This past week, I had the pleasure of working with two women struggling with anorexia and the terrifying thoughts of gaining weight and being fat. Both women were restricting their caloric intake,  one by limiting her intake primarily to alcohol and the other by not eating or drinking anything at all for the past three weeks. I felt for both women as they struggled with their illness.

What so many people do not understand about eating disorders is that anorexia, bulimia and even binge eating disorder are not always about food. These illnesses often are about control and feeling worthy of love and belonging. Anorexia may begin as a diet, a way to control one’s weight but devolves into issues of control over one’s life.

Some 30 million Americans, including 10 million men, struggle with eating disorders. For so many people, these illnesses take over one’s life, these illnesses become them and people can struggle for years, even decades, with these illnesses. Some people live with anorexia, bulimia and binge eating disorder for so long, they truly cannot remember how to live without their eating disorder. They do not remember what they were like before food took over their lives. The eating disorder becomes them.

So often, though, the eating disorder becomes less about food and more about control. Eating anything for those struggling with anorexia can feel like losing control. Some area of their lives feels out of control and it feels as though the only way to gain control is to limit food intake and they become good at it. People living with anorexia often are perfectionists and become perfect at counting calories and losing weight. People living with anorexia or bulimia often feel as though they do not deserve to eat anything unless they have exercised for hours beforehand and plan to exercise for hours after consuming even scant amounts of food. People living with anorexia often feel as though they do not deserve to nourish their bodies, much less their hearts and souls because of messages they have received, because of repeated rejection by people they love and hope to love them in return. These eating disorders become less about the food and more about feelings of worthiness. People living with these eating disorders often feel they are not worthy of love, even love given to themselves. Eating disorders often are about shame and self-loathing.

Trying to maneuver one’s way out of an eating disorder takes time and effort and is terribly frightening. Recovery can feel like losing control over the one thing—food—one thought one had control over. Recovery actually is about recognizing the fact that you are worthy of love and belonging. Recovery is actually about recognizing the fact that you deserve your own love and once you begin to love yourself, everything else falls into place.

Recovery from eating disorders means taking back your control, taking back your power. For months, years, decades you have given food your power. Now is the time to take back that power. Recovery from eating disorders means loving yourself enough to nourish your body and soul. Do you not deserve to nourish yourself? Do you not deserve the love you likely freely give others? Do you not deserve a life that is both healthy and happy?

 

 

 

 

I recently had the pleasure of speaking with a young man who voiced frustration with what he perceived as a lack of effort by his mental health providers in helping him find his way to wellness. This fellow lives with mental illness and substance use disorder and was not finding the relief he seemed to want. The patient said that his providers were not giving him the answers to his problems. He wanted the providers to make him better.

To some extent, it is partially my job as a mental health professional to help make the people who come to me better. I hope to provide my patients with the tools they need to find their way from mental illness to mental wellness. Unfortunately, I do not have a magic want to make all my patients’ troubles disappear. There is no magic pill to make my patients suddenly better. Recovery takes time and effort and persistence. The fellow I met recently stated that the would leave his provider if progress were not made rapidly enough. What he failed to understand is that while as provider, I can help make you better, it takes effort on behalf of the patient to actually get better.

People living with mental illness, substance use, trauma and eating disorders just want to feel better. No one wants to live in the fog of depression, the fear of anxiety. No one wants to live with the albatross of substance use hanging around his neck. No one truly wants to be plagued with an eating disorder. These illnesses are exhausting and often debilitating. Finding your way out of these illnesses takes work, it takes commitment. We as mental health professionals can give you tools and resources to help find your way out of illness, but you as the patient actually have to put in the work to get there and stay there. We cannot do the work for you, and that is what this young man wanted me to do. I wish it were that easy.

Finding your way out of mental illness and substance use requires change, but changing your therapist or counselor every time the work of recovery becomes difficult will not make the process any easier. What so many people living with mental illness and substance use do not like to hear is that the change you likely are seeking starts and continues with you. You can change your surroundings, you can move, change jobs, change your friends, but if you do not change yourself and change your thinking, nothing really changes. You are the thing that has to change. And changing yourself does not come without effort, often repeated daily even once you find recovery.

Recovery is work. It does not come from wishful thinking. Recovery does not come from just wanting to be well. Recovery comes after taking the steps necessary to change yourself and your own life. Recovery takes daily effort, often with the help of a therapist or counselor and psychiatrist. Recovery takes time. It is not just about wanting to be well, it is about what you are willing to do to get well and stay well. How can you work with your treatment provider to find your way to wellness? What are you willing to change about yourself to find your way out of the darkness and into the light of being healthy?