6
HOW HEALING HAPPENS
If you saw the movie The Gods Must Be Crazy, you heard the percussive speech of African Bushmen. If you are a member of a particular tribe of northwest native Canadians, you can say very delicate consonants that most of us can’t even hear. Little children in Iceland comprehend their mother’s directions.
I have a good ear. Why can’t I hear what these people can? All human babies are born with the capacity to speak and understand any human language. So if a baby can do it, why can’t I at forty?
By the time we reach our first birthday, our brains have locked into the pattern of our native language (the language or languages we’ve been exposed to by that time). At eight months, a baby can indicate recognition of very subtle sounds in speech. But by one year, she cannot detect subtle differences among sounds she has not been exposed to.
What happened? Sounds she was exposed to caused certain nerve fibers in her brain to grow in particular directions and to connect with other particular fibers. Sounds she was not exposed to caused certain other nerve fibers to wither because they received no stimulus. Certain other connections, therefore, were not made. Thus was she programmed to receive the language of her culture (and, in effect, barred from distinguishing sounds foreign to her culture).
When elderly rats have led a dull, boring existence, and then some of them are put into an interesting, stimulating environment where they have much to explore, their behavior changes. They lose their sluggishness, they lose their extra weight, their eyes brighten, and they become more active. When these two groups of rats are dissected, the dull rats have holes in their brains, gaps where nerve fibers have withered. The rats who got a new lease on life do not show these brain gaps.
This research suggests that our experiences are recorded by connections between nerve fibers. New synapses are formed and new connections made with each new experience. If an experience is repeated, the connection is confirmed. Through practice, one route becomes a major throughway. Through neglect, another route becomes a country road. Here we have a possible physiological explanation for the effectiveness of habit or compulsion.
This research presents a possibility. If we want to change our lives and try something very different, perhaps our new effort, repeated often enough, will cause a rerouting in our brains and the old throughway to fall into disuse.
My own recovery experience backs this up. With support, I’ve changed many old patterns. Now the newer patterns are more automatic to me than the old addictive ones. On the other hand, I know the old routes are still there. When I’ve relapsed, I’ve been dismayed to discover how quickly the dust could be swept from the old roads, how quickly I could return to them.
I hasten also to distinguish between a purely behavioral approach and the recovery program I’ll be suggesting. To attempt to change behavior alone without giving care to the internal, deprived child deprives her further. To force the outside at the expense of the inside sets up an incongruence that feels sick and awful inside. Anything that feels awful to us, even if we don’t know what we’re feeling, will cause us to eat.
To truly recover from an eating disorder, we must pay attention to our insides. Research does present the hope, however, that if we are steadfast in our efforts, recovery will get easier as the new patterns become confirmed. I have found this to be true for me and many of my clients.
HEALING
Healing happens from the inside out. If you scrape your hand, the scab is the last part to go. To heal from food addiction, we must attend to two important internal processes—our chemical functioning and our feelings. Healing follows these steps:
• We become abstinent from the drug foods that cloud our thinking and that perpetuate cravings and the need to eat.
• By reconnecting with our feelings and needs, we stop neglecting ourselves.
• We get the support needed to break survival rules that limit us from getting our needs met.
• By ceasing to give what we cannot afford to give, we stop abusing ourselves.
• We attend to our insides, no longer sacrificing our inside self for outside impressions, and stop abandoning ourselves.
ABSTINENCE
We respect our chemical limitations by not eating triggering substances. (Step-by-step directions for this are given in chapter 7.) We follow a program that alters our chemical functioning, or more accurately, stops promoting addictive chemical functioning. Eventually we follow a food plan that restores our bodies to natural, healthy functioning.
RECONNECTING WITH FEELINGS AND NEEDS
By gradually reconnecting with our feelings, we stop abandoning ourselves. Our feelings help us understand our own unique perspective on the world, and they reveal unfinished business. Feelings inform us that we need to attend to something, that something important is happening to us.
BREAKING OUR SURVIVAL RULES
Since these rules often keep us from taking good care of ourselves, we must identify them and break them. This process takes time and help. We are often unaware of the rules we’re living by, but they control how we relate to people and how we treat ourselves. Sometimes our rules sabotage intimacy and success. Sometimes they keep us in poverty. Sometimes they cause us to lose people very important to us. Without question, the survival rules we developed long ago can cripple our lives.
To break your survival rules, it is important that you talk regularly with a caring, healthy friend or therapist. If you have a rule that says you shouldn’t talk to anyone about what’s going on, shop for a therapist you feel safe with. She can guide you in working through the reasons for your rule and help you take tiny risks in breaking it.
