It takes many steps and blunders before we reach the first step to deep healing and real recovery.

We can be in pain because we’ve lost a person or an object dear to us. We can be frightened or humiliated because our longed-for plans and expectations have crashed around us. We cry, blame others and blame ourselves. We rail at the injustice around us.

But mostly, we are bewildered and thrashing blindly. Hopefully, we are not reaching for food, drugs, alcohol, dangerous relationships, and risk-taking to escape our bewilderment.

Eventually, our bewilderment is so thorough that we feel forced to ask for help. Even then, we ask for help to get our world in order, to stop pain, and to regain or recreate what we have lost.

Through the course of my forty years as a psychotherapist, I have heard this question from my adult eating disorder patients. Whether they are in their thirties, forties, fifties or sixties, they ask, “Aren’t I too old to resolve this eating disorder? Isn’t it too late for me to change my life?

I’m increasingly grateful for my age. My words of encouragement will not give them a believable response. But my existence as an older woman living a satisfying life does reach them. My presence gives them hope, even in their denial of hope.

But what are the details that bring about healthy change? It’s not diet and exercise. It’s not medication. It’s not a physical makeover or an affair.

An eating disorder forces a person into the body. The sensations of eating, starving, purging, exercising, and chewing on sweets or salt pull a person away from internal experiences of emotion and thought. The person plunges into raw sensation or keeps that plunge in reserve, always knowing the plunge will take her away from what she can’t bear to experience.

Choices of how she will use her time are based on the sensational needs of the body to thwart awareness. Yet she will despair over her behavior, her body and the quality of her life. She wants happiness.

Facts based on reality, not preferred reality, but actual reality, become difficult to grasp. Happiness is fleeting, sporadic and often not recognized when it occurs. Recognizing what is meaningful grounds her in reality and can provide satisfaction throughout her life.

A shelf in my office in front of a window.

Using dream analysis and guided imagery methodology, you can dialogue with your obstacles and discover opportunities. Here’s an example that gives both sides of your dilemma a voice.

Virtual psychotherapy is now the standard way of delivering services. If you've been in therapy and switched from seeing your therapist in person to seeing her online or on Facetime, you may miss the personal presence and setting. But you are grateful that your work continues with the person you trust and with whom you have developed a history.

If you are new to psychotherapy or new to the psychotherapist you are considering, what's it like to start work online? Your questions may include:

1. What's it like to be with this person?
2. How will I feel with her?
3. I get a sense of a person when I am with them. How will I get that sense over a monitor?
4. I need support and warmth. Isn't virtual psychotherapy cold?
5. How can I share intimate personal information to a stranger on a screen?
6. How can she know me if she just sees my face on a screen?
7. What happens in online psychotherapy?
8. I need help. Can this kind of therapy work?

We need our internal structure to hold, especially when we can't see ahead.

Values

We define ourselves by our personal values. We know who we are and live by our personal code. At least, that is what we convince ourselves.

But some of our values are what we wish we supported. Some of them are based on what we are told to support by respected others. And some of our values may be based on our fear of disapproval.

Shadows of the mind. Light and darkness. Active and passive. More in our depths that we can develop and use than we know.

People usually come to psychotherapy for the first time because they are in pain, bewildered and because everything they know about problem-solving no longer works for them. Going inside their psyches seems like the last option. Even then, they do not know what to expect. At first, they want to know how long it will take to fix their lives.

This is a normal response when a person is plunged into an unrecognizable world where their well-honed talents and skills do not bring desired results. They feel angry, lost, frustrated and afraid.

This slackliner achieves stability from a developed inner sense of fluid, subtle movement to maintain sustainable balance. We need that ability now.

The eating disorder system that gave you a sense of control and protection is drastically altered during this coronavirus era.

When you have an eating disorder, you have developed ways to rely on it when your feelings are too uncomfortable to bear and when disruptions in your life feel overwhelming. That’s what an eating disorder is for. It may cause havoc in your life and prevent you from developing and moving on to a more mature and satisfying existence, but it’s there for you when you want comfort and escape from what feels like too much to experience.