Fear of Letting Go of our Eating Issues

It is only with the gift of hindsight that I can put into words the overwhelming and all-consuming fear that was mine decades ago when my life was full of bulimia and binge eating.

To even consider letting go of these eating disorders would have me frozen to the spot, immobilized, unable to move forward or even sideways, so much so that backwards always looked like a good option.

Looking back is easy now and I can clearly see that at the time I was stuck in a difficult place.  I do believe that wherever we are, is where we’re meant to be.  Even if it seems incredibly emotionally painful, even if it doesn’t make any sense, even if we say we hate every minute of it and wish it was over, all the while, silently hoping for a miracle to land on our doorstep – (yesterday would have been good!)

When we have developed certain “disordered” patterns of eating, exercising and thinking, the path we’re on seems to be the safest one for us.  It’s what we know and trust.  The behaviours themselves may be extremely destructive, but they’re ours.  We know them inside out and no-one is going to take them away from us.

Even when we reach a stage where we have an awareness of the damage we may be causing to ourselves, to our health and to our self-esteem, no one can take our habits away from us.  We can decide to let go, but the choice must come from us.

Another big fear many of us have if we are living with eating issues is “Who am I without this?”

We humans like to be very comfortable and in control with our habits because they are so predictable, unlike our lives, which are so unpredictable and we have so little control over.

Keeping our eating issues in place takes up an enormous amount of time and energy.  If we didn’t perform all our daily rituals, what would we do?

There would be a huge void to fill and big empty spaces of time to get lost in.

I never used to consider that life without an eating disorder could be better than life with one.  I was always looking for some kind of guarantee before I could make any changes.  Because as many of us are aware, real change is hard work!  A defeated attitude means we think we have to compromise and give something up if we’re going to change and a belief that it won’t be worth it because we won’t get anything in return.  And who would be willing to do that?  Not me.

“Show me the proof that everything will turn out okay and I’ll consider committing myself to a plan to improve my situation” was my attitude back in the ED years.

I remember the fears and the energy I put into resistance and the fight I put up to prevent change ever happening – that was probably the most destructive influence, because it kept the whole cycle in place and had me feeling too scared to move a muscle.

When it’s your time to move on and your mind has been made up that you won’t stand your former life for one extra minute, any fear of change will be just that, a fear.  It could be a Fear of the Fear if it feels overwhelming.  And inevitable obstacles will come our way on our new paths, and we can experiment with new ways to overcome these obstacles, maybe instead, seeing them as odd, yet interesting stepping stones on the road to recovery.

We will simply be searching for another way to get past them, through them, or over them, rather than allowing our fears to run our lives and run us over.

Our new motto for our fears could be: Face Everything And Recover, and we could let go and have a ceremonial goodbye to the other version of the kind of fear that usually controlled our lives, which was F*ck Everything And Run.

We get to choose which one we embrace.

How’s that for choice?