first step in recovery is not to sail into all those goal tasks, but to develop an honest relationship with your therapist. Establishing that relationship will allow her to help you slow down your eating disorder momentum.
Focusing on showing up for your appointments and giving yourself a chance to have a relationship with your therapist will give your therapist a chance to help you.
Then you can believe her when she says, “You don’t have to do everything at once. In fact, you can’t. If you try you will only set yourself up to fail and then feel bad about yourself.”
If you can let her help you pace yourself in a reasonable way, something you can’t do if an eating disorder is running your life, you can drop the binge behavior and begin genuine recovery work.
A lot of learning happens when you discover you can binge on recovery.
Even more learning happens when you discover you can stop that binge and open yourself to genuine recovery.
(Related blog post, “Eating Disorder Recovery: Why “To Do Lists” Work and Don’t Work”)
Eating Disorders: Response to Cry for Help
Today I received a long post from a young woman caught in a desperate tangle of bingeing, starving, guilt, shame and anxiety. She is bewildered by her own experience and frantic to find relief without getting professional help.
Here is my response to her. I believe she represents many young women in a similar position of suffering.
Dear S.J,
Reaching Out
Good for you for reaching out. You are suffering and looking for a way to find relief. That’s great.
You are in the throes of a serious eating disorder. Looking for a way to end an illness suddenly and completely is understandable but not realistic.
You need treatment.
Shame Issues
I’m concerned when you use the word “confession.” You are describing symptoms. You wouldn’t feel shame about “confessing” a fever or lung infection or rash out of guilt and shame, would you? I hope not.
Feeling severe pain would lead you to a health practitioner where you would describe your symptoms to help that practitioner help you.
Further, I don’t think you would expect a word or a one-time meeting to bring an end to your symptoms or your illness. Nor would you expect yourself to heal out of will power and determination.
Bingeing, losing all appetite or needing to binge during holiday visits with family, guilt, shame, quick weight loss diets to stop misunderstood eating disorder eating patterns, throwing food away as an attempt to control a binge and later digging into the trash to find that food and eat it are all symptoms of an eating disorder.
Feeling rushes of anxiety with these symptoms is part of the profile. Being torn about keeping this emotional and behavioral turmoil secret and sharing it with someone who will offer support and ways to help is part of the pain and frustration of life with an eating disorder.
Past Attempts to Get Help that Didn’t Work
I’m sorry to learn that your attempts to see psychotherapists in the past were frightening to you. I wonder how old you were, how the clinicians were selected and what the emotional environment was for your preparation to see them.
Getting Help Now
You are older now, and perhaps in a position to select a psychotherapist based on criteria more of a match with your personal experience.
I encourage you to seek professional help from a clinician who knows about eating disorders and who seems warm and trustworthy to you. Looking for short cuts to address your illness willl only postpone recovery, and in the meantine your eating disorder can become more painful and disabling.
Resources for Finding an Eating Disorder Psychotherapist
For finding a local psychotherapist who knows about eating disorders please explore these urls.
Eating Disorder Referral and Information Center
National Eating Disorder Association
For finding support groups see:
ANAD National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders ~ The oldest national non profit organization dedicated to alleviating the problems of eating disorders and promoting healthy lifestyles.
You can also work the action plan in my (free) Triumphant Journey Workbook .
The exercises in the workbook may be helpful to you in preparing to do the deep work necessary
for your healing.
I’m going to post a version of my letter to you on my blog. You raise issues that I believe will help others who are not as articulate as you in describing their anguish.
Of course I will not reveal your name nor will I post your words to me.
If I can be of more help to you, please let me know.
Warm regards,
Joanna
Eating Disorder Recovery: Why “To Do Lists” Work and Don’t Work
When you suffer from an eating disorder your psyche has developed in such a way that the eating disorder is needed. Anyone with an eating disorder knows that deciding to “stop” doesn’t work.
