Stories of Eating Disorder Recovery
Early Struggles
Six years old.
That’s how old I was when I was first hospitalized for an eating disorder (ED). Of course, back then our medical system didn’t diagnose children with eating disorders. Instead, I was labeled as a “picky eater”, “stubborn” and a “spoiled” child that would eventually “outgrow” my disordered eating habits. A few other diagnoses were thrown around: Failure to Thrive (FTT), Avoidant Restrictive Food Intake Disorder (ARFID), and the list goes on… but eventually (for reasons I can no longer remember), I started eating more adequately. But from a young age I learned—or perhaps thought—I could gain a sense of control over my life (mainly my anxiety) by what I put (or didn’t put) into my body.
This was a message that plagued me for most of my childhood and teenage years. I more-or-less flew “under the radar” as a biologically “tall and slender” offspring of two equally “tall and slender” parents. I frequently was at the top of the height growth charts while dangerously dancing on the low-end of the weight charts. I always managed to eat just enough so that I didn’t draw too much attention but could also continue developing a toxic—and thickly interwoven—relationship with my eating disorder.
Until I couldn’t fly under the radar anymore.
In high school, I was sexually assaulted and it was this assault that shattered the carefully constructed reality I had been maintaining for so long. I could no longer dance the line of “just ok” and rapidly fell into a new, arguably more toxic relationship: one that was endlessly and unequivocally committed to my ED. I regressed so quickly that my medical team didn’t believe I would “make it past the weekend” due to my poor health status.
Thankfully, I did make it past that weekend.
But I would spend the next decade in and out of various levels of treatment—acute hospitalization, inpatient, partial, residential, outpatient—and the cycle would repeat itself over. and. over. again.
I was hospitalized a total of thirteen times.
Breaking the Treatment Cycle
Thirteen times.
Each time I was admitted I would do the bare minimum to get discharged. I was the “yes” patient, the one who did anything and everything the treatment team asked just to be let out (and, admittedly, return a few weeks or months later). I maintained my eating disorder through my undergraduate career, my graduate career, my courtship and marriage to my partner, and even into the early stages of my career as an occupational therapist.
As a healthcare provider myself, you can imagine that I quickly became the worst patient. The one that knew all the group activities, processes, behavioral and cognitive therapies, and interventions you could throw at me… but even though I knew these treatment processes intimately, something still wasn’t clicking. I was still engaging in this cycle of recovery and relapse, recovery and relapse, that it wasn’t a matter of if I would relapse, but when.
I remember meeting with my outpatient therapist in my mid-twenties and she recommended a program I had never heard of before: Eat Breathe Thrive. At first, I was extremely interested in this program because it appealed to the chronic overexerciser in me—You mean I can exercise and do “recovery” at the same time? Sign me up!—but when I started the program as a participant, I realized how different this approach to recovery was. In my twenty-two years and thirteen hospitalizations battling an ED, I had never experienced something quite like this before.
Let me start off by clarifying, Eat Breathe Thrive is not an exercise program—my ED was very disappointed by this, let me tell you—but one that supports internal awareness and resiliency skills to finally break free from ED behaviors. Yes, a large part of this is mindful movement, but it is intentional movement in that it is not focused on calories, time, or any quantifiable number really. It is about feeling in and through the body; it is about discovering the internal roadblocks that perpetuate disordered eating behaviors; it is about uncovering all the “crap” that ED is, quite frankly, so good at hiding.
I remember one evening sitting with my partner at the dinner table while I was in my first Eat Breathe Thrive program and thinking about the program’s second pillar, Embodied Intimacy. For those of you not familiar with this term, Embodied Intimacy is the ability to use the body as a vehicle for connection with oneself and others. It recognizes that all bodies have an innate capacity to give and receive sentiments such as love, kindness, and compassion. It means developing our ability to connect with ourselves and others through the body, rather than just through our words.
As a survivor of sexual assault, this was something that had been missing in all my hospitalizations and treatments. I had become adept at disconnecting from my body and steering my recovery on “autopilot” that I missed this pivotal piece to the puzzle altogether. Typically, when we think about intimacy our go-to reaction is to jump to sex or physical intimacy with a partner, and while this is certainly part of Embodied Intimacy, it doesn’t do this skill justice. Embodied Intimacy is about getting to know our innermost selves. The innermost self that is separate from the ED. The true self. Embodied Intimacy is about welcoming vulnerability to make that true self known to others.
