How My Ed Works

You know when you have so much going on inside, explaining it seems overwhelming and like it would take too much effort? That's been my life lately. I had a good therapy session with Monique yesterday and I came to realize a few things about myself and my eating disorder.

My dietician Viv worked with me for a long time on learning how to treat myself with kindness after I've abused it so atrociously. For instance, after I binge and purge, she taught me how to separate myself from my body and think of it as someone else. That person is hurting and needs help. So I treat my body with kindness by feeding it something, though small, and rehydrating. Sometimes I take a bath or paint my nails. It took me a good year and a half to learn how to do this consistently, but now I'm pretty good at it.

Maybe too good. In fact, I think I've taken it to an extreme, as we eating disordered, black and white people tend to do. Now I can't eat unless I've abused my body first. I have to hurt myself in order to dissociate from myself and make it OKAY to eat something.

This translates into me bingeing and purging several times before I can allow myself to keep anything. I realize afterwards that it would of be better to my body to simply cut out all the bingeing and purging and just eat what I know my body wants. But I can't. Because if I do that, then I can't keep the food. I'm not allowed to...

Messed up and eating disordered thinking? I'd say yes. It explains why, as I've been trying to increase my food intake, my purging as increased as well. I learned something new about how my eating disorder operates but I don't really know what to do with this information.