If you have an eating disorder you also know that you do things unrelated to food that cause problems in your life.
Problem Habits
Postponing anything or everything is standard behavior for a person with an eating disorder. Withdrawing from social contact, immersing in reading or watching TV or other escapist fare is part of the life of a person with an eating disorder. So is staying up late and/or falling asleep on the couch in front of the TV, always feeling tired, skipping breakfast, breaking promises and more. If you have an eating disorder you can add to this list.
Decision to Improve
Every once in a while the person with an eating disorder will make a decision to improve her life. She rallies her energy and makes a list of what she needs to do to live better. She knows she can’t stop the eating disorder, but she will try to improve in other areas.
The “To Do List”
Your list might go something like this:
1. Don’t watch TV (or limit TV to 2 hours a week or one or two favorite shows).
2. Get eight hours of sleep every night.
3. Eat a balanced breakfast every day.
4. Call friends (or people who used to be friends) and invite them to something.
5. Take a shower or bath every day.
6. Get dressed nicely every day.
7. Clean the house and get rid of clutter.
8. Throw out junk food and binge food.
9. Get to an employment agency and go on interviews for a new job.
10. Take a class at a college extension program.
Okay. Sound familiar? These are all worthwhile tasks. Usually a version of this list will its way into self-help programs, self-help books, blogs and suggestions from support groups, friends, therapists, and here it is on my blog. It may be pinned up on your bulletin board. A worn and faded version may be floating around in your desk or bureau drawer.
Does the List Work?
Does this list work if you follow the instructions? Yes, following these guidelines will give a person an opportunity to improve her life. So if you follow your list you will improve your life, right?
So why doesn’t it work? Why does the person revert to the old behaviors despite the good intentions?
Why that List Doen’t Work
Here’s the key, the crucial piece that needs to be understood. All avoidant behaviors serve a function.
By avoidant behavior I mean anything that keeps people and opportunity away: being tired, dirty, smelly, raggedy, angry, bored, listless are effective blocks between a person and a more full life.)
All the things you do or do not do are based on the your psychological and emotional condition as you are —-not as you wish to be, as you your are.
Making a mechanical change in your life will bring the immediate consequences of the change, e.g. sleep more and be more alert during the day, don’t watch TV and have more time available for other activities.
But, making a mechanical change does nothing for the interior structure you needed. That structure supports the old status quo that allowed you to bear your life. You need the isolation because you can’t bear the feelings that come up when you are more in the hustle bustle of life.
When the mechanical structure is tampered with, your psychological and emotional vulnerabilities are not protected. Powerful feelings, usually frightening and painful, emerge in a torrent.
The old structure isn’t there to hold you. So you will rush back to the TV or the junk food or the sleep deprived state to make yourself “okay.” And, of course, you will be highly critical of yourself for “failing” again.
When Can the To Do List Work?
When does such a “To Do” list work? In effective psychotherapy, you make a small change following such a list. Your emotions will come up. The psychology of your inner self will react. You will feel pain, fear, anger, act out and both feel and actually be “out of control.” (Because the old structure isn’t there to hold you, i.e. keep you “in control”.)
The Process
But, on the journey to health with a knowledgeable and caring psychotherapist who understands the healing system of a person with an eating disorder, that acting out can be held. It can be understood, shared, processed and eventually brought to awareness and integrated into the whole of the person.
That’s the complex psychotherapeutic work in a nutshell. When this piece is completed, you are a bit stronger and healthier than you were. Then you will make another change. Again, your vulnerabilities are exposed with no structural protection except the new holding environment that is her therapy. Again your feelings and acting out behavior find understanding and holding as you heal a bit more and grow a bit stronger.
And so again, you works down the list and add more complexity to that list as you enter a more full and complex life.
So, the list does and doesn’t work, depending on how a person prepares to deal with the inevitable consequences of tampering with the balance an existing system.
