Is God in the details?

There's a lot of talk around eating disorders around 'triggering' and unhelpful disclosure. There is also a lot of shame and secrecy. It may sound obvious, stupid, or naive, but to me the answer to much of this isn't that difficult... when I'm really ill, I'll be more vulnerable, I will never seek out tips etc. but I'll be vulnerable. When I read memoirs with details, or see posts on twitter etc about 'details' I see vulnerability and shame - a need to justify to oneself and others one's emotional pain through these rules and numbers and so on, because the protaganist perhaps is not fully holding onto the belief that they deserve support, that they deserve better whatever their 'details' may be. Then there are the other details, the hidden kind. Anyone with an eating disorder knows what I mean. These are not photos of fruit salads, or BMIs, or dexa scan results. These are waking at 2am in panic to sneak away and complete some exercise regime, avoiding sex or intimacy, going all day without food and then eating 12 slices of bread, taking laxatives to the point you damage your digestive system, regularly puking and hurting your teeth, fainting midway through a football match or whatever the individual 'push-points' may be. These are not my particular issues - they are a variety of things I encountered on an EDU. What became clear is recovery is about honesty, and tackling shame and imperfection. The NHS lets people down because numbers matter too much, and this is wrong, and it hinders a preventive approach. The critical thing to me is that I refuse to be a number - in illness or in recovery, if someone is struggling and vulnerable they may share numbers and that's ok, but it is sad that we cannot see past the numbers with eating disorders. BMI X is not the answer. Like any other mental health difficulty, flexibility and better coping strategies, greater honesty and good support are key. For me speaking and listening has been far more useful than hiding, and if one thing feels like it would be helpful it is making the nasty secrets and the dark truths around eating disorders more open - even as a relatively uncomplicated anorexic as the years have gone on, there have been bad bloods, health scares, and humiliations. Perhaps less talking about fruit salads and more talking about the true dangers and fears might help to open some doors, and make the NHS realise how badly some decent ED support is needed? These are one of the most dangerous mental health conditions - people should not be apologising for not recovering when many counties offer no outpatient preventive support. Perhaps more of the dirty truths of eating disorders and less of the instagrammed recoveries and memoir recipes is just what the doctor ordered?

