Now What

Okayyyy so there comes a point in a person's life who has an eating disorder where you realize that your life sucks. You may be suffering from depression, anxiety and panic attacks, loss of meaningful relationships, the constant battle between two monsters one, your physiological self which is singularly focused on your desperate need for food and two your desperate need for self esteem and self worth which keeps you from giving into the overwhelming need to feed. These contradicting forces keep you from focusing on anything else. Your whole life becomes the struggle between striving for self worth and happiness through avoiding your primal need. As a result of this many of the emotional/physical/social symptoms above become the state of your day to day life. A few people who I love have lately opened up to me about their position of being right in the thick of this. It is hell. And they ask what the first step I took was in getting out of it. Although a blog post can be a poor alternative to a therapy session with a trained therapist who has experience dealing with the ins and outs of an eating disorder, I really want to post this for a lot of reasons. I hope it helps :)

The fundamental belief that enabled my escape from the trap was my belief in a source of evil in the universe. I like to call this entity satan BUT if you don't like that name all you need in order for this post to be extremely helpful, whether you are religious or not, is for you to believe that there is an evil in the world, a force of falseness that ultimately will lead you to misery. All you need to believe is that there are dichotomic forces (or even forces on a continuum if you will) be they: positive vs negative, true vs false, evil vs good. If you believe that we can continue on the same path to get off of the terrible trap you or a loved one has fallen into.

For those of you who call the evil satan, there are two scriptures that are specifically pertinent to this topic, one of which was "my eating disorder scripture" if you will :) The first is

2 Nephi 2:18

And because [satan] had fallen from heaven, and had become miserable forever, he sought also the misery of all mankind.

Fundamental to getting over an eating disorder is recognizing that satan is in it to make us miserable. And if we don't believe in him to believe that the negativity, the falseness, the evil will lead us to misery.

The second scripture, my saving scripture (the saving principle) is

Moses 4:4

And he became Satan, yea, even the devil, THE FATHER OF ALL LIES, to deceive and to blind men...

Recognizing and coming to believe that the raging voice inside telling us that in order to be happy we need to be skinny and if we are skinny we will be loved and happy and get everything we really want is satan. It is the evil, false, negative influence in our minds telling us lies.

This is the scariest thing I have ever done. Honestly. To believe that my every thought, my every action was influenced by evil and that my every effort was backed by the most evil identity and force in the universe scared me to death.

I vividly remember when I decided to believe. I decided to try to accept that I was being influenced by satan and that EVERYTHING I strove for and held to with desperation was an illusion. In that moment I turned to Christ. I had to. I was so helpless and so hopeless and I knew I could. not. do. it. alone. In the moments and minutes and days to come I literally felt Christ carrying me. I could not have done it alone. It was too scary. It was too hard. To take a step away from what I clung to for everything, I believed in the eating disorder with everything I had, to step away from that, take steps into the darkness reaching out my hand with my single motivation being the hope that since this eating disorder was satan and Christ was the source of all goodness and truth and could get me through anything I could try to step away from satan and towards Christ and also that my life was absolutely miserable and I needed to be happy I needed to get out of it.

So I had to pray. I prayed that I would believe that everything the eating disorder was telling me, what satan was telling me, was false. Like every other deception satan (evil,falseness,negativity, whatever your source is, etc) presents to us it often resembles the truth or has a portion of truth in it but is twisted just right to become false and warped. This is the nature of the lies that make up an eating disorder. My recovery was made up of recognizing thoughts, letting those thoughts lead me to a mentality I held, recognizing the source of that mentality, and knowing the source is the FATHER OF ALL LIES, then, recognizing it was false and if not completely false, oozing with falseness that needed to be unraveled and recrafted into the tapestry that makes up my beliefs about life, self esteem, lovableness and happiness.

Only through Christ could I have the comfort and support and hope and strength to abandon my belief that the ED would give me everything I wanted and take on the amazing feat of beginning to recover from an eating disorder. If you are struggling pray. Pray that God will help you to believe that an eating disorder is the way that satan is trying to keep you from everything beautiful. Everything wonderful everything amazing and everything full of love and peace. Life after recovery from an eating disorder is gloriously wonderful. I have relationships like I never could imagine, peace of mind and soul I never thought I would ever attain and love for myself and others that never EVER EVER would be possible while being controlled by the terrible miserable addiction of an eating disorder. You can do it. Through Christ and loved ones around you you can have a happy amazing life full of love and peace.

The first step is recognizing that the idea that being skinny will give you everything is a lie.

If you are reading this, I love you :) And I. am. here. for. you. If any of you want to talk to me about this or anything else just know I am dying to talk to you about it. Just let me know. I love you and you can be free. Love Callie

slaythestigma@gmail.com