Living With My Eating Disorder: Narrative Therapy, Part 2

Okay, so are you ready for this??

I have published a lot of personal things on this blog.  This, though, takes it to a whole new level.  I am warning you upfront, this might be hard to read.  It was hard to write, and it was even harder to live.

The good news is, my life doesn't even resemble this nightmare anymore.  In fact, as I read over this narrative and look back over my counseling notes, it's sometimes hard for me to believe that my life ever resembled this nightmare.  Was this real??  Did I really live this way??  It all feels like a distant and very bad dream.

I recently shared this narrative with a friend who struggles with her own body image demons, and her reaction surprised me.  I thought she would be shocked and slightly horrified by my description of life with an eating disorder, but she said, "Wait, so all women don't think and feel this way?  It's possible to overcome these types of patterns??"

If you read this and recognize some of yourself in it, please know--you do not have to live like this!  It is not okay for you to feel this way about yourself or to treat your body like this.  And most importantly, it is possible to be free of these cycles and destructive thoughts.  Send me an email at rachel (dot) nielson (at) hotmail (dot) com, and I will tell you more.

Thank you for reading and for being a safe place to share.  It is scary for me to be so vulnerable in such a public forum, but I feel like it's important.  And if you didn't read yesterday's blog post, this one is going to make no sense to you.  So start with yesterday's post here, and then come back, okay?

Deep breath...and here we go...

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Over the ten years that I allowed this friendship to be part of my life, she manipulated me and told me all sorts of lies.  

She told me that I had to run every single day or else I was a failure.  When I had mono and was emotionally exhausted from news of my mom’s terminal cancer diagnosis, she told me that I had to go running with her at 11:30 p.m. when I got home from studying at the library.  If I ever got more than four or five hours of sleep a night, she told me I was worthless and unproductive.  A true friend would’ve told me to climb into bed and be gentle with myself during such a difficult time.

She told me that if I ate more than half a salad wrap at any one time, I was going to get enormously fat.  She told me to stop eating sweets altogether except for once a week—once a week was all I could risk if I didn’t want to be obese.

She made me hyper-aware of what I ate because she was constantly making comments about it: “You’re going to eat a second cookie?  Looks like you won’t be able to wear those jeans that you just bought for very long…”  “Are you really going to order fettuccine alfredo?” I could always hear her critical commentary running through my head. 

The summer that my mom was so sick and I was her caregiver while my dad was at work, she met me every morning on the running path.  In and of itself, a daily jog was not an unhealthy way to cope, but she pushed me to run farther and farther each day, telling me that my run was a “waste of time” if it wasn’t at least five miles.  She would tell me I was pathetic if I missed a day or didn’t feel up to running as far as I had the day before.  Five miles…six miles…seven miles a day…it wasn’t enough.  I often ran eight miles or more in the early hours of the morning, and then went home and took care of my dying mother for the rest of the day.

She told me that she would help me fix the negative emotions that I felt about my mom’s impending death.  She reminded me to stand on the scale every morning to make sure that something in my life was still in control.  The decreasing number on the scale seemed like the only thing that was measurable in the midst of all of the pain. During those months, I did feel comforted by my faith and my family, but I couldn’t bear to just sit with the agonizing grief that I was feeling—so I tried to run and starve it away. 

A few years later, when I started my career as a high school English teacher and got too busy to jog every day, she told me it wasn’t worth running at all.  “What’s the point?” she would say. “At this rate, you’re going to get fat anyway, so why even try?”  When she said this, I felt utter panic—I don’t want to be fat!—and she seemed to love getting that reaction out of me.  She always told me it was “all or nothing.”  I believed her. 

She told me not to go to parties and social gatherings because I wouldn’t be able to resist the food there. I usually ignored her and went anyway, but I spent the entire time telling myself that I “couldn’t” eat any of the refreshments.  I often ended up eating them anyway, which made me feel guilty and weak, so I ate more than I even wanted to because “tomorrow I will start my diet—tomorrow, I will start being ‘good.’”  I left those parties feeling sick to my stomach and awful about myself.  “I told you so,” she would say with a smirk.

She told me I never deserved to have time to myself.  “You are so selfish,” she would say when I felt too tired to participate in a service opportunity organized by my church.  When a student seemed to need extra help on something (whether or not he or she had even asked for the help), she would tell me, “If you want to be a good teacher, you need to give up your lunch break to help that student.”  I would often go an entire day without eating anything, only to realize at 3:15 when the students left my room that I was ravenous and utterly drained.  

Despite my fatigue, I stayed at the school until 6:00 or 7:00 p.m. every night, grading papers and planning lessons—working, always working.  During those long afternoons and evenings at the school, she brought me candy bars from the vending machine.  “You’re tired, you’ve been working hard,” she would say to me. “This candy will make you feel better.”  In those moments, she seemed sweet and supportive, but it was always her underhanded attempt to make me feel reliant on her and bad about myself.  I sometimes ate two or three candy bars to make it through those exhausting work sessions.  Slowly, just as she knew it would, the weight crept on.

