My Eating Disorder Recovery Story
And why I choose to Share it.
It’s a little known fact that most of us in the mental health field stumble upon this profession because of some personal connection to the work. Some of my colleagues have mentioned family members who’ve struggled, others have spoken to early life experiences with friends managing mental health, but for many of us that personal connection is VERY personal. By which I mean, we ourselves have battled some sort of mental and emotional difficulty in our lifetime.
Being open about this can be a little controversial in professional therapist circles. One thing that is drummed into us in school is to limit our self-disclosure; therapy is not about us, it’s about the client. Boundaries between therapist and client are so important – boundaries create safety, boundaries give the client space to be vulnerable, boundaries maintain a secure and consistent base for a client to return to. I mean, imagine going to therapy, sharing about your recent break-up and then being subjected to your therapist going on about her recent break-up! Yeah, that is not okay on so many levels – ethically that is a big no-no! Our professors say, “beware self-disclosure” for that very reason – typically it does not benefit the client and really is a hindrance to a client’s own work in therapy. And I absolutely, absolutely agree with this…to a certain extent.
The other frame of mind proposes that there is such a thing as appropriate self-disclosure from a therapist – this is governed by the rule, “Never self-disclosure, unless what you’re sharing benefits your client and is not something that you are currently emotionally activated by.” I believe that some types of self-disclosure can be of great benefit to a client – I know this because I have been a client. I know this because my own therapist shared her story with me, and it was actually a pivotal part of my recovery from my own eating disorder. To know that my therapist understood me, not just from studying about eating disorders in school, but because of her own lived experience, created so much safety and trust in our therapeutic relationship. It allowed me to be open about the most shameful parts of myself, knowing that she would never judge. Not only that, working with someone who had recovered from an eating disorder gave me the hope I needed that I could do it too.
With that in mind, I’d like to share with you a little bit of my story. Nothing nitty-gritty, nothing unhelpful, nothing triggering – but the key bits that I do openly share as nuggets of my experience that may impart some hope for change and recovery.
I was probably six years old when I first became aware of my body. I have a very specific memory of seeing myself for the first time – I was at a shoe store, probably a Payless, trying on some sneakers for the new school year. I saw my calves in the little shoe mirror and thought to myself, “Well, that looks weird.” I didn’t like what I saw, it made me really uncomfortable, and to this day I still don’t know why that is. Perhaps recognizing that I lived in a body with curves instead of lines was distressing.
I always liked lines. Structure, routine, planning, and repetition were primary comforts to me for as long as I can remember. I used to sit down with a tiny journal and write out an entire life plan, timeline and all, detailing when and how I would accomplish each goal on my list. I think you can guess where this is going. Life rarely adheres to a structure or plan, especially not one that was naively established at eight years old. When my life inevitably did not unfold the way I had planned, I needed something to blame and something to control. The unfortunate role of scapegoat was played by my body.
Eating disorders are sneaky little things – they start off quietly, whispering promises that sound like the answer to a prayer. Mine sounded like this: “If you can look this way, anything is possible,” or “When you finally lose X pounds, everyone will love you and your dreams will come true.” And I had big dreams to fulfill. I wanted to be a Broadway star since I first stepped on a stage at six years old (and I am realizing as I write this, the not so coincidental timing that I became critical of my body at that very same age). The theatre world can be a magical and exciting place, and it can also tear you apart. My eating disorder showed up full throttle in the “tearing you apart” stage of my life. It gave me something to blame when I was getting rejected from BFA programs I applied to. It gave me something to control when I was no longer getting lead roles like I did in high school. It gave me something to escape to when I realized that working as a professional actor is lonely, unstable, and all together not what I thought it was. So when my eating disorder said, “I can fix this,” I responded with an emphatic, “Thank God!”
And it worked for a time, as many maladaptive coping mechanisms do. If those things didn’t work, we would not continue to return to them, right? Then one day the voice that was so friendly, so hopeful, so promising, turned into a cruel and cutting tyrant dominating every single thing I did. The dream became a nightmare and I realized what I once thought was a source of control, was the very thing that led me to a state of powerlessness I had never before experienced. I wanted to stop, and I couldn’t.
This is when things began to change. I knew I couldn’t do it on my own, and I asked for help. I came home, leaned on my family, and sought out a treatment team to guide me out of this prison of my own making. It was not easy, and I was not always as willing to accept the support as I initially thought I was. Eating disorders hang on for dear life, and sometimes scream even louder when threatened by the pursuit of recovery. I battled with myself every day, caught between wanting to get better and wanting to stay comfortable with this frenemy of disordered eating. Eventually I learned that I needed even more support and admitted myself into a treatment program.
There, I met some incredible individuals who changed my life. My peers in treatment became my friends, and it got easier to fight with them by my side. I felt less alone, less crazy, and ultimately more hopeful when I sat beside these powerful women who had stories that sounded like my own. Seeing them triumph helped me to keep going. I also met several therapists, dietitians, and mental health technicians who themselves had recovered from eating disorders. I credit so much of my own recovery to these recovered individuals who constantly reminded me that full recovery is not only possible, but so completely worth it.
I would not be where I am today without these women. It was because of them that I saw a future for myself, though that future looked dramatically different than I originally planned as a little girl. In therapy, I reconnected to my soul and began to understand that I am so much more than what I do and what I look like. My goal used to be to shrink myself as small as possible – now the most important thing for me is living a big life, and that has absolutely nothing to do with my body shape or size. My recovery journey guided me to be a therapist, and help other women overcome what I did and find healing.
I am proud to be a recovered therapist and I am proud to share that with my clients.
Though with most of my clients I don’t share the details of my own recovery, I believe that just knowing to some degree I understand their experience is integral to creating trust and safety between us.
So yes, self-disclosure is controversial, and you’re not going to catch me spilling about my exes or old eating disorder behaviors. But if it helps, I will tell you I’ve struggled. I will tell you that my eating disorder used to control my life. And with a heart full of gratitude, I will tell you that this is no longer my story – and it doesn’t have to be yours either.
