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
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2 Responses to “Eating Disorders: Response to Cry for Help”
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Thank you for your rich and deep thinking about the complex experience of both developing an eating disorder and recovering from an eating disorder.
The sudden moment you speak of I understand in a similar way that I understand the actor who describes his thirty years of dedicated work which set him up for his “overnight success.”
A sudden moment of realization that turns a mind or heart or soul around can be the tiny moment that brings a life of work and growth into a crystal clear point of life changing revelation.
I tell a lot of stories and parables in my work with people. Meaningful and relevant stories cut through mind and psychological barriers of Left and Right brain hemisphere roles and vertical splits such as you and Kohut describe.
Ah, but which story will do it, and how many stories and years do we live through before we encounter the tale the brings that click of revelation?
What you say about faith I also support fully. In my life and in my practice I’ve learned to respect the power of what we actually believe in our lives.
No matter what religion or spiritual practice we prefer, or that comes from our heritage, or that our logical mind can support and defend, in a personal crisis
that touches our deeps our true beliefs comes forward. And those are the beliefs that require respect and can contribute greatly to solid healing.
Thank you again, Elizabeth. You raise beautiful and profound issues that I’m sure others would appreciate as well as myself. Your personal recovery work
can not only inspire, but also offer others an appreciation of difficult challenges such things as vertical splits can present to people moving on their own recovery path.
And thank you for your kind words about my blog.
warm regards,
Joanna
Dear Joanna,
I continue to visit and I love the latest incarnation of your blog. Your work is very powerful and I applaud your generosity in bringing others to a place of wholeness, as evidenced in your reply to this young woman.
I am doing some work with the Enneagram now, as part of my own journey, and recently came across a book on the Parables and the Enneagram (the Enneagram from a Christian perspective).
NB: I am a Christian by birth, and I find the religion intellectually fascinating; however, for many reasons, my “practice” has evolved in a more Eastern, specifically Buddhist, direction. I am sure Christianity offers a path to wholeness; however, I could not find in my own practice of it a way to healthfully integrate the body, something that has been essential to my healing.
Anyway, I am a Type 4 (with 5 wing) and in the chapter on Fours, the author of this book says something that resonates with what you are always saying - namely, before the behavior to change, it is important to address one’s underlying belief system as it is the beliefs that trigger the behaviors. The author reminds us that Jesus did not require repentance before administering healing: “For the fullness of the kingdom to break into one’s life (in the form of healing miracles), Jesus always required faith, not proof of moral rectitude. That’s because the morality will flow from the vision of fullness. People aren’t immoral for the fun of it; they do it to survive in a world of perceived scarcity.”
I never noticed this, despite two degrees in religion and countless walks through the New Testament!
How many mis-perceptions underlie our eating disorders!
I believe you are absolutely right that healing an eating disorder can require years of deep work - though we reap the benefits of being on a healing journey immediately. However, IF that shift in perspective can be achieved in a moment, as in hearing a parable, the process can be quicker. The world can turn on a dime. It didn’t for me, it took many years. But I don’t doubt the possibility - even for the woman you address here.
I think in my case what forestalled my healing was that I had was suffering from what Kohut would call a vertical split in the psyche. The sealed off material was not - as in a horizontal split - accessible through ordinary therapy. And more problematic, for a time, the “false self” (the unhealthy self) was stronger than my healthy self and it was the false self seeking therapy! I did not want to change - I wanted to preserve an illusion of perfection and invulnerability I had achieved at great cost! Only over time did the healthy self become stronger and I’d say only recently do I feel completely integrated (if not yet healed!).
This raises questions, perhaps for another post, about how to welcome the false self presenting for therapy so as to create a safe container in the therapeutic relationship for the healthy self to emerge.
It also makes me think of the all the effort that goes into maintaining a false self, how precarious it is, really, and how easy it might be to “kill it” (in a manner of speaking). There must be encounters, events, experiences in which the false self disintegrates and the healthy self, however weakened, is all that is left.
If you threaten it, it will retreat. And many retreated from Jesus’ words…
Anyway, all this by way of saying I believe that healing can happen instantaneously, even if it wasn’t my own experience.
Many thanks again for your work. I hope many find their way to it, and to wholeness.
Blessings,
Elizabeth
Elizabeth’s last blog post..on the enneagram type four, a christian perspective