She told me not to go to baby showers and parties because I was overweight and embarrassing, and everyone would judge me. I usually went anyway, but I spent the entire time feeling self-conscious and loathing myself.  Sometimes, I actually listened to her and stayed home.  I even gave up the opportunity to go visit the kids that I love in an orphanage in El Salvador one summer because she told me that they would all make comments about how much weight I’d gained.  I knew she was right that people in El Salvador are blunt and make comments about people’s weight—and I didn’t think I was strong enough to smile and bear it. A true friend would’ve said, “Those kids love you for you, not for what you weigh or look like!  You should go!!”

She told me that I must be disgusting to my husband with the weight I’d gained.  “I bet he doesn’t find you attractive at all anymore,” she would say.  This sometimes made me cry when Ryan and I were together, because I was sure that she was right.

When I was struggling to get pregnant and going through infertility treatments, she started hanging around even more.  She would wait in the car after my appointments, and as I drove away from the clinic, my heart breaking and numb, she would say to me, “Well, if you can’t have a baby, at least you deserve to have a dessert.  Dessert will make this feel better.”  She encouraged me to stop at the grocery store and buy myself a mini pie, or go home and scour the refrigerator for something to temporarily numb the pain—chocolate frosting with graham crackers, ice cream…foods I didn’t even really like or want, but that she assured me would make things feel better.

In the midst of my fertility treatments, I was also going through the adoption process, and when I was corresponding with expectant mothers who were considering adoption, she was always the first to remind me that things were uncertain.  “Don’t get your hopes up, Rachel,” she would say.  “Remember the last three birthmoms you communicated with?  They all changed their minds.  I'm sure this one will too.”  Her words filled me with anxiety that never really went away, no matter what I was doing. I tried praying and reading scriptures, I tried going out with friends—all of those things helped, but the stress and pain still gnawed at me from the inside.  Always, always there. 

Months later, when my miracle son finally arrived to us through adoption, things didn’t go as smoothly as I’d imagined they would.  My son had colic and cried most of the day, and I was filled with inadequacy, loneliness, and desperation.  Instead of encouraging me that things would get better, she told me I was a terrible mother.  She told me I hated being a mother.  She told me the rest of my life was going to be miserable.  Then she’d say the inevitable: “Here, eat these brownies.  After all, it’s the only thing you have to look forward to, and you’re never going to be skinny again anyway, so you might as well.”

She told me to lie to my husband, something that I never thought I would ever do until she infiltrated my life.  She didn’t want me to be close to him—she wanted to be my only friend and confidant.  “He will think you are a failure if he knows how much you eat,” she would say.  “He will realize that you can’t follow through on your goals and you are weak and unworthy of his love.  You should only make cookies when he isn’t home and then throw away the evidence. And you better make up a reason to leave the house instead of telling him that you want to go get a treat.”  After a long day stuck at home with a crying baby, I would tell Ryan that I was running an errand but instead meet up with her to indulge in a dessert that she assured me would help me feel better about my life; but even as I was eating it, I knew she was lying. I would silently resolve to be rid of her, starting the next day.  “This is the last time I will ever hang out with her,” I would tell myself, “so I better live it up now.” Sometimes we’d stop at multiple drive-thrus to get various treats in one evening, because nothing was making me feel better so I had to keep trying different options.  A few times I felt so physically sick and so full of self-loathing when I got home that I made myself throw up before I went into the house. 

It was in the midst of that final nightmare that I decided that I had to break off my friendship with her.  I wasn’t sure how to do it, so I recruited help.  I prayed and plead with my Heavenly Father for strength.  I sought help from a professional counselor.  My husband, my family, and a few trusted friends were at my side when I told her to get away from me.  Get out of my life.  I told her that I never wanted to speak to her or see her again.

She didn’t take the news well, and she was slow in leaving.  There were times when she knocked on my door, and in a low moment, I let her in.  We’d sit on the couch and talk, and she would start feeding me lies again, and sometimes I would listen, but it wasn’t like before. I never really let her back into my heart. 

Now her visits are few and far between.  Sometimes she still knocks.  I look through the peephole and see her standing there—sometimes she even tries to talk to me through the door—but I generally don’t respond.  I may hear her words and wonder if they are true, but I don’t respond to her, and I don’t let her in, and I think she is starting to get the hint.  She comes around less and less often these days.

Looking back, it’s hard to believe that I allowed myself to be abused and manipulated for so long.  It makes me feel sick and a little embarrassed to think about the years I wasted on her.  But it also makes me proud to realize that I have almost broken free, and it makes me feel hopeful to realize that she has left a big space in my life that I can fill with relationships that actually nourish me, instead of leaving me empty, alone, and in pain.

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Part 3, "Life Without My Eating Disorder," (yay! the happy ending!) tomorrow...