Value in Experimentation
Above all, experimenting with a “To Do” list, can lead you to a genuine recovery path. Often it’s when we do everything we can think of, use everything we have available and still fail to accomplish our goals, that we then reach for something beyond what we know about. That’s when we reach for teachers, schools, therapists, educational programs, creativity and spirituality practices, and healthy body movement experiences to grow beyond our limits.
If you have an eating disorder you need to reach beyond the limits of your abilities and risk trusting the heart and mind of another to find your way through that list to healing and a better life.
When your “To Do List” fails it may be just the signal you need to reach for your deep recovery work.
Catch 22 in Getting Effective Eating Disorder Treatment
Calling for Help
Many people with eating disorders call or write to me asking for help. They often face a dilemma. I wonder about the people who don’t call or write because they may be in a state where they the dilemma prevents them from reaching out.
Positive Opportunity
Here’s how it goes. A woman of any age or social or economic or educational level says, “I’m suffering. I can’t live this way anymore. I need help.”
Okay. That sounds good to me. The woman realizes her eating disorder makes a fulfilling life impossible. She has reached the limit of her tolerance for pain. Her denial system is breaking down. She is ready to commit to the deep and sustained psychological work that can result is deep and sustained recovery. The next step is to discuss her experience in detail to determine what kind of treatment would best serve her given her life situation. Then I refer her to professionals in the field who I think may be a good match or she makes an appointment to see me if that seems right to both of us.
Opportunity Glitch
But. She goes one. “I feel so guilty and ashamed. I try to stop this and I start again. I was better for a week (or a month, or two days, or five months) but then I started again. I have to stop being so weak and just do it.”
Uh oh. Now she is succumbing to symptoms. Guilt, shame, sense of personal failure are symptoms that accompany an active eating disorder. If those symptoms are given power she will continue to attack and criticize herself. She will refuse treatment because she feels certain that she should be able to stop her behavior from strength and will power.
She doesn’t appreciate the fact that she is trying to stop a symptom through will power in much the same futile way as a person who attempts to use will power stop lung congestion or a fever. Will power cannot cure illness or disease. The belief that she can use will power to stop her eating disorder is one of the symptoms of an eating disorder. This is a powerful dilemma.
When her will power fails to stop or cure her eating disorder she will feel more guilt, shame and fear. She certainly will experience more suffering. And that can cause her eating disorder behaviors to increase. This is the road to despair.
She continues. “I don’t want anyone to know. I can’t tell _______(my husband, parents, friends, doctor). Can you help me?”
Wanting to keep her agony a secret is part of increasing shame. It’s also related to keeping up a good front to others. She does this because she is afraid other people will be disgusted with her if they knew the truth of her life. She fears that they would pull away. She would then be more isolated, alone and afraid.
This fear of instilling disgust in others and therefore making it necessary for them to abandon her is also part of the symptoms that accompany eating disorders.
The Catch 22
She asks for treatment which would hopefully include symptom reduction. But those symptoms prevent her from getting the help she needs. A woman needs to get past some of her symptoms on her own in order to reach out for effective treatment.
Getting Through the Obstacles
The good news is that she doesn’t have to cure herself before she can enter treatment. That doesn’t make sense and is not required. Her pain will push her to seek help.
If she hears often enough that some of her feelings are symptoms she might entertain the possibility that this might be true. She might rally her courage despite her fear and shame and risk putting herself in a healing environment. With a competent and caring mental health professional who understands people with eating disorders she can begin real recovery work.
She doesn’t have to believe that some of her feelings are symptoms. Wanting to believe may be enough to get treatment started. That desire to believe breaks the lock on the dilemma.
When that lock breaks and real treatment begins she can start making her desire for recovery a developing reality.
Bias Confession from an Eating Disorders Specialist
My patients and readers live their own lives with their own agendas and values leading the way.
