(I’ve been having some long conversations about the experience of eating disorders–living with them, surviving them. This post is just a few of those thoughts written down.)
I thought I was cured of my eating disorder when I stopped purging. So did at least a few of my care providers, as well as many of the people in my life. It is true that ending these self-destructive behaviors is an important part of the recovery process, and that they can be extremely dangerous in and of themselves. It is also true that you can’t really seek treatment for these behaviors unless and until you understand that they are harmful and extreme, that they are symptoms of a big problem.
However, the mindset behind an eating disorder is much more difficult to change–much more difficult to even recognize–than the behaviors that have become representative of the illness. As with “dry drunks,” the components of an eating disorder–e.g. goals that are by definition unreachable, obsessive focus on one aspect of one’s life, a punishing regimen, a need for strict control–can be and often are transferred to other things. The body is an immediate sphere, but it is not the only one.
It’s even possible to carry these impulses into the recovery process. It’s not even all that hard for many sufferers, I don’t think. You’ve got an urgent problem to solve. You’ve got all this new stuff to learn and remember. You don’t want to be irrational or infirm or screwed up. No, you refuse to be irrational or infirm or screwed up. It’s suddenly clear to you that you’ve lost control over yourself and your life. How else can you reassert it? I’m going to beat this thing.
I find myself referring to “eating-disordered thinking,” and I am increasingly wary of that construction. I cannot distance myself from this problem. To do so would be to obscure its origins and mask its virulence. My eating disorder is me. It is as much a function of my personality as any other skill. In other contexts, the same tendencies are neutral or helpful. In still others, they are the best things about me. The same traits that caused me to develop an eating disorder are the talents that allow me to save money, plan trips, write posts, create paintings, and learn languages. My ability to adapt, to learn new information quickly, to commit to a goal and pursue it with singleminded focus, to ignore frustration, to keep moving, to find occupation, to tell a story.
All of these things will make me a great artist, if I harness them in the right way. They also make me brilliant at refined self-destruction. They are also the tools I will have to use to recover. This is why it is sometimes fatuous to talk about being cured. I may not have an eating disorder all my life, but disordered eating and the mindset behind it will always resonate with my personality on the deepest level.
Piny, it sounds like what you’ve done is very similar to what I did years ago with my alcoholism. The problems are not just physical- that’s the immediate situation. It’s the MENTAL mindset that has to morph and change within us, and only we can affect that.
These problems are indeed part of who we are and while we own them, THEY DO NOT HAVE TO OWN US. After over a decade, my “allergy” to alcohol is no more important to me than my allergy to blueberries- I just don’t involve myself with EITHER.
You sound like your focusing your energies in positive directions! GOOD LUCK… and thank you; I have learned so much from your writings and links this past year.
That’s a really interesting point that isn’t talked about enough to people in recovery from anything, but especially eating disorders (where it’s probably needed the most). After I went through inpatient and outpatient treatment, I too thought I was cured, because most of the behavior had stopped. But even after treatment, I still felt uncomfortable with food, depressed, distracted, and isolated. I expected these feelings to be there, but I expected them to lessen without ever getting worse.
Unfortunately, their intensity came and went, and instead of riding out the bad times as a normal part of the illness, I considered them some sort of imperfection in my recovery . I used to get even more panicked because I was supposed to be on the straight and narrow road to recovery, full stop, as if I had control over whether I felt shitty or not. It’s the exact flip side of the anorexia – there’s no room for backsliding, ever, even mentally, even if it’s unreasonable to expect that sort of perfect standard.
I think I could have spared myself a lot of grief if I could have given myself permission to fall apart every once in awhile, realizing that it didn’t always mean I was slipping back into full-blown disordered patterns.
Of course, that begs the question – when does a “bad spell” become a full-blown disorder again? I guess that’s what I was afraid of in the first place – like you said, I didn’t want to be irrational, infirm, or screwed up. It’s still hard for me to see when I might cross the line into those areas.
Oh, hell yes.
