To Keep Me Safe
I have had strong emotions about my eating disorder. Most of the time, it’s been either love or hate. I was either in a honeymoon-like period of gleefully indulging my dear friend Ana, or I was hating her guts. I spent most the time hating her guts. It kept me going.
In recovery, they talk about intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. Intrinsic motivation is doing it for yourself and extrinsic for other people, maybe loved ones, maybe community, maybe specific individuals you don’t want to let down. Eating disorder recovery leans on those extrinsic motivators because they are the only things that will keep you going when you feel more honeymoon and less hate.
For me, hate has been the big emotion that fueled my intrinsic motivation. Hating Ana, hating what she does to my life and my body. I deserve better, and she’s keeping me from what I deserve. Hate, disgust, vitriol, rage. It got me up in the morning and drove me to treatment when otherwise I’d have no energy.
That leaves me in a funny place now. For the first time, I feel compassion towards my eating disorder. I feel compassion towards Ana.
I did an exercise at Renfrew yesterday. Part of it had me write down a list of as many qualities of the eating disorder that I could. Then, I took a marker and blotted out the ones I’d like to be rid of. The next step of the activity was to show how what was left over—the things I like about my ED—were not extricable from the things I don’t like. I gotta let it all go, the exercise claimed. I ran in a different direction, though. I asked my eating disorder, why can’t you just be these nice things? Why can’t you just be disciplined, driven, loyal, comforting, familiar, and safe—the things I like about my eating disorder? Why do you have to be abusive, competitive, relentless, unforgiving, denigrating, and demeaning, too?
The answer to that, after a bit of searching, was that it wouldn’t have been protective then. It wouldn’t have done its job of numbing me to the scary and hurtful things in the world. It wouldn’t have narrowed my focus to something I could control. It wouldn’t have helped me when I called on it for help.
And that’s why it can’t give up those qualities, now. Because it is trying to keep me safe in the only way it knows how. It’s a pretty fucked up way, to be sure. If I follow its version of safe, it’ll kill me. But it’s all in pursuit of protecting me from a world I don’t entirely feel capable of living in.
Why can’t I let Ana go altogether? Because, right now, that feels like jumping blind off a cliff. Many reasons to think that wouldn’t go well and few to think that it would. Of course my hatred hasn’t gotten me there yet. I can hate the ground beneath my feet but that doesn’t mean I think jumping is a better idea.
Hatred and love have immediate answers. I sometimes get more motivated to eat when Ana starts mouthing off in my head. Hate fuels me. Or I get less motivated to eat. Love pulls. Compassion is harder. Compassion makes me look at myself and asks me if I feel safe enough to both let Ana say what she wants and eat what I will. Compassion says if I don’t, then that’s okay. My eating disorder is a response to feeling unsafe and insecure in my life, and feeling safe and secure are psychological needs. If I can’t avoid disordered eating habits, then the next step isn’t to rev up the hate engines; it’s to find ways to shore up that sense of safety and security so I can keep moving towards recovery. And that can take time.
My intrinsic motivation has often been “I deserve better than this,” said with venom in my tongue and an immediate imperative. Now it might have to be “I deserve better than this,” said with gentleness and a bigger picture in mind than the immediate pain. I don’t know what that looks like in the moment-to-moment.
What I do know is that when compassion is in the foreground, love loses power. There are three places “my eating disorder protects me” could go. The first, hate, is against myself: I am weak for needing this. The second, love, is against the world: I am able to enjoy living in a hostile world because of this. The third, compassion, turns that energy against neither and directs it towards recovery: I have needed this in the past, and if I need it right now then that means I still have room to make myself feel safer. I can still slide between the three, but compassion saps the energy from the other two better than they sap from each other. Compassion is a more stable base for long-term action.
So now I feel sympathy for the devil. Not where I expected things to go, but I’m not sure I can escape now. God damn my big heart.