Christmas wishes

This is my first Christmas living with my boyfriend. Last Christmas I was kind of unofficially invading his house, but I was also spending every waking minute living and breathing my PhD thesis so Christmas was reduced to a three day intermission in that process.... So this year it feels special. Christmas has always been really mixed for me. I'm religious and it has a great deal of spiritual significance, few things are more moving for me than midnight mass. I have also always loved the feeling of magic that surrounds Christmas, especially when there are children involved. But, it also brings up some very painful memories - some of which I can still barely tolerate thinking about - and brings up a huge amount of anxiety around some difficult and unresolved family dynamics. And then of course there is food.
I have been trying to embrace the excitement that the kid in me still feels over Christmas - making the house sparkle, gift-wrapping and bows, candles, the smell of mulled wine and Christmas baking. On Saturday, we got a tree, and I spent hours carefully choosing decorations and making it pretty, and just as I wanted (as a kid, our tree was always chaos - I wanted a colour scheme and symmetry, my sisters wanted EVERYTHING on it, they won...). I love our tree! It's pretty and it lends a touch of Christmas magic to the room. I have delighted in buying (too many) presents for my niece and nephew, carefully choosing this years gift-wrapping colour scheme, and picking out cards for each friend abroad that best matches their personality and taste. I have come up with plans for ice-skating and Christmas markets, bought mulled wine, and filled the living room with Christmas candles.
The thing is, I've also been avoiding and suppressing my terror over spending an entire week with our families. Or rather, I had been. Then I got blindsided by an unexpected surge of total panic on Saturday evening, was unable to sit or stay still, unable to tolerate the fear, I wanted to run away to the sea, to make everything stop somehow. I even tried buying cigarettes (on the plus side, this confirmed I have definitely lost all desire to smoke, a spectacular waste of money that went straight in the bin)!
When I'd eventually calmed a little, I tried to explain. I described my fear of being trapped, unable to leave the house all day. Just sitting, eating, talking, being evaluated. My boyfriend very gently suggested that this sounded like my anorexia was scared. I insisted that wasn't it... I still don't really know, but I think there is definitely a bit of both... Part of it has nothing to do with anorexia and everything to do with other stuff around reliving memories (to do with my family, not his) of feeling controlled and judged and forced to play the part of the person other people want to see. And part of it is the very anorexic fear of sitting around unable to walk off my anxiety whilst meal after meal, and snack after snack appears, and the inevitable comments about my appetite (from my boyfriends family) and avoidant chaos-making (from mine) increasingly make me feel a conspicuous failure.
This has been nagging at me ever since. My boyfriend deserves to sit around, relax, enjoy catching up with his family and sharing Christmas treats. He works really hard, and comes home everyday to his anxious girlfriend wobbling around attempting a DIY recovery whilst the NHS offers SFA in terms of guidance or support. That is tough. Really tough. Whatever Christmas means to me, to him it is all the things it should be, all the things I would wish it to be for my kids if I had any - togetherness, sharing love and joy, and giving gifts, having meals together, playing games, resting and relaxing. Coming together with those we love to celebrate, catch up, and relax. I don't want to take that away, I don't want to bring any tricky associations to his picture of Christmas, the way that past events have done to mine. At this time of year more than any I wish that he and I both had a little support around this.
I absolutely believe that recovery has to be for oneself and not just about pleasing other people. And there are many reasons that I want recovery just for myself. But I also want it for my boyfriend... I worry so much that all this wobbling around trying to figure out what on earth I'm doing isn't just putting aspects of my life on hold, but also aspects of his.
The more I think about all this, the more I'm really saddened by it. Sad for him, and sad for me. I really want to be doing better, to be more on top of my anxiety. I really wish I could be the girlfriend I feel he deserves. Being passive and self-critical isn't the answer. Neither is waiting for the NHS to commission community support for eating disorders. Nonetheless as things stand my (incredibly selfish-feeling) Christmas wish is once again just to make it out the other side without any major catastrophe or humiliation, and my Christmas mantra is once again "this too will pass". I genuinely love Christmas and yet again the combination of anorexia and a somewhat tricky family dynamic threatens to reduce it to an endurance test. It is rarely as bad as I fear in the end, but 'not as bad as I feared' is a million miles from 'fun and relaxation', which is what my boyfriend has in mind. I have less than two weeks to change this and I am really struggling to figure out how.
The one thing that is crystal clear from this is that even at a stable weight and relatively healthy, as long as anorexia still plays any part in my repertoire of coping strategies, it will forever threaten to sap the fun out of not just my life but my boyfriends too. So I guess my real Christmas wish for us both is that one day we get the Christmas we deserve - one without so much of a shadow of anorexia in the room.

