Grieving in recovery

This is a hard one, and a subject so many people will not understand. If you’ve not suffered from an eating disorder, how could you possibly think there is a part of you that would miss what had ruined your life, your health, taken everything away from you. Something that took me along time to understand about myself and my illness is that it happened for a reason. It served a purpose, there was a long time that all I wanted was the eating disorder because of what it gave me. There was a time in my life where the eating disorder had a role to play, to help me, it gave me control, a feeling of safety and security, it was known, familiar, and it felt like my protective barrier against the world. So when it came to recovery, I had to learn that I was going to miss it. And that was hard. I couldn’t understand myself for so long, why was it so hard to give up something that was destroying me? Why could I sit in hours of therapy every week, be utterly determined that I could see the eating disorder in it’s true colours, and yet still feel this strong dependency on it. I felt like I was giving up a part of myself, my shield and ‘helper’. I resented myself for a long time because of this, and I lied and hid my dependency on my eating disorder because I felt so ashamed that I was getting it so ‘wrong’. 
Through time, the support and honesty from other patients and realisation that this was NORMAL, I began to get myself grieve. That process was, is, far from easy though. It’s grieving for something that isn’t essentially ‘there’ but also hasn’t actually ‘gone’. If you think about the stages of grief, denial, anger, depression etc. It’s safe to say I went through each and every one, over and over again. Because on of the biggest difficulties of grieving my eating disorder is it was still there, loud and clear. Even when I woke up each morning and swore to myself I would eat my meal plan that day, that I wouldn’t engage in any behaviours and I would practise all the skills I had learnt in therapy, the eating disorder wouldn’t let me go. It held me in its claws like an abusive partner that I had seen the true side of. It was only when I tried to get away from it did I realise how prevalent it was in my life, how much it meant to me (which I hated) but also how much I wasn’t in control. I didn’t realise how bad things were until I tried to get better, and then my little mole hill I thought I had to climb showed itself as Mount Everest and I knew this was going to be a lot harder than I had ever anticipated. 

And one of the most difficult parts of recovery was that no matter how much I hated my eating disorder, I still felt like I was loosing something that I loved in a way. It filled and consumed so much of my life for so many years, and while those years were horrific, painful, traumatic, it became all I knew. So when I began to fight it, I found a void, a chasm of unknowns and it was scary. Yes the eating disorder was scary, being told I wouldn’t survive was scary, seeing my world fall apart was terrifying. But this gaping hole where the eating disorder used to be, the hours it consumed punishing me and forcing me to do unimaginable things, they were now hours I had to try and fill with... anything else. I didn’t know what I liked what I wanted, what I valued or But that is okay, because I need to remember that you are going to miss something that serves a purpose. Why do you think relapse happens?

 I know it’s vital for me to remember the true colours of my anorexia, and that everything it ‘gave me’ was short lived, and usually false. Recovery is by far the more difficult route, it means feeling vulnerable and scared and anxious and guilty, it means facing the pain, not running. It’s about learning to understand why you needed such an extreme coping mechanism, but also how to learn to let go, remembering it won’t let you go easily it’s a rocky road, but definitely one worth going down.