My Bias
However, I am not neutral. I want, with all my heart, for you to live long healthy lives. I want you to be well, to have love, joy, satisfaction, confidence and a genuine liking for yourself as you proceed onward to a feisty, interesting and healthy old age.
I especially do not want you to break your own hearts.
Reasons for Entering Psychotherapy
People who come to my psychotherapy practice or writings need a reason to make that entry. Primarily, you come because you have an eating disorder. You also come because a person with an eating disorder is in your intimate circle. You may also come because you know someone who benefited from my work and want those same benefits for your life.
Mostly, you come because you experience emotional pain and frustration in their lives and have a spark of hope that maybe another way to live exists.
Ending an eating disorder is a step, a major step granted, but still a step toward creating and living a better life.
Establishing Goals
In my practice, my focus is on the whole person sitting in front of me. I see the energy poured into the eating disorder. I get a glimpse of what might be possible for you if that energy were directed toward living a more full life. When we share that glimpse we become a team of two with the goal being to send life energy to life. That means dismantling the eating disorder mechanism and removing the need for the protection given by the eating disorder.
Our mutual goal becomes creating a psychological, emotional and spiritual normal that allows your genuine life potential to unfold.
Priority of Your Goals
My job, as I see it, requires me to state my bias and let you know that your best choice is one that comes from your beliefs, not mine. You also need to know that I will support your living based on your values, not mine. But neither of us will make or honor decisions based on the distorted thinking and value systems that are hooked to the eating disorder.
Goals Based On Eating Disorder
A free and healthy person faces difficult choices in life. If an eating disorder doesn’t exist, then an automatic and artificial guiding system doesn’t take over the decision making by default.
For example, you don’t stay home and binge or use instead of meeting with friends. You don’t binge and throw up before meeting a potential employer and therefore meet that person in a partially numbed condition.
If an eating disorder isn’t there then decisions about school applications, career choices, pregnancy (to conceive or terminate), relationship choices (positive or negative), commitments of any kind, are based on personal agenda and personal values. These must belong to the individual, not me. And neither of us want them to be determined by an active eating disorder.
Discovering and Honoring Your Genuine Values
I do my best to make my bias clear so that you are free of any sense of obligation to please me. More importantly, my stating my bias helps you sort out what you she thinks you are supposed to choose based on the agenda and values of others, including the entire culture, as opposed to what you deeply value.
After all, in the end, you lives your life. And a satisfying life is one that is based on living according to your own true agenda and values.
Sometimes self sacrifice is based on deeply held and honored values known and appreciated by you alone. I believe a person needs to be free to make such a choice.
However, if an eating disorder is in the way, choices involving self sacrifice can be blurred or seen as required with no possibility of flexibility, change or even a vague sense of the option to say, “No.”
If you is oblivious to her your values or put the demands of an eating disorder before your own highest priorities you can make a choice that will immediately or eventually break your own heart.
As an eating disorder fades you are challenged to listen and learn your own truth. I stand for your listening t0 and honoring your own unbuffered self, mind, spirit, body and heart. When you can do that, you are on your way to living your real life. That is a joyous and satisfying way to live.
Joanna Poppink, MFT, psychotherapist eating disorder specialist, Los Angeles, CA bulimia, anorexia, compulsive overeating recovery, www.poppink.com
National Eating Disorders Awareness Week Starts Today
National Eating Disorders Awareness Week
February 24 – March 8, 2008
Useful Resources for All Year
Here’s a list of what I consider useful and substantial resources related to eating disorder information and treatment opportunities. I’ve included two videos that impressed me. And I’m including my list of eating disorder in-patient and residential programs (93 pages) available for free via my website.