Learning to live with mess

I've been thinking a lot about the myth of a 'perfect recovery' -I recently came across what I must admit was a very beautiful looking example, filled with instagrammed bowls of fruit and yogurt, a delicate size 8 girl daintily sipping on chai lattes, carefully arranged plates of vegetables and cereal bars, steaming bowls of soup, and so on... Well of course I desperately wanted mine to be like this. Or rather some part of me did... but who REALLY wanted my life to be like this? Well my anorexia of course. It's swapping one illusory guide to perfection for another... Recovery is necessarily going to be messy because life is messy, and I have no doubt that this beautiful illustration of recovery masks the same fears, tears, and self-loathing, as the hidden mess of my recovery which I try to hard to mask... When I stop and think hard, I absolutely do NOT want to live my life photographing every meal, making a shrine of cereal bars and hot chocolates to replace the books of calories and rules.
Well why do I try to hide this 'mess' that is my path through recovery? Is that reinforcing the shame, and supporting the illness? Perhaps. But this has happened for a reason - and it happens time and time again... The more I think about it, the more stigma and misunderstandings around anorexia trouble me - and I worry that I absorb this too much, and it further fuels my need for secrecy.
Most recently this has come up at work. I feel bullied half the time, but then the other half I'm told what a great employee I am. I've been told to keep my anorexia a secret - because "it's not like disclosing depression, admitting to having had anorexia". Apparently anorexics tend to have problematic personality traits. I regularly feel my personality is being attacked and am anxious and sleepless throughout the week, and then exhausted by it all by the weekend. In this context, it's hardly surprising that I am feeling more self-critical and ashamed again. But yet I feel powerless and scared to stand up to this. So I am pretending that I'm doing better, that I'm in control, that my life is like the pretty instagrammed images I saw. And this seems to be what people want. I still get criticised and laughed at, but it makes it more difficult for my anorexia to be used against me.
All this has been nagging away at me, and then this morning I read a powerful and moving post on the voice of anorexia... It occurs to me, that voice is not so different from the one at work. Most of the time the anorexic part of me tells myself how shameful and awful I am, berates me for every mouthful consumed or unwalked mile, but then intermittently it gives me a warm glow of relief and praise for the uneaten snacks or extra miles walked... Basic psychology tells me that should be reinforcing, and it is. The thing is, as time has gone on, at work any praise feels empty and manipulative - it has lost all impact or meaning. Sadly my anorexia has not. I still have that scary rush of relief if I discover my weight has gone down - it is quickly followed by shame and attempts to mask it, but it won't go away. It's totally irrational, but it feels safe and kind and a shield from all the horrible stuff out there. At the moment I am not losing weight and so I am terrified to go anywhere near the scales. No amount of reasoning will convince this part of myself that I am not out of control and fat, despite the fact that I know full well that I am not overweight and I'm more in danger of losing control to anorexia than to greed.
To make matters worse, when I recently tried to explain this internal war zone to someone from the EDU that I was admitted to 2 years ago, they attacked the anorexia and questioned my commitment to recovery. This went on for a few weeks and before I knew it I was lying again, just like I did when I was there - because I feel shamed for struggling with anorexia as opposed to wholeheartedly hating it, and being committed to the beautiful recovery meal plans and pretty pictures of food.
I WANT a rich and messy life full of spontaneity, imperfection, truth, and love... Home-cooking, not tidy, precise apple segments; rich, connected relationships, not superficial, safe ones; emotional highs and lows, not predictable impassivity... A life with fewer rules and more mess and fun. But I struggle to face up to just how horribly messy and imperfect I am without the urge to go running back toward the bomb shelter of anorexia - the anxiety becomes too much, the self-criticism to great, and I find myself numbing it out again. I desperately want to be good at recovery, but that isn't what recovery is about - it isn't something to be good at, it's riding out the storms and mess and whirls of anxiety and self-criticism and holding faith that this is the only route to taking life off 'pause' and embracing one's dreams.

Reflections on recovery

For various reasons, I have been thinking a lot recently about what recovery means to me. There is one thing that I am clear on - to me, recovery is no more about weights and numbers than anorexia is; to reduce anorexia to numbers is to miss the point, to reduce recovery to numbers is to live your 'recovered' life in a different set of chains... So what is it? I think part of the trick to recovery is in the process of working out what a meaningful recovered life might be for oneself - and that is quite personal and idiographic. But there are also perhaps some themes, and somewhere in there there is an important thread around working through body image distress... A close friend is currently working through that process, as am I.

To me, recovery is certainly not about replacing one set of numbers and rules with another; that is not an excuse to live a life in denial, but I think to me it is important to not think of recovery in terms of BMI, not least because everyone has a different 'set point' and that point can and will change for any given individual in response to other factors outside of their control. Recovery is about reaching a place of psychological freedom, where emotional vulnerabilities can be navigated without using food/body as a source of emotional control/numbing.... Easier said than done! *sigh*... But it can be done, I believe this 100%; I believe everyone has fat days and body hang-ups but they don't always have to have the impact that they are having upon both myself and my friend just now.

