The Truth About Early Treatment: You’re Not Doomed if You Missed It

I read an article in The New York Times (NYT) titled “Anorexia in Middle Age and Beyond”.

For context the three headings within the article were “No Treatment”, “Little Progress” and “High Cost of Help”. You get the idea. Essentially it wasn’t presented as a very inspiring article. Interestingly as I read deeper it did actually share the successful recovery stories of a couple of women over the age of 60 years and I just thought that was so awesome and the opposite of “No Progress”. I wondered why these inspiring recovery stories weren’t highlighted as the focus (My jaded guess it that it simply doesn’t sell as well as the doom and gloom)...

Anyhow as someone who spent fifteen years of her life living with anorexia nervosa before recovering and going on to spend many more working with people from all over the world of all different age ranges who are wanting to recover from every diagnosable and undiagnosable eating disorder imaginable, there’s many things I’d like to add to that article but the main one is to rebuke this idea that early treatment is the most successful treatment or the only way that someone can recover.

The truth is that early treatment is not a prerequisite for recovering from an eating disorder.

You are not doomed if you missed out on early treatment.

Early Treatment is not Necessary for Recovery

The old sentiment that the earlier you get treatment the higher chance you have of recovering does not rule out your ability to recover if you didn’t have early treatment. I’m not even certain how accurate the early treatment thing is to be honest (if anyone has any stats on this please feel welcome to share them with me).

As someone who years of her life “in recovery” from anorexia nervosa and who was in treatment from the very early stages the truth is that early treatment quickly turned into fifteen years of “treatment”.

However, throughout those years I don’t think I was slowly recovering. I don’t think those years of treatment got to a point where thy culminated in enough treatment that I was able to recover.

The truth is I spent those years stuck.

Stuck, guilty and ashamed.  

Ultimately for about fourteen years I didn’t achieve much more than fighting against my mind, fighting against my body and fighting against my soul.  

It wasn’t alack of treatment that kept me stuck because I was lucky enough to very rarely not be in some form of treatment and more often than not was seeing multiple health care providers at once. I was privileged enough to be in a position where my family helped me financially to access what we’d consider “gold standard” treatment.

Why I Didn’t Recover More Quickly

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Why I wasn’t able to recover was not a lack of treatment. It was a lack of treatment that was able to help me.

I persisted and diligently showed up to many treatment providers offices week after week, year after year including psychologists, psychiatrists, dietitians, councillors and doctors.    

With, if I’m being honest, not much success beyond the initial education and support a dietitian was able to provide my parents to help me eat when I was a young teenager. This isn’t to discredit the value of this education, clarity and support because I wholeheartedly acknowledge and am infinitely grateful for this guidance because there is no two ways about the fact that this was what kept me alive.

However, there was a side I was really stuck with and that was my mind.

There didn’t seem to be any answers or anything that helped me with how wrong it felt to eat, how guilty I felt in my life, how overwhelmed, emotionally dysregulated and ashamed I was by all my short fallings.

The Emotional and The Logical Mind

Knowing what I know now it makes sense why the procession of treatments I was recommended didn’t help me recover. It’s for one very simple reason and that is that they were all targeted and directed exclusively towards the “conscious mind”. The conscious mind is the part of us that is reason, logic, willpower, intelligence and planning. All awesome capabilities and all of which I had in abundance but the shortfall was that it was the part of me that was already on board with making the change.

My logical mind wanted to recover, it had the information and the reasoning as to why Ishould recover already which meant that all the focusing on this part of my mind exclusively, truly achieved was to add more shame and guilt to the mix that I wanted to change, had the intelligence and information on what to do and yet there was an immense emotional disconnect between wanting to do different and being able to do it. What was missing was being able to do it in any way that felt normal let alone good. Therefore, the changes I bullied, willpowered, threatened and guilted myself into didn’t last. What I know now is that they were never going to and I feel so sorry for my abused past self that I kept down that path of self-blame and self-shame for so long.

The missing piece, I knew was missing, everyone knew was missing, but didn’t know what it was that could help didn’t come until years later. Until I and all those in my life had lost hope that recovery was possible, that my life would be anything more than what I can only describe as a hollow shell.  

The piece that was missing was the piece that could work with the other part of our mind that didn’t answer to reason and logic. The feeling mind or what we call the unconscious mind. The part of us that is emotions, memories, beliefs, associations, lessons, learnings, compulsions and habits. That part that runs an eating disorder.

And then it all makes sense.

If it sounds powerful and like a no brainer that this part of our mind should be involved in eating disorder recovery that’s because it is! Once you know it, it makes complete sense. Once you know it, it makes you wonder why we stuff around doing a lot of the other stuff we do. A lot of the other stuff I did.

Stuff that cost me fifteen years of my life that I will never get back.

Could Hypnotherapy be a Game Changer in Your Recovery?

So, how do we work with the unconscious mind? How do we work with the part of our mind that is responsible for running the eating disorder?

The most precise and accurate tools I’ve come to know to do just this are Clinical Hypnotherapy and Neurolinguistic Programming. Both are modalities that focus on connecting to and accessing the unconscious mind. From there we have almost an infinite number of ways to work with our unconscious mind to make the changes it needs to make that allow for us to update our limitations, change our associations, understand things in ways we haven’t been able to consciously and ultimately to feel different.

This isn’t about being made to do anything you do not want to do, it is about learning how to work with your mind to do everything you want to do and more importantly how to be everything you want to be.

Summary

I want to be really clear that early treatment for an eating disorder is not a requirement of recovery.

Many people receive early treatment and yet go on living with an eating disorder for year sor indefinitely, many people entre treatment and simply never leave it because they don’t know what else to do and they see their inability to recovery as a reflection of them and not simply that perhaps this treatment is helping them and many people I work with have had negative experiences and trauma with treatment and this prevents them accessing treatment in the future.

Early treatment is not always the best treatment nor is it necessary for recovery.

Your past does not define what you are and are not capable of. The only thing that matters in your recovery is the decisions you make now.

If you feel like you’ve been stuck in relapse cycles, “quasi-recovery” or you’re not quite where you want to be and you’re curious to learn more about working with instead of fighting against your mind please send me an email (bonnie@fuellingsuccess.com) or book in for an obligation free Clarity Call where I can get to know you and decide if Clinical Hypnotherapy could be valuable addition to your treatment or perhaps even the missing piece you’ve been looking for (as it was for me all those years ago!)

If you’re interested to have a read of the article that inspired this post for yourself here is the link to NYT article: Anorexia in Middle Age and Beyond - The New York Times

Yours in health, happiness and success,

Bonnie.

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