1. National Eating Disorders Awareness Week home page
2. National Eating Disorder Awareness Week - IAEDP Southern California Event
3. YouTube - Eating Disorder Awareness Week Video
Powerful and sensitive visuals and rap music
4. YouTube - National Eating Disorder Awareness Week Video
Candid talk by young woman who restricts
5. Gurze Books
Specializes in publishing books about eating disorders
6. Academy for Eating Disorders (AED)
The Academy for Eating Disorders (AED) is a global,
multidisciplinary professional organization that provides
cutting-edge professional training and education, inspires
new developments in eating disorders research, prevention,
and clinical treatments, and is the international source
for state-of-the-art information in the field of eating disorders.
7. International Association of Eating Disorders Professionals (IAEDP)
8. National Eating Disorders Association;
10. Eating Disorder Information and Referral Center
11. American Psychological Association Help Center for Eating Disorders
12. ANRED
a nonprofit organization providing information about eating disorders,
recovery and prevention.
13. Extensive list of in-patient and residential treatment programs - international
Created by Joanna Poppink, MFT, the list is free and available to qualified
individuals via e-mail attachment. Be advised, attachment is 93 pages long.
This is the week to learn and share knowledge about helpful eating disorder recovery resources. It’s a time to support all who are working for recovery for themselves or on behalf of others.
Please let me know if you discover other valuable and useful resources you feel belong on this list.
Thank you.
Joanna
How Long Does It Take to Recover from Bulimia or Anorexia? Part III
What does it take to Heal from Bulimia or Anorexia?
Healing from anorexia and bulimia requires development along all seven points I described in my last post.
But what does it take to actually heal? And why does this healing take a long time?
When I went back to college after a 13-year absence from academia, UCLA gave me a yellow piece of paper that listed my required courses. When I completed everything on the list UCLA would grant me a degree in psychology.
The sheet was 81/2 x 11 inches. I tacked it on the wall above my desk and set to work. Every four months I checked off three classes. It took me three years to work through that one sheet of paper and qualify for my first diploma.
Below is a short list of developmental tasks that can take several or many years to move through. Still, like my yellow sheet on the wall, the list can inspire a person to keep on keeping on.
Perhaps, most importantly, the list confronts a person with realistic goals when her mind starts making excuses and rationalizing false beliefs.
Necessary Developmental Tasks Stated in Affirmation Form
Here are some of the developmental tasks written affirmation form so even reading them is a beginning.
1. I tolerate my feelings.
2. I am realistically aware of what is going on outside and inside my own skin.
3. I know how to establish and honor personal boundaries
4. I know how to make myself safe.
5. I know how to recognize reasonable and honorable people.
6. I know how to enlist the help of reasonable and honorable people in a fair and honest way.
7. I know how to discriminate between healthy and unhealthy activities, environments and companions.
8. I know how to makes honest, self-caring and honorable choices based on healthy observation.
9. I know my own genuine weaknesses and strengths.
10. I take responsible action in the world.
11. I know when to say, “No.”
12. I am able to say, “No,” even if I am uncomfortable about saying so.
13. Regardless of the challenges life presents, I know and trust that I have what it takes to live a good life.
Thirteen Breaks the Pattern
I created thirteen tasks in this list. The number thirteen has significance. It means breaking an old pattern. It means emerging as something new or a new variation on an old theme.
Actually, as I write this I surprise myself because I began this post by revealing my thirteen-year hiatus from school. I didn’t make the connection till just now. That’s how the psyche works.
After thirteen years out of school I returned to resume my education on a new path, build a career and create a new life that was and is much better than the life I had completed. Thirteen was the break the pattern signal. And I didn’t know that consciously till just now.
Developmental Benefits
When a person makes positive strides in the direction of achieving these developmental tasks, the eating disorder has less of a function in her life. The person discovers much better ways of taking care of her psychological and survival needs and expands her life into more enriching experiences. The eating disorder is less or even no longer necessary.
How long does this take? It takes as long as it takes to accomplish these tasks. The actual time differs with each person. How each task is accomplished involves the work in psychotherapy that leads to the past, the present and the future. It leads to new ways of thinking, feeling and responding. It leads to grand discoveries of where a person is truly interested and of how she wants to invest her life energies.
