Eating Disorders Today

Bias Confession from an Eating Disorders Specialist

 

Eating Disorders Today has a name change and a new location. 

Please visit Eating Disorder Recovery for Women at http://www.eatingdisorderrecovery.com.

My patients and readers live their own lives with their own agendas and values leading the way.

       However, I am not neutral. I want, with all my heart, for them to live long healthy lives.  I want them to be well, to have love, joy, satisfaction, confidence and a genuine liking for themselves as they proceed onward to a feisty, interesting and healthy old age.

       I especially do not want anyone to break her own heart.

       People who come to my psychotherapy practice or writings need a reason to make that entry. Primarily, they come because they have an eating disorder. They also come because a person with an eating disorder is in their intimate circle.  They also come because they know someone who benefited from my work and want the same benefits.

       Mostly, they come because they experience emotional pain and frustration in their lives and have a spark of hope that maybe another way to live exists.

       Ending an eating disorder is a step, a major step granted, but still a step toward creating and living a better life. 

       In my practice, my focus is on the whole person sitting in front of me. I see the energy poured into the eating disorder.  I get a glimpse of what might be possible for this person if that energy were directed toward living a more full life.  When we share that glimpse we become a team of two with the goal being to send life energy to life.  That means dismantling the eating disorder mechanism and removing the need for the protection given by the eating disorder.

       Our mutual goal becomes creating a psychological, emotional and spiritual normal that allows a person’s genuine life potential to unfold.

       My job, as I see it, requires me to state my bias and let the person know that her best choice is one that comes from her beliefs, not mine. She also needs to know that I will support her  living based on her values, not mine.

       A free and healthy person will face difficult choices in life.  If an eating disorder doesn’t exist, then an automatic and artificial guiding system doesn’t take over the decision making by default. 

       For example, someone doesn’t stay home and binge instead of meeting with friends.  Or someone doesn’t binge and throw up before meeting a potential employer and therefore meet that person in a partially numbed condition.

       If an eating disorder isn’t there then decisions about school applications, career choices, pregnancy (to conceive or terminate), relationship choices (positive or negative), commitments of any kind,  are based on personal agenda and personal values.  These must belong to the individual, not me.

       I do my best to make my bias clear so that the person is free of any sense of obligation to please me. More importantly, my stating my bias helps the individual sort out what she thinks she is supposed to choose based on the agenda and values of others, including the entire culture, as opposed to what she deeply values. 

       After all, in the end, she lives her life.  And a satisfying life is one that is based on living according to her own true agenda and values.

       Sometimes self sacrifice is based on deeply held and honored values known and appreciated by the individual alone.  I believe a person needs to be free to make such a choice.

       However, if an eating disorder is in the way, choices involving self sacrifice can be blurred or seen as required with no possibility of flexibility, change or even a vague sense of the option to say, “No.”

       If she is oblivious to her own values she can make a choice that will immediately or eventually break her own heart. 

       While an eating disorder fades the person is challenged more and more to listen and learn her own truth.  Whether her truth is mine is not the issue.  I stand for her listening and honoring her own unbuffered self, mind, spirit, body and heart.  When she can do that, she is on her way to
living her real life, and that is a joyous and satisfying way to live.

Joanna Poppink, MFT, psychotherapist eating disorder specialist, Los Angeles, CA bulimia, anorexia, compulsive overeating recovery, www.poppink.com

Death, Tragedy and the Wounded Soul

Eating Disorders Today has a name change and a new location. 

Please visit Eating Disorder Recovery for Women at http://www.eatingdisorderrecovery.com.

        A young anorexic woman died in Ireland because her psychiatrist mother drowned her daughter in the bath. It's a tragic story of Gothic proportions going back who knows how many generations. The mother couldn't bear the daughter's anorexia.  The daughter refused treatment.  The mother had an eating disorder.  The grandmother committed suicide.  The story in "This is London" stops there, but the human story has got to go back who knows how far.

       I'm haunted, as many people must be, by the horror, the extremity, the tragedy, the ignorance, the blindness, the waste and the ongoing and spreading suffering of this event.

       Eating disorders go deep into our souls.  Personally I think that they go deep into the souls of the individual with the disorder and also deep into the soul of our society.  Something powerful in our current human condition is bringing up a terrible despair that eating disorders are making public.

       If we can a bring thorough recovery to people with eating disorders, and embrace effective ways of preventing anorexia, bulimia, binge eating disorder and all the rest, we will also be finding a deep cure for the problems in our society that spawn eating disorders.

       I hope this sad and profound tragedy will spur people to look more deeply into both the psychological and cultural forces contributing to sustaining eating disorders in our midst.

       Wounds of the soul are showing.

 

Bulimia Emergency Tips for Holidays

Eating Disorders Today has a name change and a new location. 

Please visit Eating Disorder Recovery for Women at http://www.eatingdisorderrecovery.com.

        When your gut trembles and aches with fear, when your upper arms seem to vibrate on their own, when the back of your throat aches, when what you see begins to have an unreal quality you are experiencing raw vulnerability that is a prelude to a binge/purge episode.

       If you suffer from bulimia the end of a holiday season can leave you in this fragile emotional condition.  You may attempt to use rage to wipe out these feelings. You may try to control the people around you to prove your power when deep down you feel powerless. You may want to hide under the covers or throw a full on tantrum. 

        Please remember these are symptoms of your illness.  You can get through this.

       After the holidays a quiet comes to town, which is difficult for a person with bulimia to bear.  Generally people use the after holiday time to rest, clean up, see how much money they’ve spent and get ready to go back to school, work or family routines.

       A person with bulimia can’t move smoothly from high-energy conditions to a calm and even state.  Other people relax after an intense time.  They rest and regroup. The bulimic person crashes and feels frightened and unstable.

       This instability can set off one binge/purge episode or a series of binges and purges that can last for days or weeks. 

       If you are near this state, please remember to be kind and giving to yourself.  Try these simple self care tasks:

       1. Take a shower and wash your hair
       2. Make your bed
       3. Eat breakfast and immediately go for a walk
       4. Go to an OA meeting
       5. Call your psychotherapist.  If you don’t have one, start looking for one.
       6. Go to an animal rescue shelter and volunteer to walk a dog
       7. Go to the library and write thank you notes to anyone you can think of
       8. Look at something you usually think is beautiful – even if nothing seems beautiful now.
       9. Postpone your binge or purge. Start thinking about what else can nourish you.
      10. Journal, journal, journal.
   
       Find ways to put yourself in environments that nurtures healing, creativity and learning. Someday you will create that for yourself.  For now, stretch yourself in that direction because every moment of your life can be the beginning of a New Year for you.