The Terrible Truths Behind Anorexia...

I haven't tended to write all that many blog posts about recovering from anorexia.
I'm not exactly sure of the reason - perhaps it's because I wouldn't consider myself completely recovered or because anorexia represents my past more than it does my life at present.
Nonetheless, I had wanted to write this particular post for a very long time but I knew I had to wait until I was in a strong enough place to do it justice.

I guess my motivations are rooted out of concern over the fact that there seems to be a commonly held idea that young girls become anorexic because they want to lose weight and look like celebrities in magazines.  The media has a great deal to account for on that front but I think also, sometimes the impression anorexia sufferers give on the surface is that the illness is indeed purely about losing weight.
In truth, anorexia is far more complex than simply wanting to lose weight.
I have suffered with anorexia for the majority of my life and I would say that in my mind, weight has featured considerably little in my experiences and as strange as it may sound, I know of other people who have suffered from anorexia and who have said the same.
It is the reasons why people don't eat that lie at the heavy heart of the illness.

I was 7 years old when I developed anorexia and a lot of people are quite shocked to hear that as anorexia is usually associated with teenage girls.  I developed anorexia long before I had even heard the words 'Anorexia Nervosa' or 'Eating Disorder'.  I developed anorexia before I knew what a calorie was and those magazines with weight loss tips branded across the covers - they didn't exist!
As far as I was concerned, it was all about My Little Pony!
Behind each case of anorexia is an individual, not a stereotype.

I would like to share some of the reasons and factors which I think caused me to develop anorexia in the hope that it will raise awareness about the complex nature of the illness.
If you know someone who suffers from anorexia, then I hope I can offer an insight into some of the factors and thought processes that may underlie their illness.
I also hope that I might inspire people who are suffering from anorexia themselves to think about some of the reasons why they developed the illness.  I believe understanding why you turn to certain unhealthy behaviours and coping mechanisms to be at the heart of recovery.  Rather than solely addressing your problems with food in a physical sense, focus on why you have those problems and work to overcome them.
(I will warn you that some of the reasons I discuss could be quite distressing and do link to childhood sexual abuse so if you think this may trigger you then please don't read or feel free to skip points -
the truth is, anorexia is certainly no walk in the park!)

Why I developed anorexia...

I wanted a sense of control in my life
My eating disorder is very much about control.  I lived a life that felt pretty chaotic and out of my control most of the time.  My dad was very controlling and abusive - emotionally and physically.
He was also an alcoholic so the environment I lived in often felt chaotic.
I wasn't allowed to speak, cry or even play too loudly.
At a young age, I came to realise there was a lot of things I couldn't stop in my life: I couldn't stop the way my dad treated my mum, I couldn't stop him drinking and I couldn't control some of the people who were put in my life and caused harm.
In my mind, I see the point where my anorexia began as the point where I realised that one of the only things I could control in my life was the amount of food I ate.
Of course though, ironically perhaps, my illness quickly became very much out of control.

It made me feel powerful in a little life where I felt powerless most of the time
This links back to control but anorexia gave me a sense of achievement, it made me feel as though I could really do something.  It shames me to say this but it almost gave me a sick kind of high, it made me feel invincible and as though no one could ever get to me.
I can see know though that it was an illusion of power and being in control, the only thing I was really achieving was letting it kill me.

Because if you tell someone something enough they start to believe it...
Emotional abuse basically.
Words can stick in your mind just as strongly, if not more strongly, than anything that physically hurt you.  There that saying 'sticks and stones' but as much as you may not want to let someone hurt you, the more you are exposed to mean words about yourself, you will inevitably start taking them in.
Mainly from my dad again, I was persistently given a message that I wasn't good enough, I was ugly, it would have been better if I hadn't been born and countless other awful things.

I was sexually abused
(that never seems to get easier to write or say)
If I was to highlight a single factor that caused me to develop anorexia, then that would be it.
It's not so much the abuse itself but more the way the abuse made me feel about myself.
With sexual abuse comes a lot of shame and with it, I lost a lot of self worth too.
I didn't think I deserved anything good in my life, I didn't think I deserved food, I didn't even think I deserved to live.

Being thinner was closer to being invisible or not existing at all
This may sound quite simplistic thinking but after all I was a child at the time.  All I had was a vague idea that if I didn't eat, I would become smaller and being smaller or thinner was closer to being invisible.  As I've said, I felt as though I wasn't worthy of life so I aspired to sort of disappear.