One reason I stopped going to 12-step meetings is that they started to sound like Sunday School. If I want more punishment, I’ll go visit my family, thanks.
Lots of “recovery fundamentalism”–which to me, is just more of the same problem that got us into trouble in the first place. All sorts of lines drawn in the sand, particularly regarding the use of Rx drugs (I refer to AA). The constant supervision can feel like you are trying to adhere to kosher cooking laws, or something.
And I’m sure this type of recovery fundamentalism is totally nightmarish when applied to EATING–my God! How much carbs does this saltine have? Are you ALLOWED to eat it, or have you TURNED ON THE COOKSTOVE AFTER SABBATH?????
Hope that made sense.
Yep, I hear you. The black and white thinking is always going to be there, whether it’s about binging, purging, starving, my body, or getting the house cleaned exactly the right way and if I can’t do that then FUCK IT LETS JUST MAKE A HUGE MESS.
Yeah, I think that’s right. When I say I’ve been cured of my eating disorder, what I mean is that I’ve taken control of food out of the “all” category and put it into the “nothing” one. I’m still an all-or-nothing thinker. I’m just way healthier when I eat whatever I want. I don’t know what I’m going to do if I ever develop diabetes or some other condition that means that I have to watch what I eat, because I’m no more capable of moderation in that direction now than I was when I was starving.
I think this is hard, because while I do think that my eating disorder tendencies are pretty fundamental parts of my personality, I also think that they cause me trouble in other aspects of my life, and some of them are things that I’d like to change about myself. I’m not sure where to draw the line between trying to be someone who I’m not and acting as if I have no control over how I think. And unfortunately, I tend to be pretty all-or-nothing on that issue, too.
Or, one can focus obsessively on controlling other people’s behavior, obsess over other people’s issues (giving oneself an unreachable goal) and trying to maintain strict control of the uncontrollable (other people). This is insidious as it effects everything in life, denying a person any sort of support system because his/her behavior has become insufferable.
Well, IME, someone who cares so deeply only need learn to care for him/herself as much as s/he does for everyone else. So, as you said, the qualities that may have caused a person to spiral are also the very same qualities that will ultimately save him/her.
The recent book “Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters: the frightening new normalcy of hating your body” by Courtney Martin hits at this topic precisely, and from a young, realistic, and insightful perspective. I just happened upon it at my local library a few weeks ago and it’s been an overwhelming read.
I still do this to a really unhelpful degree. Whilst I’m, largely, no longer engaging in eating disordered behaviours I still use the mindset a great deal.
The thing I struggle with in relation to this is trying to rationalise the positive aspects, success at a relatively young age, drive, focus etc., with the degree of restriction and rigidity I also experience. It ends up feeling tremendously disempowering, both because I create huge amounts of stress for myself as a result of setting unattainable goals and standards and also because I then attribute much of my success to aspects of my personality I’ve ‘othered’ as part of my recovery process.
I’ve done a lot of therapy, but not formal ED treatment (in\out patient), and as part of that I worked on trying to recognise and move past some of the negative thought patterns and behaviours (the obsession, the rigidity, the all or nothing,) although I now think I ended up putting them in a kind of unhealthy box that me, the healthy person, didn’t access anymore. When I started my job (high intensity, corporate type,) those personality traits, particularly the perfectionism and obsessive dedication, were very useful and get affirmed and validated as positive traits. I’ve certainly had a couple of projects where I’ve ended up compulsively working ridiculous hours, in a way that felt much like bingeing \ purging felt when it stopped being something I did and became something I couldn’t not do.
I think work is one of the relatively few areas- along with weight loss- where an obsessive and somewhat self-destructive drive isn’t just acceptable, but lauded. On a gendered note, it seems like the area that men can most easily express that kind of rigidity and focus and be rewarded in the same way that, at least in the early stages (and according to cultural mythology), women with restricting anorexia are rewarded for doing something that’s fundamentally self-limiting and destructive.
