Recently I was asked the question “over the past ten years of your life what’s something that turned out to be a blessing in disguise?”
My response took a little while because when I really thought about it over the past ten years I’ve been through a lot.
I tend to think about all that (the life I lived when I was consumed by an eating disorder) as being over. A time in the distant past where my life was so different it doesn’t really feel like it happened to me but rather to someone else. I don’t particularly think about it anymore (yes, even despite working in this space). But the truth is it did happen.
For fifteen years I struggled beyond what I have the capacity to convey in words. So, when I think back to the reality of where I was, who I was, my experience of life ten years ago it is confronting because I had another two years to live in struggle trying to recover from the eating disorder and during those two years I really packed in a lifetime of pain.
To anyone who has read my blogs you’ll know that I don’t hold gratitude towards what the years of living with an eating disorder taught me, I don’t believe it made me a better person, I don’t believe it was a necessary part of my life or that it was worth it in any way, shape or form. Given this and given that in the last ten years and possibly in my life the most personally important thing I did was truly and completely recover from that eating disorder and given that I didn’t see that time as a blessing in disguise, what within the past ten years was something that turned out to be a blessing in disguise?…
I’ve had break-ups, I’ve had friendship breakdowns, I’ve had family members die and none of them I can say were blessings in disguise.
The Disguise
Then it dawned on me – hospitalisation. There really is no other answer as to what hit the hardest and has had the most lasting impact.
In 2017 I was hospitalised for anorexia nervosa treatment for the last time.
It was traumatic.
I didn’t want to be there but I was threatened with the mental health act if I didn’t go in “voluntarily”, I was the only patient in the room that I shared with five others who was spoken about rather than to or with, I was poked and prodded within an inch of my life, I was woken up at all hours for blood tests and blood pressure readings, I was watched 24/7, I was not allowed to leave the bed, I was not allowed to go to the bathroom on my own, I was not allowed to have my best friend or my boyfriend sit on the bed with me, I was treated not only as though I was stupid but as though I was something less than human, I was given no information about the plan for my treatment or what was going on, I was given injections and medications without any explanation as to what they were, I was transferred from the medical to the mental health ward with no communication, I was threatened into abiding by the “rules” (the rules I was already following and trying desperately to be compliant with in the misguided hope that would mean that I would be treated more kindly).
Hospitalisation with an eating disorder is horrible. I am yet to find someone who contests that but having lived it and lived the other side as a health professional treating people in recovery from eating disorder I know there really isn’t a way around that. Confining someone to a bed and making them do the one thing they are absolutely beyond terrified to do is always going to be awful. I also know there was and is more to why it was horrible than the medical treatment. It was the delivery of the treatment. The delivery of the treatment hurt more than the treatment itself.
When I was the one in the hospital bed, alone, exhausted and scared I thought it was all my fault. That if I tried harder, if only I was better people would treat me better.
I tried so hard.
I abided by all the rules (except the one where you weren’t allowed to eat outside food because I was desperate to get out of there and I knew the way out of there was weight gain and medical stabilisation. Therefore, I had snacks of all sorts smuggled in that I’d eat in secret between meals). I was polite and friendly and mild mannered even when I was terrified and felt my world was falling apart around me. I have no idea how I maintained the sense of composure I did. I was abiding, trying to please and most of all trying to be seen as human and treated with more kindness even when I wanted to die.
Looking back, I know it wasn’t all my fault.
Looking back, I wish I didn’t try so hard to be kind and to please people that were harming me.
Looking back, I wish I’d been truer to myself.
For the entire duration of the fifteen years, I lived with anorexia nervosa I gave a damn about what others thought about me. I more than gave a damn. It consumed me.
For some unknown reason I was obsessed with appearing to others as though I had it all together, as though I was a strong, competent and capable human being (I wasn’t). I could not let others see that I was struggling or failing in any way.
I wish I didn’t do that.
Most of all I wish I didn’t do that during those weeks in that hospital bed. But even as I write this and for the first time imagine how that would have gone, I can’t help but wonder how that then would have turned out for me…
If I’d been more of a “mess”, if I’d been more honest with my struggles and shown that more how then would I have been treated? And the uncomfortable answer is likely much worse.
I can see that not only was I trying to appear more together than I was so I could get out of there I was mostly attempting to come across and be perceived as stronger and more together than the crazy person I’d been labelled as because I just so badly wanted to be treated better. To be treatment more human (and maybe if I was, I wouldn’t have been so desperate to get out of there…). I was protecting myself from the people who were supposed to be helping me. And knowing that makes me so sad. Especially because it didn’t work. I was kind and caring and considerate towards people who at the best were busy and stressed and didn’t understand and at the worst outrightly mistreated and abused me.