Recovery challenges many personal survival rules. Often, the actions needed for recovery are exactly the actions prohibited by the survival rules. No wonder people spend so much money and time trying diet remedies and weight-loss programs. If there’s even a remote chance that weight loss can happen without an overhaul of our system for dealing with life, of course we’ll grab at it.
STOPPING SELF-ABUSE
We food addicts are very giving, generous people. We are more likely to take care of another’s needs than our own. Codependence is a related disease that many of us share. We are codependent when we put others’ needs before our own, or when we base our behavior or feelings on someone else’s behavior or feelings to our own detriment. Many of us have suffered sexual abuse or incest. Someone we trusted touched us in a sexual way that felt wrong to us. Our unhealthy homes did not have the safety and protection we needed. Incest is having something taken from you that you can’t afford to give. As incest survivors, many of us repeat the experience of giving what we can’t afford to give. This is abuse, and this abuse will force us to eat. To recover, we must learn to sense when we’ve given enough and to stop at that point. This may break one of our survival rules. Kind people can help us stop this abuse and can teach us how to provide safety for ourselves.
HALTING ABANDONMENT
When Dad was drinking, we were abandoned. When Mom was codependent with Dad, we were abandoned. Any time our parents were involved in addictive or compulsive behaviors, we were abandoned. Whenever we turn to addictive behavior, we abandon ourselves. To shop when we feel sad is abandonment. If we are sad, we need a shoulder and an ear. We need comfort, not new shoes. We are accustomed to sacrificing our insides for our outsides. We work too hard to get recognition at the expense of our tired selves. We force ourselves through diets that make us feel emotionally empty. We give more than we have to offer. We make ourselves nice, cheerful people who are flexible and willing to go along with others, but inside we are crying. With recovery, this gradually stops. We learn to listen to our insides so they aren’t sacrificed for appearances. If we said we would go to the concert and we know we are so tired that it would be abusive, we call and say, “I realize it’s not good for me to go tonight. I’m too tired.”
We change our minds, we revise our plans, we shorten our list of things to do. We get more realistic about the amount of effort we can put into Christmas. We stop spending more than we can afford for gifts. We don’t offer to put on a huge dinner party. We stop baking for hours for someone’s birthday. Finally, we care more for our own well-being than appearances.
THE FEELING YOU
As hard as abstinence is, it is not the hardest part of recovery. Here’s the hardest part: Recovery will challenge you to face the issues you’ve been hiding from. It will require you to take good care of yourself. It will ask the barely possible—for you to entertain the idea that you are lovable, loved, and wanted.
Ongoing recovery requires attention to all sides of yourself, starting with the physical and emotional. Ultimately your whole self will become involved—your spiritual, historical, moral, and purposeful dimensions. But to keep it as simple as possible, we’ll start with your emotional dimension.
In the previous chapter, you saw that your feelings can be a storehouse of information about your present needs, past hurts, expectations, and survival rules. We can manipulate our awareness of these feelings. We can close ourselves off, we can ignore them, we can hurl epithets at them. Doing that imperils us. Cut off from our feelings, we must operate without internal signals about what fits us and what doesn’t, what matches who we are and what doesn’t.
If we ignore our feelings, we can’t clean up our histories. We may choose futures that lead us away from our true selves. We may be forced to adopt someone else’s pattern for living. If we ignore our feelings, we lose the road map that tells us how to get where we want to go—to get what we need. By not getting our needs met, we feel more neglected and abused. We make choices that are bad for us and lead us further from our true selves. The stress and tension from this neglect, confusion, and lack of direction force us further into the need for food. The food itself becomes a barrier to feeling. Under the influence of drug food, our feelings are hazy. Our thinking is less clear.
How do we start feeling again? How do we renew acquaintance with ourselves? We talk. We put those feelings into words. We talk to people who can listen to us with kindness and care and without judgment. Stay with me. I know I’m asking a lot.
If you are like most compulsive eaters, you would prefer to recover from this disease without involving anybody else. Very likely you have already struggled by yourself for years, making and breaking rules about eating, trying to restrict your intake, pushing yourself to exercise. Why didn’t this work? Because you were too alone. You got this disease in the first place because you were too alone. Continued loneliness only makes it worse.
Do you know any recovering alcoholics? The ones who have recovered by receiving help from others—through treatment or Alcoholics Anonymous—are incredibly wonderful people. Do you know any “dry drunks”? These are folks who have quit drinking by themselves and have changed nothing else and learned nothing new about living. These people are hard to be around and very hard to get close to, the drill sergeants of the straight and narrow. Maybe you can change your relationship to food by yourself, but the odds are against you. If it were going to work, seems like it would have by now, doesn’t it?
