A Discussion About Rule 62

An open letter to men in recovery: stop using “Rule 62” to dismiss women, comorbidity and intersectionality.

To ring in 2020, I spent New Year’s Eve with my friends who are sober–most if not all of whom are qualifying members of Alcoholics Anonymous (I am not; however, I understand the fellowship and framework quite well).

I was discussing sobriety with a man I had just met upon walking in the door to my good friends’ house on the water on the south shore of Long Island–the designated gathering place for 50+ sober people at any given time on a holiday such as July 4th, MDW, and this year, NYE.

I mentioned the unfortunate lack of consideration for folks with eating disorders like myself in the program of AA–especially considering that so many women (approximately 50%) experience comorbid symptoms of eating disorders and substance abuse including alcoholism.

The man in question simply said, “Rule 62,” and looked at me blankly.

Rule 62. 

Don’t take yourself so damn seriously. 

Rule 62, for those unfamiliar, is a rule that has found its way into recovery circles as unspoken tradition.

The backstory, from what I understand, has to do with tradition four (“Each group should be autonomous except in matters affecting other groups or A.A./E.D.A/whateverA as a whole.”) in anonymous programs, which discusses the  idea that individual meeting groups can operate on their own volition without involving or compromising the integrity of the fellowship as a whole.

When AA was expanding, a group attempted to be “all things to all people”–they resolved to take care of meetings, residential treatment, and other facets of recovery life all under one roof–and realized that their goal was way bigger than they could manage in the context of the AA program.

This group came up with 61 rules and sent them to AA as a manifesto or proclamation for beginning their ambitious program. Then, they realized just how daunting a task it would be to take care of every single person’s needs in the realm of addiction treatment–and before scrapping the idea, they came up with rule 62. 

So, what about it? 

Last week, I read a really powerful and thought-provoking opinion piece in the New York Times about the patriarchal foundations and history of AA as an organization. We all know the names Bill W. and Dr. Bob, two men who were alive during the first world war and became alcoholics due to a perceived spiritual malady that they believed had to do with an inflated ego and sense of self, as well as a lack of presence of a higher power in their lives. They were their own higher power for the duration of their relationship with alcohol and drinking–which, as the NYT article suggests, is the essence of white male privilege. 

They sought to recover from this sense of ego, but did it also heal their harmfully separatist sense of rigid gender roles and toxic masculinity?

Alcoholics Anonymous itself has, seemingly ironically tried to be all things to all people; opening itself to women, people of color, people with doctorates, average folks, and everyone in-between, but how can it do that if it still holds itself in the principles, practices and ideas of a world that was designed by and for white men? How can a fellowship with such a marginal number of women attending compared to men even say that “anyone can do it” if they have the capacity to be honest? 

The problem is, this claim is dishonest in and of itself.

Rule 62 was meant to be an ego-check on a group of alcoholics who thought (mistakenly) that their individual group’s program could be a one-stop shop for recovery. When they failed, they wrote this rule as a way of softening the ways that their ambitious and admirable mission had not gone to plan. Well intentioned? Maybe.

In this conversation in my friend’s kitchen, Rule 62 was used to dismiss my very real concern about the harm still being done to people like me in the rooms who are not having their eating disorders addressed–a problem backed by statistics, as I shared before.

I know, I know. If AA were to take on eating disorders too, they wouldn’t really be AA anymore. But this is 2020; and we really need to start accounting for the more than half of the fellowship that needs access to a safe place to express the comorbidity of their alcoholism with other issues like disordered eating and, in the case of my region, opioid abuse. By not being sensitive to issues that clearly and empirically intersect with the problem of alcoholism, there is an imminent danger of making full recovery inaccessible to so many members and potential members.

“At least you’re not drinking” (I hear this one a lot, too!) isn’t good enough anymore. Eating disorders have an unbelievably high mortality rate, especially anorexia nervosa. And I’d venture to say that MOST eating disordered alcoholics can relate to the feeling that alcohol sets off their ED, and vice versa. This is serious.

Food is available at tons of AA meetings without supporting the people for whom food might be a trigger. With over 50 percent of addicts and alcoholics also having an ED–it seems a little insensitive not to address this, and to tell those who are authentically worried about it “not to take themselves so damn seriously.” 