It’s been fundamentally pretty odd to be in a position where I’m objectively healthy- my weight is at the low end of normal but ok, the scary health problems have gone away- but still feel haunted by the same type of problem as before. To respond to personal losses or stress by deciding to stay late at work or to take on another project and feel the same emotional charge I got from restricting (the virtue in self-negation, working for another, higher cause.) And then to find that, hey, no matter what this does to me as a person, it never gets to the point where I’m going to get anything but praise. There’s no visit to the GP where my blood pressure is dangerously low, or anything obvious to slow me down and pull me back. Seeing that, and feeling so much that’s reminiscent of EDs, whilst working to make a space that lets me be healthy, is really hard. Particularly when the me that I want to be is a successful person and that success feels linked to using behaviours that feel like they have that potential to blossom into something soul-constricting again.
Hey, I have a twin! ;-)
The more I learn about eating disorders, the more it sounds like they fall on the spectrum of addictions and not a “mental disorder” the way schizophrenia or depression would. The 12-step model may not be perfect, but it sounds like it would be much more useful than the current mode of treatment.
Thanks so much for posting this. I haven’t purged in almost a year, and I thought I was fine, too. But now it’s all resurfacing, and I’m finding that a lot of my rigid behavior concerning other parts of my life parallels my all-or-nothing mindset that I had towards food.
This part especially resonates with me. For me, though, I think the black-and-white thinking has been more of a problem than a boon… at least, in that I’ve been so blindly running away from my eating disorder that I’m willfully neglecting other parts of my life (ie. I’m afraid to start a work-out regimen because I don’t want to fall into my old habits, even though I do need to exercise more). I’m now realizing that the urges to binge and purge were symptoms of my eating disorder, not actually causes. It’s like my fear of imperfection-through-weight has now become a fear of imperfection-through-eating-disorder. I guess I have a while more to go.
Thanks again for posting this, I’ve been having trouble finding people to talk to in my area who actually know where I’m coming from, so it’s really nice to see this here.
Binger and purger of three years. I remember the day I quit, February 10, 1986 because it’s one of my proudest accomplishments. Several years later, I attended OA for three years. Addictions turned into new addictions but nothing was as messy and awful as purging.
This is so, so timely for me right now. People expected that once I stopped purging, stopped starving and stopped visiting pro-anorexia message boards, that I was “cured.” I think I even assumed that for a while.
But the thought patterns are what just never goes away. I’m about to start a new phase of my life with all new people and it’s been a struggle not to start restricting again. I have to force myself to eat whatever is on my mind, because as soon as I start skipping a meal or denying myself, I’m sure I’ll go right back to how things were. Sally is so right about it being all or nothing.
P.S. Donna Darko, you quit on my birthday.
Thank you so much for posting this. I’ve been bulimic for ten years now, and I use that verb tense consciously, because although it’s been nearly a year since I’ve purged, I know that, as you said, not-purging isn’t the same as being cured.
For me, any time I’ve not been actively bingeing and purging, I’ve just been projecting that mindset into other harmful activities. When it wasn’t purging, it was sex, and when it wasn’t sex, it was self-injuring, and when it wasn’t self-injuring, it was overworking, and sometimes it was several in combination. All harmful, and all based on the same mindset.
Right now, I’m healthier than I’ve been in a while just in the sense of mental health, body image, and harmful behavior, but just like you said, those same bulimic tendencies influence the “healthy” things I do. I’ve got a workout regimen and a diet going on, and I’ve got maximum limits on both to keep me from getting into dangerous territory, but it’s still not moderation – it’s a slavish attendance to the standards that I’ve set for myself, a competition with myself to be perfect and get everything right. I do give myself credit for setting standards for perfection that are reasonable and fairly healthy, but I don’t for a minute kid myself that I’m “better.”
You’re never cured. I moved to less harmful addictions like coffee and the internet. Trying trying trying! ;)
You’re never cured. I moved to less harmful addictions like coffee and the internet. Trying trying trying! ;)