Holding hands with your eating disorder

Where are you holding hands with your eating disorder? It’s a really tough question, but one that has to be asked often in recovery. Especially for those who have been living with an eating disorder for a long time it can be extremely difficult to separate the core self from the eating disorder. I would have times that I was doing really well in recovery - I felt like my world was expanding, food wasn’t constantly on my mind, I was more relaxed and less irritable - only to find that a week later some sneaky thoughts and behaviours had made their way back in. After going through that process a few times I realised that I had to eliminate every single eating disorder behaviour and that meant I couldn’t hold hands with my ED in recovery.

The best example I had was when trying to quit calorie counting. Bearing in mind that this was a behaviour I had done for more than seventeen years so felt like it was hard wired into my actions. All the guidance suggested that when I count calories I should eat something. And I was doing that! So why wasn’t the compulsion going away? Well, because what I ate was based on the calculations I did - how much I could “afford” to spend in that moment. It wasn’t until I started using that calculation as a total eff you to the eating disorder that I was able to kick the habit. Going way way way above and beyond any number that my eating disorder deemed acceptable meant that I eventually taught my brain that just because you count those numbers doesn’t mean I’m going to act in line with them. Sure, this still took months but at least I could recognize where I was holding hands with my ED and take the bold, brave, scary step to break up with it properly.

There are so many examples of this throughout recovery. Holding hands with your ED can show up in obvious or very subtle ways but the truth is that you need to root out all of it. You simply will not reach full freedom if you leave even a trace of ED wiring behind. Yes, you may well live a much bigger life than the one in the depths of your illness but did you really come this far to only come this far? Taking regular opportunities to be brutally honest with yourself and identify where you are holding hands with the ED is crucial to your full recovery. It might be that something you’ve been challenging just isn’t getting any easier, or some thought patterns just seem to be immutable. I promise you that they are not. But I would wager a bet that somewhere your actions are supporting the idea that complete unconditional unrestricted is not permissible for you. This is what you have to identify time and time again to ensure that every little tendril is weeded out. And I would encourage that even in those final stages, when you think you might be fully recovered, to continue to question if there is any place that you are holding onto even a pinky finger of the ED, and even if you’re not, keep doing those bold recovery aligned actions until you are truly certain that none of that wiring remains.