home base for Sunday dinners, talks by the fire, and honest sharing. A recovering alcoholic psychiatrist I'll call Michael, became a teacher and mentor as I worked my way through 12-step groups finding my path.
Hedda Bolgar accepted me in her practice and, through her love, skill, and the powers of psychoanalysis, helped me clear psychological rubble blocking my way to recovery.
The requirements of my profession gave me opportunities to practice what I was learning in classes, seminars, group trainings, and readings. I shared work with colleagues at the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute as we studied guided imagery and helped one another learn to help others and ourselves. I stopped being locked into a false presentation of who I was and began living a life that gave me the opportunity to build a real person—me.
Because I was ill, I was a flawed mother. But like so many mothers I see in my practice today, I was determined to make a good life possible for my daughter. Moving toward recovery and well-being for myself created a better life for both of us. I earned enough money to provide a lovely home near her school and friends, which had seemed impossible only a year earlier. I developed myself, my career, and my new friendships in order to be a better person for me and a more positive influence in her life. I'm happy to say she lives her satisfying and fulfilling life today. Love is a powerful motivating force.
I didn't intend to specialize in working with women who had eating disorders, but I kept following my heart and my authentic values as I learned to recognize them. As I healed and developed, I studied and spoke about what interested me and what I cared about. I discovered that there was more to me than being a woman with an eating disorder, as I had believed when in the depth of my illness. I discovered that women in their thirties, forties, fifties, and sixties were revealing their eating disorders as more of us spoke openly about our lives. I came to believe I had value to offer.
Today my goal is to help others who are suffering from eating disorders to achieve health and freedom. I believe that healing, developing the person you authentically are, and honoring your heart frees you from terrible fears that make eating disorders necessary. Further, I'm confident that your recovery exerts a healing influence on others.
Living with an eating disorder is a miserable way to live. Women often live with their eating disorders for many years before seeking help. Stopping the behavior is good, but it's not enough. I've heard women say, (and I've said it too), “I want my life to have meaning.” We don't want those years consumed by an eating disorder to be lost years. We want to go beyond recovery into a life that is worth living. With recovery comes a unique awareness and knowledge we never would have had without struggling with an eating disorder. When we find value in that knowledge, we are truly in recovery and in a life that is satisfying and free.
I wrote this book, word after word, in a linear fashion because that's how books get written. But you are not linear. Each chapter describes a particular issue that requires skills, growth, understanding, and courage to negotiate. As a nonlinear human being, you will most likely be confronted with many of your personal issues at the same time. Please do not be dismayed. Every chapter is designed to help you develop the awareness, self-compassion, and tools to keep you moving on your recovery path. Each bit of growth and healing you experience will help you in all phases of your life. The chapters are designed to help you build, layer upon layer, the means to nourish your own health and become less afraid, less bewildered, and more present and more capable.
Please remember, helping yourself does not mean going it alone. Helping yourself means committing to your life and supporting your own recovery. This includes learning how to recognize opportunity and reach out to people who are in a position to offer you genuine help on your journey to healing. Part of recovery is learning how to make wise choices about trustworthy and honorable people. They will come.
A happy—an amazing—surprise awaits you in recovery. Your goal may be to lose weight or lose your obsession. You may yearn to escape your fears and feel safe. You can't imagine more than that. In recovery, you discover that you can be more alive than you ever dreamed. You discover that trustworthy people honor you, welcome your gifts, support your endeavors, and even offer you love. You learn that you are valuable and can find joy in sharing the gift of yourself. What's more, you learn to recognize love and not accept false substitutes. You become present in the world as a real woman.
CHAPTER 2
Beginning to Free Yourself
“In the truest sense, freedom cannot be bestowed; it must be achieved.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt
Before you picked up this book, you probably looked for ways to recover many times. Maybe some of your methods were questionable: You tried diets to lose weight; you chewed sugarless gum until your jaw ached; you may have tried drugs to squelch your appetite or control your feelings. Maybe you surrendered to your eating disorder and isolated yourself with TV and binge food as your main companions. In public, you may have hidden your too-thin or too-fat or just plain unacceptable body in layers of clothing, smiled a smile you didn't mean, and kept yourself so busy you didn't have time to know what you were feeling. You may have distracted eyes from your rotund or skeletal body by wearing expensive or flamboyant jewelry.
When these tricks succeeded, you felt safe as eyes bounced off you and moved on, or if you beguiled those eyes with accessories. At the same time, you were not happy being treated as if you were invisible or when someone focused on your embellishments. You created a barrier between yourself and other people so that having a genuine relationship was an unlikely possibility. This “success” caused you much loneliness.
Now, book in hand, you are ready to explore a path that might be new for you—and it might work. You want to be free. You share this desire with all men and women who are dependent on an eating disorder.
Most of the people I work with are women, so I use the feminine pronoun in this book. I'm reporting the details of the successful treatment of women in my practice over the years, plus my own recovery story. When you, man or woman, focus on the personal details of your life and understand how you act out your eating disorder, you have the potential to move toward your recovery and heal. Are you ready to begin?
Research about eating disorders continues at all levels of psychology and medicine, dispelling myths and gathering new information. (See Appendix C for findings and summaries.) Yet many of the ideas and information about eating disorders, even when based on credible ongoing research, are still controversial.
Eating disorders have the highest mortality rate of any mental disorder. Bingeing and purging plays havoc with teeth and gums and can harm the esophagus, and over extended periods of time it disrupts electrolytes in the body, which can result in a heart attack. Anorexia leads to heart problems, infertility, and osteoporosis.
Some people might suffer from bulimia and anorexia without having complicating medical problems. Some live long lives. I've known anorexic women in their eighties, bent over with osteoporosis and suffering from mild to moderate dementia. I remember Bella, frail and thin at eighty-five. Her osteoporosis created a “hump” in her back that pushed her upper torso forward. I watched her buttoning her cardigan sweater. Because of the angle of her body, the buttons and button holes didn't connect. In a harsh staccato voice she said, “I'm so fat. Damn it. I'm not eating today.” My breath stopped. My chest ached as I stood witness to the ravaged leavings of a lifetime of anorexia. Bella no longer had a choice, but you do.
This book lays out essential guidelines for creating and supporting your ongoing recovery. As you move through the chapters, you