Another important theme is around personal connections, trust, and vulnerability - these are things that not only challenge personal shame and self-hatred, but also add a great richness and colour to life. to me, my close relationships are completely invaluable and I will do anything that I can to support the people I love, both in good times and bad.

I also think, related to that, that a big part of recovery, and in particular relapse prevention, is about developing sufficient self-compassion to be able to be honest with oneself and with trusted others about times when things are more tricky and food/body issues are looming bigger in both our brain and our behaviour -  that is a really great weapon. Personally, I have found a close friendship with a wonderful girl that I met on an EDU invaluable in this respect - I think we have developed an honesty with each other that has really helped me to fight back at the more shaming voices that my anorexia can come at me with. I feel that no-one deserves to feel shamed into silence and deception by their eating disorder, and learning safe ways to fight that is invaluable. I really liked this piece on lying and EDs: http://www.dropitandeat.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/lying-and-eating-disorder-recovery-what.html

Finally, I personally feel that part of recovery is letting go of this unhelpful 'devil vs angel' schism with respect to anorexia... Depression etc. are commonly conceptualised as undestandable responses to particular combinations of personal vulnerabilities and life circumastances. Anorexia is instead talked about as some kind of evil spirit that one must be cleansed of - I find this unhelpful and counter-productive.

I personally feel that while I am often angry with anorexia, when other people get angry with it, a part of me wants to leap to its defence and point out that actually it has worked very hard to take care of me in the past (although of course it has also worked very hard to destroy me...). I've always worried about this 'angel vs devil' splitting of my thinking about anorexia - and I think it is something that professionals often reinforce by talking in a language of war and eradicating this evil thing. The thing for me, is as I move away from anorexic behaviours, my emotions become more intense, my anorexia gets more anxious and it screams more loudly "come back, let me make all this scary stuff go away for you" - it thinks that will make things better, because it misunderstands that I am no longer in a place where blocking out emotional pain is necessary or helpful as it was when I first became ill, so I need to find ways to ride these waves of emotions without doing what it tells me in order to reassure it that I don't need it to try to look out for me like this anymore, that I am stronger and more resilient and so it doesn't need to worry and interfere so much... With time and repetition, it should hopefully then feel reassured that I don't need it so much any more and quieten down a bit... I think this is a process I am trying to master at the moment... and I think I will, but that process will, like all others in recovery involve blimps, bumps, highs and lows - all this brings personal strength and a deeper knowledge of our own resiliency and how to harness that in times of distress. My friend rather beautifully described anorexia as like an emotional bomb shelter, and recovery as the process of venturing back outside and learning to trust and navigate the post-war world.

Ultimately, I strive to move back to intuitive eating, no weigh-ins, and more spontaneity, freedom, and fun - a life without number and rules determining how I *should* be - because I should be just as I come, there isn't a formula to win over acceptance, either from myself or anyone else... This is the thing with the body image stuff for me - it distresses me unbearably, but in the same stroke if anyone judged me based on the stuff that I am tormenting myself about, I would question why I had chosen to be friends with them... I love my friends regardless of their shape and size, and I don't believe for a second that they would care less about me if I were over-weight (or for that matter if I got really ill and underweight again). All that makes me determined to master my distress because I want to be able to treat myself in a way that is in line with my values - and those very clearly scream out that a persons worth is not and cannot be measured or determined by their physical appearance....  None of this is a magical cure, and I have often used a sign on my bedroom door: "what would you think or say if someone else was treating themselves as you are?" or variants of this... not rocket science, but I would be very sad for the girl who lost hours to tormenting herself in front of a mirror or screaming and crying over the curve of her stomach. And one day, that girl will no longer be staring at me in the mirror. And then if and when I meet her, I will be able to honestly say with complete authenticity "yes, that piece can go to" - that day will come. But I believe it come through riding out body distress without using behaviours to numb it, not despite that distress.

As Brene Brown says, one cannot selectively numb out the emotional lows, and I don't want to miss out on the highs that I am working so hard to discover and cherish.