It’s not really a coincidence or an accident that this “rule” is probably most often bestowed upon women, as it was done unto me.

Having an ego and unwarrantedly flaunting your ability to quote a book that is, dare I say, just as fallible and subjective as we all are is…confusing, and honestly, a form of gaslighting imo.

Women don’t need to be powerless, and we don’t need to be told not to take ourselves so seriously. The world outside of those church basements and sober gatherings already does that to and for us. 

Now, I know that this individual’s use and interpretation of Rule 62–like the fallible interpretations of a lot of things in AA and other anonymous groups–speak to the person, not to the fellowship as a whole, hence, the fourth tradition. Hell, Rule 62 was created so that a bunch of people who created a plan and failed, like any human might do, could laugh at themselves and not be bummed that they hadn’t succeeded. We all need a little of that in our lives, certainly.

But I wonder how many times this rule has also been used to drive women into silence about the things that bother them about the world that they live in; things happening inside and outside the rooms. Because the fact is, we absolutely need more power in the world at large and in the daily context of our lives, not less.

And that’s not going to come to us when we are told that the realities of the things we face–pay gaps, the motherhood tax, harassment, assault, violence, dismissal, diet culture, body shame, objectification, legislation made against and about our bodies, repeated interpersonal abuse and marginalization–aren’t serious, problematic or important enough for the men who claim to be united in recovery with us (while, might I add, segregating themselves OFTEN) to take seriously.

I’m a member of a recovery fellowship that isn’t AA, but since AA laid that foundation, I’m addressing it directly, I guess. Any if not all of my closest friends are members of AA. Some of them may cheer me on for saying this, and some might not. That’s okay. However, if anonymous recovery groups, and recovery as a whole, isn’t the same boys club that it says it “used” to be, I’m going to need some of the recovering men I see, know, and love, to start proving that. In fact, I demand it, because (gasp!) I take myself seriously. Out of nothing more than self-respect.

 

Revolutions Need Bodies/A Pride Guide for Everyone!!!

This post has been sitting in my drafts for the past few months, because I thought it would be super important to talk about the embodied practice of revolution.

What better time to do so than pride month?

I’ve been reflecting a lot on what I know about embodiment lately, and I feel like this perfectly goes with the idea of pride month and everything I feel about celebrating Pride as we do.

Micah Banzant

A little queer history: On June 28, 1969, Marsha P. Johnson threw a brick at a NYPD police officer at a bar that was frequented by many gay, lesbian, bi and trans folks. The Stonewall Inn was one of the only places in NYC where LGBTQ+ people were left alone to be themselves, as homosexuality was against the law in New York City at the time.

Mafia families controlled bars and paid police to stay away so that they could make a profit. They sold their bottom shelf liquor at top shelf prices, knowing that queer folks had nowhere else to go to socialize.

On June 28th, the NYPD raided the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village.

The Stonewall Riots gave us NYC (and other nationwide celebrations) of “Pride”. 

But so many people forget this history.

 

 

The revolution that is PRIDE was built on the bodies of trans women of color, cis gay men, black lesbians, and continues to be built on fat peoples’ bodies, queer peoples’ bodies, and trans bodies, too. Some of these bodies share multiple marginalization. But the true shifts from tolerance to acceptance, from marginal to normalization, would not exist without them. Without us. 

It is because of Marsha and Silvia Rivera and so many other important and beautiful people that we have entered a new era of civil rights. And this revolution continues to build. As Marilyn Wann says in the foreword to the Fat Studies Reader: “If we cannot feel at home in our own skins, where else are we supposed to go?”

 

@transtastic (DeviantArt)

 

I experience it on a daily basis, in my relationship with my partner, and incidentally, in my relationship with myself and my body. To be queer is to act outside of normative structure. To be fat is to act outside of normative structure.

It’s worth acknowledging that with my marginalization, comes also my privilege. I am white, able bodied, a citizen, middle-class by birth, and these are things that not every queer or fat person shares with me.

We must not forget, during a month that is about equality, that there still are ways in which we are not all equal. 

 

Starting with Pride celebrations themselves.

As I stated in my history lesson earlier, Pride was born out of a mass resistance by LGBTQ people to no longer be policed and to resist the idea of only being able to socialize through active drug and alcohol culture.