Because that is how we build connection.
That is how we build community.
That is how we build recovery.
Building Recovery
Of course, this building is by no means an easy task—it is still an area I challenge in my recovery to this day—because it involves fighting through detachment and dissociation of past trauma. It involves communicating boundaries with yourself and others. It involves being seen and heard by others without judgment. Truth be told, I didn’t even know that this was something I was missing in my life. I truly believed I was connected to my body, my true self, and to others. But I realized that evening at the dinner table how untrue that was.
I found myself having a hard time focusing on what my partner was sharing with me about his day. I couldn’t even hear his words, just monotonous white noise like how the adults talk in Charlie Brown. I’m sure my body language communicated this disconnect, but I was just doing everything I could to remain seated at the dinner table that I didn’t even think about how my body was connecting (or disconnecting) from my partner at that moment. I would be lying if I said I didn’t struggle to connect with my partner in other ways too. The early stages of my marriage really suffered because of my inability to be mentally and physically vulnerable with my partner.
It was because I was lacking the vital skill of Embodied Intimacy. The skill that allows us to find, maintain and foster long-term relationships outside the ED. Of course, our EDs would like to think that we “don’t need anyone else” and that we are “strong enough” to get along in life without them. I don’t mean to throw ED under the bus, in many stages of my life this dissociation served a necessary purpose. It helped me to survive and withstand the trauma of my childhood and teenage years to be a relatively “functioning” member of society. But once that danger was over, it no longer served a purpose. My ED wanted me to believe that this dissociation was still vital to my survival, but the only thing it was doing was keeping me stuck in the same cycle of recovery and relapse.
It was keeping me committed to my ED and no one else.
Turning on the “Lights”
I felt a sudden shift in the energy of the room upon realizing this as if I had just witnessed my partner for the first time. I could hear the words he was saying and though my ED would rear its ugly head and try to draw me back into the confines of dissociation, my partner’s words kept drawing me back to the surface. That desire and need for human and bodily connection. It was as if a light bulb went off in my head that I didn’t even know existed. It was an “ah-ha” moment for me. That magical moment that everyone had told me about in recovery but that I couldn’t quite access. I get it now. I remember thinking to myself—I get it now. This was the missing piece I had been searching for.
“It was as if a light bulb went off in my head that I didn’t even know existed... This was the missing piece I had been searching for.”
The piece I hadn’t found in…
Thirteen admissions.
And twenty-two years.
After I finished my Eat Breathe Thrive series, I was committed to becoming a facilitator and to bringing this healing work to others. After taking a few years to become more stable in my recovery (and personal and professional spheres), I finally signed up for the Online Facilitator Immersion. This second time participating in the program was just as amazing as the first (I actually did my homework this time without dissociating)… and I felt like I learned new parts about myself all over again. When I began my facilitator training, I found the same level of self-discovery was true. Though I was guiding others through their Eat Breathe Thrive journeys, I was reliving it with them through each discussion, activity, and mindful movement practice.
I think that is perhaps my favorite part about being a facilitator: not only am I able to witness and hold space for the healing of others, but I also learn more about my own healing too. Eat Breathe Thrive as a community is one of the pivotal pieces that I had been missing from my recovery and to be able to share in that with others fighting the same battle is one of the most humbling experiences I could ever describe. I love seeing the “light bulbs” go on for other participants, and while their stories and missing pieces may be entirely unique from my own, it’s an incredible honor to witness those moments happen in real-time.
If you support someone with an eating disorder or are just passionate about helping individuals improve their relationship with food and their bodies, becoming involved with the Eat Breathe Thrive community is one of the most powerful roles you could play as an advocate… and if you are currently living with your own ED or have a personal history with disordered eating, I encourage you to participate in the powerful healing processes of this community.
Eat Breathe Thrive may be the difference between whether the “light bulb” turns on or off.
It certainly was for me.
Alyssa Gremban, OTD, OTR/L, RYT-200