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Anorexia to Obesity and back again: An adult woman's life journey

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Category: Symptoms

(Anorexia to obesity to anorexia again becomes a life of spinning like a carnival wheel. It makes you dizzy. It makes life a blur. It looks like a lot of action but gets you nowhere. This is a true story, written in her own words, of a woman getting off that wheel and finding wisdom.)

by Kym, guest writer

My first bout of anorexia came when I was 30.

I grew up being underweight; I believe I didn't get enough nutritional foods, but it had more to do with my parents income than emotional or compulsive behaviors. Starting at the age of 22 , gaining weight hasn't been a problem. Having food available and never having had to learn to restrain my eating, I found myself moving up and up the scale until I reach the “obese” level by the age of 25. 

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Mature Women: Issues After Eating Disorder Recovery

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Category: Psychotherapy and Recovery Work

(To mature women: Regardless of your age, size, shape, color, mental or physical health or political situation, the glorious free and visionary you is always alive within you.)

A mature woman, decades after eating disorder recovery, may live a life fraught with relationship, career and self-esteem difficulties. You are no longer starving, binging or purging, but you still suffer from painful issues in your life, particularly self-doubt.

If you went through effective psychotherapy you found your way to ending your eating disorder behaviors. As a mature woman today, maybe you rarely think of those starving, binging, food obsessed days and nights. Yet underlying psychic structures of the eating disorder can still be present, ready to spring into action when you are threatened by more than you can bear or allow yourself to see or know. 

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Panic Attack Can be Part of Your Eating Disorder Experience

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Category: Symptoms

An OMG panic attack experience gives you more information about what's happening to you than the numbness an eating disorder provides.

 "The Panic Attack Symptoms Nobody Talks About" by Rachel Gearinger is a short, well written and candid article that may have powerful significance if you have or had an eating disorder.

Eating disorders can create a psychological numbness that dulls your senses and, for a short time, relieves panic. But you don't feel relief. You feel nothing.That dullness or numbness could be a form of depersonalization and/or derealization, a little discussed aspect of panic.

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Bias confessions of a psychotherapist: overeating recovery

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Category: Psychotherapy and Recovery Work

Bias Clarity and the Therapeutic Alliance 

Bias in psychotherapy needs to be on the table. This is critical for a cooperative alliance between client and psychotherapist.

With or without an eating disorder, we all live our lives based on our agendas with our values and perceived survival needs leading the way. If we balance our emotions and stress levels with overeating we will get short term benefits. If we let overeating continue to balance our tolerance for stress we move into isolation, self-criticism and loneliness break our own hearts and can't save ourselves from our pain.