Almost eight years ago, I started writing a book.
I was relatively fresh out of hospital.
An experience that had left me reeling, lost and feeling more disconnected, different and alone than ever.
I felt uncared for, misunderstood and abused. I felt untrusting and almost disgusted by the world I was trying so hard to live in.
My sense of self-worth was next to non-existent, and it was hard to think of any goodness I may want for myself so at first my intentions and motivations for writing were to help others who may someday read the words feel less alone.
I cared so much.
I had a huge desire to protect others from going through what I was going through.
That care for strangers helped me to start. I didn’t yet know I would one day feel that care for myself.
Cold
It was winter when I started writing and I would get up at four am, turn my little but incredibly noisy heater on and write.
I wrote about the reality of the fifteen years I had lived with anorexia nervosa.
I wrote about the pain both mentally and physically of feeling like my life and my body were not my own.
I wrote about the big things and the seemingly small things from friendships, relationships, sex, family, travel, study, work, dreams and fun.
I wrote about how the eating disorder controlled them all.
I wrote about the truth.
Truth
In the years since first putting pen to paper, I’ve intermittently come back to this book to chop and change bits and pieces here and there as my understanding has grown so much so that it has become almost an entirely different book.
I say almost because key themes have remained.
The most important of which is the fact that eating disorders are not conscious problems, they are unconscious problems (and yet we treat them very much as if they are conscious).
This key has remained because learning this, understanding this, feeling the truth of this and crucially applying this changed everything for me.
It also made the book what it is today.
A book not only about the pain of living with an eating disorder, the weird changes your body and mind go through as you renourish yourself but also a book about the practicalities of recovering from an eating disorder and creating and living a life on the other side.
Something I’ll admit I did not believe was possible when I first began to write.
Different
This is why the byline of the book is “Your guide to doing recovery different this time”.
Because for fifteen years I battled not only against an eating disorder but also against myself.
I was certain I was the problem.
I told myself that if I could only be more motivated, determined or tried harder I could recover.
That is also the way I was treated both by people in my personal life but also by professionals.
Because up until then all the treatment I had sought had been focused on doing better, taking medication that was intended to take the edge off but not really cure and learning to live with an illness I did not want to live with.
Therefore, this is what I believed was the only option and my inability to recover was my fault because I was getting it wrong.
I did not know there was any other way of doing things.
Understanding this isn’t true, that I didn’t just need to try harder changed everything for me.
Understanding this allowed me to do things differently.
Understanding this allowed me to begin to work with instead of against myself.
Freedom
And this simple difference of working with instead of against myself is how I ultimately created freedom from the eating disorder.
That is what I mean by doing recovery “different” this time.
Thoughts
I have no doubt there are countless different ways people have recovered from eating disorders.
I sometimes wonder if we were to take a survey or ask people to condense how they did it into a few lines what similarities we would find.
I truly believe that if we are to recover from an eating disorder there are changes that have to happen at the “unconscious” level. The level at which the problem exists.
I have no doubt that this sometimes happens through chance or perseverance for people but knowing what I know now I also know this can be done deliberately and intentionally by working directly with out unconscious mind.
This book includes a section on the types of professional treatment I recommend and includes clinical hypnotherapy and/or NLP both of which are direct tools for working with our unconscious mind aka the part where the eating disorder exists and is maintained and therefore to me the part worth spending your time and energy working with…
With my whole heart I hope you found this information useful and inspiring.
Become Great. Live Great.
Bonnie.
