So, if you’ve read everything up to this point, you know that I’m broken. My immediate family and friends have abandoned me and my husband betrayed me – I’m sitting in the bunker of hell trying to figure out how every single fear I had about ED recovery was coming true and my life, literally, is in shambles.
To recap – my mother and father both told me how disappointed they were in my weight gain and that I’ve ruined my life because I’m fat & unattractive. My brothers have told me that they are embarrassed to be seen with me and feel sorry for my husband and kids because I’m such an embarrassment. My friends, while not saying anything mean, have decided not to say anything; completely ignoring the fact that I’m in recovery. And lastly, my husband told me I’m fat, ugly, disgusting and he wants nothing to do with me now that I’m repulsive to him.
Do you see me…..questioning why in the hell I decided to recover in the first place? And tell me, how in the hell am I supposed to love myself and know my worth when literally every single person around me who means anything is telling me I’m a piece of ugly ass crap? I have no idea how I came out of the hole I was in. I really don’t. I’m no longer at the bottom of it, but I’ve most certainly climbed up some of the walls to escape. Remember that moment I told you about when I was begging my husband to find something else attractive in me besides my physical appearance? And remember how I told you that was a pivotal moment in my recovery journey? There is something so raw that happens when you are begging someone to see you for who you are instead of what you look like. There is something so painful about listing off the qualities you love about yourself to someone else to prove to them how wonderful of a person you are. There is something so defeating about realizing how little the people in you life really care about you. I lost everyone. EVERY SINGLE person in my life left me for dead and kicked me HARD while I was down.
Could you imagine trying to recover from cancer and your friends and family members telling you don’t deserve to recover? You should die instead of living? That your hair loss, pale skin, weakness or excessive weight loss from chemo or radiation is NOT ok to them and that you are recovering wrong? That your physical appearance, ravaged by the treatment, makes you look sickly and unattractive to them? That you are an embarrassment and don’t deserve to be seen in public? That you are now a horrible mother because you look different than you once did while recovering from cancer? It sounds so idiotic when I write it down, doesn’t it. The number one reason why it’s NOT OK to treat a person in recovery from cancer this way and why IT’S OK to treat a person in recovery from anorexia this way boils down to ONE thing – FAT PHOBIA. Every single comment, insult, concern, lecture, and vile statement made to be by my family members was ALL ROOTED in their fear of me being fat.
So what was I supposed to do? I only had once choice – and it was the hardest path to go down. I had to be the one to support myself. I had to be the one to love myself. I had to be the one to ask how I was doing. I had to be the one to value me for something other than my body. I had to fall in love with who I was. I had to appreciate everything I offered to the world. I had to have confidence that I was a good person even though I was fat. I had to know that I didn’t do recovery wrong. Everything single horrible, hurtful, awful thing that was said to me by my family – I had to defend MYSELF. I had to stand up for ME and stop the abuse, hate and battering. Let me tell you that for someone who had hated herself for decades and who NEEDED and CRAVED the acceptance of others to feel valued and loved; this was my worst nightmare. I didn’t know how to love myself because I had been dependent on everyone else around me for 43 years to love me.
To start this journey of self-respect, self-compassion and self-love I took EVERY SINGLE rude ass comment my family made and had to challenge every single one. For example, am I less worthy of a mother because I’m fat? Of course not! What does the amount of fat I have on my body have to do with me being present for my kids? What about me being unattractive? This one was hard for me because deep down I agreed with this! I wasn’t hot anymore, right? Well, at least according to the standard that had been set by me and society over the years. So I had to break that down. What does attractive mean for me now that it’s not determined by the amount of fat my body has?