I know the suggestions in this chapter are very difficult, and that doing them will involve breaking patterns that have kept you “safe” for years. For this reason, the best possible place for you to try these things is in a therapy group for compulsive eaters run by a therapist who is skilled in working with food addicts. Not all therapists are fluent in eating disorders and not all eating-disorders therapists speak the same language, so choosing a therapist right for you may take some shopping. Chapter 8 talks about how eating-disorders therapists are certified and how you can find out which ones are in your area and what to look for.
To recover forever, we have to learn to talk to others about what we feel, do, want, need, and care about. We have to begin exposing secrets. I’ve found that everything I thought was too awful to tell had been done or thought of by the people who listened to me. In nine years of recovery, I’ve not been responded to with shock or dismay one single time.
ASSIGNMENT 6.1
In the last chapter, you began the difficult task of building a support system. This assignment builds on the work you did there by giving you practice in asking someone to listen to you.
1. Think of someone who truly supports you and who wants the best for you. This should be someone who is warm, caring, and thoughtful, someone who will give you some time. Someone you listed on your healthy list from the last assignment is a good candidate. (This should not be someone who is sharp with you, judgmental, critical, cold, hurried, or angry.)
2. Call and ask if she has ten minutes to talk on the phone, that you have something you’d like to talk about. Ask if she would mind listening. Say that you don’t expect her to solve anything for you, that what you mainly need is for her to listen. If she doesn’t have time, thank her and hang up. Think of someone else to call.
If she has time, notice the time on the clock, then talk about anything that’s going on with you. Talk about the ideas you’ve gotten from reading this book, about some way you were disappointed today, or something you’ve been concerned about.
Glance at the clock now and then. When eight minutes are up, thank her for listening and ask if she would like to say anything. If she has something to share, and you have the time, listen. You need not give advice or solve her problems. If the time appears to be going beyond the ten minutes allotted, ask if she’d like to talk longer. If you have a time limit, tell her what it is. It’s fine to explain at the beginning of the conversation that you are doing an exercise to help you learn to tell people about yourself. When the time limit is reached, close the conversation and hang up.
3. Write about how it felt to do this. What rules did you break? How do you feel now?
ASSIGNMENT 6.2
Disease Inventory: Part III
It’s time to look more closely at your own food addiction in this third part of the Disease Inventory begun on page 46. The following assignment is one of the hardest in this book. A giant barrier to recovery is denying to ourselves the extent of our involvement with food, but if you will persist in writing your inventory as honestly and courageously as you can and share it with another person or persons, you’ll have a chance to get a true picture of your disease.
1. Write the inventory using the guide at the end of this introduction. Three approaches to writing are as follows:
• Set aside an entire day. Go to the library; rent a cabin in a nearby park for a day; go to a beautiful, safe spot in the country and take a picnic lunch; rent a room by a lake, the ocean, a river, in a forest for a day; or go to a convent that allows visitors on retreat. Write for a while, take a break, walk, then write some more.
• Set aside three hours a week, four weeks in a row, in which you will not be interrupted. Go to the library or unplug the telephone or drive to a safe park with your notebook, some water, and reflective music. Each week do one section of the inventory.
• Write a little bit each day, and keep writing daily until you’ve completed the inventory.
2. Read the inventory. The discoveries you make by writing will be multiplied if you read your inventory to someone who can be warm, accepting, and nonjudgmental. By writing, you’ve listened to yourself. By reading it, you will experience the connection and warmth of having others hear what you’ve been through. By reading it in your therapy group, your therapist and group members will be able to spot patterns in the present that reflect patterns from the past.
If you are in a therapy group, take this inventory to group and ask for time to read it.
If you are in individual therapy, take this to your session and read it.
Identify a healthy, loving, supportive friend. Ask if she’d be willing to listen to you for a couple of hours. Explain that you’ve been writing about your life and have learned that you will get a lot more out of it if someone can listen with acceptance and caring. If she’s willing, set up a time and place where you won’t be interrupted by telephones or children and ask that she keep what you read confidential. At the appointed time, read all of this part of the completed Disease Inventory. Allow her to comfort you if you can. Thank her.
DISEASE INVENTORY
Starting from your earliest memory of bingeing and/or starving, dieting, and/or purging, chronicle your relationship with food.
The Progression of Powerless Eating
1. When did you first turn to food? Perhaps your reliance on food started at age ten when you came home from school and curled up in front of the TV with a bunch of snacks because no one was there for you to talk to. Perhaps you started skipping breakfast at twelve as a misguided weight-control measure and then began skipping lunch, too—leading either to increased fear of food and decreased eating or to bingeing to make up for the meals you missed.