So, what I really wish is not what I did (be true to my suffering) because I was protecting myself and being true to my suffering likely would have made things worse. I wish I was treated better. I wish I was treated better so I had the safety to be more true to the suffering I was experiencing.
I wish I had the safety to be me.
I wish I had safety so I could direct my energy to work on what I needed to work on rather than direct all my energy towards protecting myself.
That’s the real truth.
And behind that truth is something I’ve thought about, written about, spoken about, trained health professionals on and been an active part of changing for a long time. The state of current treatment.
Yes, hospitalisation with an eating disorder is horrible. There is no way to avoid that entirely, but it doesn’t have to be unnecessarily horrible.
It doesn’t have to be traumatic.
We even use different language when we talk about people being “hospitalised with an eating disorder” then when we talk about people “going to hospital for a chest infection or a broken leg”!
It’s wild.
We still talk about eating disorder treatment as though the person is not there, is not wanting to get better and is stupid or less than human.
We claim to be treating people with eating disorders but I can tell you from having lived both sides of the hospital bed it more often than not feels like we are just moving them around, dictating and controlling them because on one well-meaning level we just don’t understand or know what else to do with these people who appear to be refusing to help themselves and on a more sinister level there are those who undoubtably do the things they do for the power and control it gives them over another.
The Blessing
You may be wondering when the blessing part comes in.
Hospitalisation at the age of twenty-seven years old after living more of my life with an eating disorder than I had without by that time was a blessing in disguise not because of the treatment I received there (will no longer pretend that was helpful) but because of what it stirred me to do after I was discharged.
It was a blessing in disguise because it was such an awful experience that it made me lose hope. When I was being wheeled in a wheelchair from the medical ward to the mental health ward, my heart racing as I was going through what seemed like a ludicrous amount of locked doors, my possessions being taken off me, into a tiny room with a woman crying to herself, standing for the first time in weeks to see if the door to the outside I missed so bad would open only to find it also locked, crying in that pathetic way with my tears mixing with my snot, staring at the motorbike helmet of my friend because I couldn’t bring myself to make eye contact with anyone it hit me that this wasn’t the way I was going to get better.
It hit me that there was nothing here for me.
It hit me that I’d been through this before.
I’d been through this loop of hope that “this would be the time” things would be different only to be met with the harsh reality that they weren’t followed by the all-consuming numbness of hopelessness before.
It was a blessing in disguise because as horrific as that experience was (and I cannot stress this enough) it opened my eyes.
It planted that seed that said enough.
It instigated me to do something different, even when I didn’t know what that something different could be.
And do something different I did.
Something very different in the form of clinical hypnotherapy and neurolinguistic programming.
I worked with a lady who had arguably very little insight or knowledge and certainly no formal training on eating disorders or their treatment and yet for the very first time in fifteen years of constant treatment I was asked what it was I wanted.
With her I wasn’t treated less than human, with her for the first time my body wasn’t the measure of how well I was or wasn’t doing, with her there were no threats, coercion or guilt to manipulate me into changing behaviours.
There was truth, there was trust, there was being treated on the same level.
With her help (and patience) I experienced a safety I’d never known. From which I was able to learn to use my use my mind in new and different ways.
I learned how to let go of the past, I learned how to connect to and listen to myself, I learned how to feel more comfortable within myself and I learned how to imagine and create a better future for myself. I learned how to create freedom and a life beyond the eating disorder. I learned how to just be.
And because of this the life I live today is a life I never could have imagined possible.
Summary
I hope you can transform all the unfair and unjust things that have happened to you into “blessings in disguise”. Not because they are blessings in disguise and not because they needed to happen, should have happened or make you a better person in any way because let’s be real not everything happens for a reason. Some of it is just shit and in eating disorder recovery most of it is just shit. But because you can be more despite the things that have happened and because you deserve to live your life not just free from the eating disorder but free to be you.
I hope you get to transform the pain of what you’ve been through into a new life and when you’re ready to make that more than a hope please get in touch with me because recovering from an eating disorder is not something you have to suffer through, feel ashamed of and do alone. Even if your prior treatment has taught you it is. There is help that can help. I promise.
With my whole heart I hope you found this information valuable to your recovery.
Become Great. Live Great.
Bonnie.
