Blending Personal and Professional Experience to Heal Eating Disorders Professional Experience Article
There was a time, in the first half of my life, that I didn’t recognize I had an eating disorder. I knew I craved food beyond its ability to nourish me and that it had a psychic hold on me that seemed unbreakable. The only solace I had as a child and adolescent was that my father also seemed to have a similar affinity for food. My mother, a normal eater, was the odd person out in our small family. She berated my father for overeating and me for sneaking food that was hands off, for company only. In my teenage years I binged and dieted, dieted and binged. In my twenties, I spent about 18 months perfecting bulimia. Then British psychotherapist, Susie Orbach’s book, Fat Is A Feminist Issue, transformed my life with its wisdom, teaching me that I could eat according to appetite and stop worrying about my weight. From there, I read every book I could find (not many back in the early 1980s) on what was eventually called intuitive eating and I was finally on the road to recovery. Half a lifetime later at 75, I enjoy being a “normal” eater at a comfortable weight without dieting. I entered social work school knowing I wanted to treat people
with eating disorders, to teach them what I’d learned and maybe save them from making some of the mistakes I’d made. Of course, as I now know, that was never a possibility because missteps are part of the zig-zag road of recovery and every individual’s journey is unique. What I can offer clients is a blend of what I personally learned the hard way and more than thirty years of clinical observations about what is needed to recover from an eating disorder. I share these insights with clients and colleagues through my books and blogs and let them know at the get-go the pre-requisites for getting them across the finish line. Here’s what I tell them: Persistence Recovery requires a passion to heal oneself and a deep certainty that you won’t stop trying until you are healed. I knew in my heart that failure wasn’t an option and that if other people could become “normal” eaters, I could too. I had no ambivalence about that possibility as so many clients do. I definitely had unconscious reasons for not wanting to stop bingeing—because then I’d have to deal FMHCA.org | InSession- July 2022 | 25