2. Gradually, over the years, your relationship—your intimacy—with food progressed. Chronicle this progression.
3. Include, if relevant, the progression of addiction to sugar and/or alcohol.
4. What impact has the addiction and compulsion had on all parts of your life in the last five years?
5. Be very specific and honest about your present pattern of bingeing and/or purging and/or starving. How much and how often do you binge? What is your volume of food? How frequently do you purge? How often do you starve yourself?
Control Efforts
1. List attempts to control eating—starving, dieting, purging, laxatives, diet pills, prescription drugs, coffee, smoking.
2. Mark the control efforts that failed.
Unmanageability
1. Unmanageability is a part of this disease. Anyone with an addiction finds that her life gets frayed around the edges. What evidence of unmanageability exists in your life? (It is common for addicts not to realize that manageability is related to the addiction. Addicts initially think life is naturally unmanageable, and that they use food to comfort themselves or help them deal with this unmanageability. In fact, it’s the other way around. Addiction makes life unmanageable.)
2. List evidence of unmanageability in:
a. Emotional state—mood swings, depression, self-esteem.
b. Relationships, social life, sexual relationships.
c. Work. Have you been late or missed work due to a sugar low or due to drinking? Have you attacked coworkers because of sugar anger? Have you sabotaged your own success by not having a clear head when needed or by eating instead of studying or reading or learning?
Adverse Physical Consequences
1. Have you ever risked your life or the lives of others by eating or not eating? (For example, driving lightheaded from starving or bingeing; driving after drinking; fumbling for a crumb at 40 miles an hour; driving for hours on insufficient nutrition or in a glut of mind-dulling sugar.)
2. Have you damaged your body as a result of your addiction? (For example, tooth problems, loss of enamel from purging, fallen arches, inadequate exercise, blood-sugar difficulties, high cholesterol or blood pressure from an excess of fat in your diet, malnutrition from inadequate vegetables or whole grains.)
3. Include food blackouts. How many times have you found yourself with an empty bowl or bag in your lap and no clear memory of a decision to eat? How many times have you stood in front of the open refrigerator without knowing that you were going to walk there? When did you first start having food blackouts? Have these progressed?
Adverse Social Consequences
1. What harm has been done to your relationships? (For example, strained relationships from sugar anger, isolating, mood swings caused by sugar or starving, being undependable, changing appointments or plans with others because of sugar tiredness or lack of interest.)
2. How has your disease affected others? How have the people around you had to adapt because of your disease? In what ways have you abused others—your spouse, partner, children—because of the influence of this disease?
Adverse Financial Consequences
1. Include adverse financial consequences. How has the addiction kept you poor? How has it deprived you of having money for other things you want to do? Include crazy thinking about money so you could spend it on food. (For example, breaking your neck to save thirty cents on toilet paper and then treating yourself for your shopping efforts by “taking yourself out”; spending more than is reasonable for meals; rewarding yourself by eating at a more expensive restaurant than you can really afford or by eating out so often that you deprive yourself of money for other activities; spending money on food that you could have used for therapy or recovery; spending extra money on food each week and then telling yourself you don’t have enough money to take sensible care of yourself—for example, putting off seeing the doctor or dentist because of the cost when you are spending the equivalent amount on restaurants; not counting the money you spend on food or restaurants because that’s a “necessityʺ—all addicts consider their drug a necessity.)
Adverse Moral Consequences
1. Has the disease made you violate your values? (For example, lying about eating; stealing, hiding, or concealing food; concealing bingeing, purging, or starving.) How is your self-respect doing? Have you lost any because of the effects of this disease?
2. Have you manipulated others so you could satisfy a craving? (For example, getting people out of the house so you could be alone with food; getting everyone to go to a certain restaurant; manipulating toward a specific activity because of the food associated with it; controlling food portions so that you get the most or there will be some left over that you’ll eat later secretly.)
3. Include confused priorities—how is food the center of your life? Has it been the center of any of your relationships? What evidence is there that eating has been more important than relating? (For example: You’re with a friend; she’s talking. You pretend to be listening but you’re actually thinking about food and eating. Your body is present but your thoughts and focus arenʹt on the relationship or the interaction.)
Adverse Spiritual Consequences
1. Include evidence of how eating has been more important than your spiritual development, more important than your relationships, more important than your health, more important than your peace of mind.
2. How has this disease affected your choices, your decisions, the opportunities you’ve missed or aborted?