If there was less of me, then there was less of me to hate
Again simplistic thinking but that was how I thought at the time.
The abuse completely changed and distorted the way I felt about my body.
If I was to put it in one word, it made my body feel poisoned and I couldn't even think about my body without remembering how the abuse made it feel.
Quite simply, I concluded that the less of my body there was, the better and more manageable living in it would feel because at least there would physically be less there to hate.

I didn't want to feel 'full' ever again
Fear of feeling full is at the centre of my eating disorder and that has often been very difficult for other people to understand.
What could possibly be so bad about feeling full?
The thing is, I don't think my concept of 'full' was quite the same as everyone else's.
I was sexually abused between the ages of 5 and 7; like many other child victims, at the time I had absolutely no idea that the things that happened to me were of a sexual nature.  I also came from a background and community where anything related to sex was not discussed in front of children.  At the time, I didn't even have the vocabulary or concepts to understand why had happened to me.
I only knew the way it made me feel.
The way that I understood the incident of abuse that always stood out in my mind as the worst was that it made me feel 'full' and I never wanted to experience that fullness or anything that would remind me of that fullness ever again.

It numbed me
When your body is deprived of food, your emotions become numbed too.
I could not regulate my emotions well at all as a child due to the experiences I had been through, I felt like a bit of a loose canon with emotions flying around everywhere.  It just overwhelmed me.
I found that if I didn't eat, I couldn't feel, it numbed out the pain and the feelings I didn't want to have to face.
It meant I couldn't feel anything at all though.
I couldn't feel happy or anything positive, I just became cold and empty.

It distracted me
Focusing intensely on just one aspect of my existence, ie. my food intake, made my life feel much simpler and manageable.
I wanted to take my attention away from the other negative things that were happening in my life and really, forget, just how desperately unhappy I was.

I didn't want to grow up
This might seem like a bit of a strange one.  You might expect that I would have wanted to grow up and move on from my unhappy childhood but I guess I saw the world very differently.
When something traumatic happens to you, it can transform the whole way you view the world and the people in it.  To me, the world was an unpredictable and frightening place and any future, I could only assume, would be filled with more pain and suffering.
You could say I got a bit stuck and even now, a part of me still feels stuck there somehow.
I didn't want to grow bigger as that would mean I would have more body there to despise.
I think I most probably also didn't want to develop - I hated my body as it was, let alone with out it changing and becoming different.
I also feared growing up and developing would draw unwanted attention to myself -
 I saw all men as a threat.
More than anything, it was as though I wanted to make time stop so that I could turn it all around.
I used to blame myself for things that weren't my fault because it made me feel as though I could do something about them.  I wanted another chance at being a child and to get it 'right' this time - to stop my dad from drinking, stop my mum from being sad all the time and not let the bad things that happened to me happen.
It was magical thinking but it was what kept me going at the time.

It is important to understand that people develop anorexia for different reasons, there are often some similarities but ultimately each person's anorexia story is their own.
Not every person who suffers from anorexia will have had the same kind of experiences as me but their battle is just as real and devastating.
I have questioned several times while writing this, whether there is actually any real point or purpose behind me bearing these details of my life to others - could it really help anyone?  I suppose I concluded that if anyone out there has faced similar experiences to me, at least they will know that they are not alone and I can also tell you now that things do get better even when it feels like they never will.
After years of fighting my eating disorder, trying to resume a 'normal' intake of food and outwardly 'normal' behaviours around food, I kept on asking myself when it would start to feel easier.  It didn't feel like the day would come but actually it has started to feel a bit easier sometimes and now and again I see that I owe it to myself to ensure I stay strong and healthy and food gets me there.
Not so long ago, I wouldn't have even been able to write the last sentence as I found it impossible to express or think of anything positive associated with food.
I also want to say that if you have been through traumatic experiences as a child, you can find a life worth living and the world will not always seem quite as scary a place as it once was.
I have by no means healed from my past and am certainly a long way off from the place I want to be but I am not ashamed to say that I was sexually abused as I have a reached a point now in my life that I know in my heart that it was not my fault and that I owe it to myself not to stay trapped in the hurt that others inflicted on me.
Recovering from anorexia is just one part of this journey and I'm sure it is for others too.

Love and Strength,
The One Day Seeker