About a year ago, I gave a talk to a group of patients with eating disorders at Sheppard Pratt. Apart from obvious signs of eating disorders (e.g., low weight), the group couldn’t have been more different, given the age range was 11 to 55 years. What could I say to a preteen to which a mid-lifer could also relate?
The answer was simple: the eating disorder itself. I described what happened when my eating disorder was active. I spoke about a voice in my head, harsh sometimes, seductive others. It cajoles me into old behaviors. I saw the nods and the tears and I knew I hit my mark.
And then one young girl raised her hand. “What do you do when you start to recover and you go back out into the world, and you start slipping back?
The temptation is so common. But the what-to-do is not. How to prevent relapse often comes from the individual. How else can a person feel empowered to get better -- other than finding his or her way to confront the voice?
To help in that journey, I’d like to begin a series of blog posts that deal with the mind.
There’s a wide body of research that looks at eating disorder causes. One of great interest is genetics. The idea is that genes give a person a predisposition for an eating disorder. It manifests as a personality style. Someone prone to an eating disorder is generally, driven, thin-skinned and hyper-perfectionist. For bulimia and binge eating disorder, notes of impulsiveness and depression can also chime in. The idea is that experiments with food and weight are means to numb out, swallow, override, distract from or generally cope with the pain a person with the predisposition feels when his or her personality type collides with life.
The eating disorder, then, becomes the means to check out of experiencing the full force of life. While palliative in the moment, however, disordered eating backfires in the end. The person afflicted never learns the skills to face trauma or cope with everyday life because the eating disorder has stifled the growing pains. So there is stunted psychic growth.
On the recovery end, taking away the eating disorder leaves hole. Back out in the world, reality hits. But reality to a child-minded person is too much. And then comes the voice, offering refuge.
In the next series of blogs, I’d like to explore that “hole.” It’s not necessarily a dark place. More like sitting in the epicenter of emotions, long unfelt – worry, depression, joy, anger, contentment, boredom and so on. How does one cope without the eating disorder behaviors to buffer?
I’d like to explore the answers, emotion by emotion. Explorations yield insights. And insights can bring real change. You can learn to tolerate the discomfort. It passes. And then you can move on…
Oh wow I loved this, so interested to hear more... thanks
Posted by: nicola | April 04, 2011 at 03:43 PM