Self love has to do with ACTIONS. You have to show yourself that you actually truly LOVE YOU! But how was I supposed to do this when loving myself before recovery meant looking good in my body? I had to learn, SLOWLY, to give myself the unconditional love that I was craving from ALL the people in my life who betrayed me. I started with my own thoughts. You would think that your thoughts would be easy to analyze. I mean, they are MY thoughts, how hard could it be? I WAS EXHUSTED! Every single thought that went through my head was challenged. EVERY.SINGLE.ONE. DO you know how many thoughts I had per day? Thousands upon thousands! Let me give you some examples of how this process worked for me:
-I wake up and start to walk to the bathroom to get dressed and brush my teeth. I hear the wooden floor creak as I walk…..I would say to myself constantly “If you weren’t so fat, the floor wouldn’t creek and you wouldn’t wake up the family from the noise”. So there I was at 6:45 am challenging this thought. I had to break it down. Did the floor creek when I walked? Yes. Did the floor creek when I walked because I was fat? Well, to answer this question, I had to have one of my kids walk on that part of the floor to see if it creaked. It did. However, I had to further break this down – what if the floor didn’t creek when my kids walked on it? Was the creaking dependent on a certain weight activating it? So how heavy did one have to be to active the “creak”? Did the floor creek when I was in the middle of my eating disorder at my lowest weight? Honestly – I couldn’t remember, because when I would make that same walk in the morning during my ED days, I wasn’t paying attention to the creaking, I was paying attention to my anxiety building as I was getting ready to weigh myself for the day, or the anxiety of my body not looking good after I got dressed. I simply wasn’t paying attention to the damn floor creaking.
So we determined the floor creaked when I walked on it. We determined that maybe it creaked when I was thinner or maybe it didn’t. Let’s assume it DID NOT creek when I was thinner because going back to my original thought – I was shaming myself for making the floor creak because I was fat. But why is the floor creaking bad? Like why does my body weight activating a creek make it a bad thing? Why did I place a negative thought to a creaking floor? Ahhh….now we get even further down the rabbit hole that is my disordered thinking brain; the creak could have woken up my kids. But why is that a big deal? Because, as I found out, a mother waking up her kids in the morning from making noise, is in fact a bad mother. But wait, is she a bad mother? Who told you that mom’s who make noise that wake up their kids in the morning are bad mothers? I could go on and on…. This exercise has been called various names; I like to call it peeling the onion. Keep going until you hit that pressure spot – that emotional ahh haa moment. For me, is was this idea that making noise in the morning that could potentially wake up your kid mad me a bad mother. I BLAMED that particular belief on my FAT body. It was an easy scapegoat. Being fat = floor creaking = bad mother.
I used this process for COUNTLESS thoughts, and as I mentioned before I was exhausted by 6 pm every night. I imagined myself as this bad ass, high-powered NYC attorney who was unmatched in her ability to question witnesses. I pretended like I was on one of those lawyer TV shows and I was trying to catch myself in that moment when I “spill the beans” on the stand and the entire courtroom gasps at the truth bomb. Only I wasn’t getting paid $1000/hr to do this, ha! To this day I still do this. Breaking things down really helps you find what your core wounds are. Core wounds are critical for learning self-love because you can’t learn to love yourself unless to get to the bottom of why you don’t think you deserve your OWN unconditional love. The reason WHY I needed everyone else’s love and admiration to feel good was rooted in co-dependency and issues from my childhood. Without discovering what they were and breaking down the lies I told myself throughout the years, I would have been stuck in this perpetual loop. I will go into more depth on this in a later post. Just know that your anxiety which manifested in your eating disorder is mostly likely from something that happened in your past as a child or young adult. And figuring out what that is will make your ED recovery 1000’s times easier.
I remember hearing someone talking about worth and he used the analogy of GOLD, yes, that gold. The precious metal. It went something like this……
Here’s a piece of Gold. You are either interested in the gold, or you’re not interested in the gold. You decide to walk away. What happens to the value of the Gold? NOTHING. The Gold stays valuable. Apply this to your daily life – Someone’s non-interest takes nothing away from your value. They didn’t even realize it was gold. They didn’t realize what they had in front of them and walked away. The action takes nothing away from what Gold is; it stays valuable whether someone stays or walks away from it. Don’t take anyone’s non-interest in you personal.