Recovery doesn’t happen overnight and the work isn’t easy. However, the good news is that you don’t have to wait for full recovery to reap benefits of healing. Every step of the healing process allows the person to be more competent in the world, experience the joy of being more capable and especially, able to connect with other good people in a satisfying and healthy way.
By all means, let me know your thoughts about this. I welcome your sharing.
Joanna Poppink, MFT, psychotherapist eating disorder specialist, Los Angeles, CA bulimia, anorexia, compulsive overeating recovery, www.poppink.com
How Long Does It Take to Recover from Buliimia or Anorexia? Part II
Why does recovery from anorexia or bulimia take years? Because vital developmental tasks must be addressed, and development takes time.
Let’s look at what needs to be accomplished in recovery.
Psychological Function of Eating Disorders
Eating disorders develop to serve a protective psychological function.
1. They protect a person from being aware of what they cannot bear to know or feel.
2. They give a person a sense of control when the person has little real control over what’s important to them.
3. They give a person a private island of limited sensation and limited awareness. This is a defense that helps when a person is incapable of preventing physical, psychological or emotional boundary invasion.
4. They create an obsessive sense of entitlement to make up for the lack of boundary awareness or the lack of knowledge or skill in honoring personal boundaries or limits.
5. They protect a person through numbness and obsessive thinking from knowing what they feel such as anger, fear, disappointment, regret, guilt and shame. A person may even need to block feelings of love, passion and joy if knowledge of those feelings would disrupt the status quo of her environment.
6. Eating disorders allow limited but intense feelings to surge within the person and explode out as a form of relief from tension. These episodes are often highly dramatic and can be both manipulative and destructive in relationships.
7. In many situations eating disorders protect a person from knowing she is competent, intelligent, capable and creative when such knowledge might be disruptive to her present life and the imagined (and sometimes real) consequences are intolerable.
Necessary Psychological Development
Healing from anorexia and bulimia requires deep, rich and healthy development along many layers of the personality. When this is achieved the person can cope with the difficult ordinary and sometimes extraordinary challenges life presents without the protection of the eating disorder. Healing also frees a woman to be capable of giving and receiving honest emotions in worthwhile relationships.
As a matter of fact, healing frees a woman to actually be a woman.
I’d be glad to elaborate on any of these points. Please feel free to ask questions and share your opinions and experiences in the comments.
In the service of easy blog reading I’m trying to keep posts as short as I can while still giving you as much recovery information as possible.
In my next post I’ll talk a little about some of the work required to heal from bulimia and anorexia.
How Long Does it Take to Recover from Bulimia or Anorexia? Part I
Realistic Answer
How long will recovery take? This is a reasonable question I’m often asked.
Not only can I not provide a specific time, but also I can’t guarantee that someone will indeed recover. And I certainly can’t give the answer so many people want, which is days or a weekend or at most, a quick stay in a residential program.
The question is complex with a different answer for every individual.
If you are still reading after this undesirable news, please let me talk a little about eating disorders and recovery.
Purpose of an Eating Disorder
People develop eating disorders for a reason. Eating disorders help a person cope with living when the person has not developed other ways to successfully take care of herself.
Healing Tasks
Healing has to do with developing a competent, mature and aware sense of self and awareness in the world. It has to do with restarting stalled emotional development so that the person can take care of herself realistically in the face of simple and complex life challenges.
How long does it take to accomplish the required developmental tasks? A substantial period of time from several years to many years, depending on the challenges of each individual.
Recovery is a Process
But please don’t despair at the thought of the time involved. Recovery is a process. As you move through time and stages of recovery, you reap benefits as you go. Your life improves as you gain more health.
During the healing work, yes, you will need courage to face your pain. But you will also experience joy as you discover the authentic worthwhile you.
I’ll write more about the recovery process in my next post.
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