Yet today, Pride itself often serves as a space for queer folks and their straight ally friends to get buzzed on the LIRR and go to Cubbyhole or Phoenix after the parade ends. This closes out the festivities to a lot of people in the LGBTQQIPPA+ community, those in recovery from substance abuse in particular.

It goes without saying, many people in the queer community become addicts in the first place because of homophobia, stigma, shame and self-hate; things that nobody deserves to feel, or should have to bury in an addiction.

Another reason I’ve come to reconsider pride as an “inclusive” space is the corporatization of the parade itself in the past couple of years. It’s become a space for banks and companies to give away rainbow stuff with their logo on it and pledge their support for one day of the year, while either implicitly or explicitly also reinforcing discriminatory hiring practices against queer and trans bodies.

Corporations made up 36% of San Diego Pride in 2016, while actual LGBTQ+ people only made up 26%. Many of the companies at pride festivals also exist in states where it’s legal to fire someone because of their orientation or gender identity. In other words, they’re proud to take your money, gay people, just don’t come out at work. 

The protest space itself is not disability accessible; for so many reasons. For folks with anxiety or autism, it can be extremely loud and overstimulating. For physically disabled folks, crowds aren’t known for being wheelchair friendly or generally accessible. Especially when the crowds are upwards of a few thousand people per city block.

And on an election year, expect candidates to be canvassing and shamelessly self-promoting.

And if you’re going to go to pride as a straight person, please be respectful of us. We are not your token gay friends, this day isn’t about how great an ally you are. Like, at all. 

IMPORTANT!!!! make sure you keep your hands to yourself. There is nothing more obnoxious than touching marchers or parade attendees without their consent, commodifying their identity. Don’t be Perez Hilton and go all “I can objectify women and harass them because *haha* I’m not attracted to them!”…just because you wouldn’t sleep with someone doesn’t make it funny that you’re potentially making them uncomfortable.

 

Elias Ericson

 

Let fat people be fat! I adore and love and cherish fat queer bodies. They belong there in that space as much as thin privileged folks do, and y’all best make room for them–no objectification, grumbling, rudeness, side eye, or marginalization or heckling allowed. Fat people exist and they are loved and they are welcome. And they’re not in queer relationships because they “couldn’t get a man/woman/other implied heteronormative relationship situation to love them”. Fatness isn’t a condition. But queer fat love is an act of liberation, and that’s what this entire month (and for some of us, every day life) is about.

In her essay “Fattening Queer History”, Elena Levy-Navarro defines her definition of “queer” outside of the spectrum of human sexuality and love, and into the realm of “other.” She discusses a queerness that “is ore expressly inclusive of all who challenge normatively, including fat people.” She argues the point that while the LGBTQ+ community struggles to be integrated and accepted in society, they may also perpetuate fatphobia in their communal spaces, which are supposed to be about love and justice. While researching pride flags for people to be aware of for this month, I came across a ‘fat fetish’ flag and I was appalled because this is exactly the problem. Fat bodies are squished into convenient narrative boxes, selectively assigned sexuality (based largely on “acceptable fatness” and the “pretty face” pejorative). But to the rest of the world, fat people, particularly fat queer people, are of otherwise no use, no worth, and no value in and across social contexts. And the LGBTQ+ community cannot continue to prop up this kind of commodification rhetoric–we must get rid of the in-house “othering” of bodies in our community as a whole.

Navarro argues for a “historical turn” in queer history, such that we reflect back on the past to look at the bodies of people involved in LGBTQ+ Liberation movements and honor them for their size, shape, assigned sex at birth, expression, gender identity, and the work that those bodies did to get us here.

Fat people experience the same kind of ignorance-based discrimination from the health care system, and are seen as “undesirables” lacking in reproductive ability (as many people view LGBTQ folks), thus rendered unimportant to the medical community. Western medicine hyper focuses on creating a “before” and “after” picture of a fat body, as if there is something assimilationist that is required to be accepted as a fat person, as is the case as a queer person.

This is, after all, the month when we hear slogans like “love is love” and the heterohistorical contextualizers of our society give a lot of effort and lip service to orienting queer people into a space that is heteronormative, using heteronormativity as the reference point. These attitudes and behaviors are the same ones that ask the question, “So which one of you is the _____?” (insert binary gender here), which completely misses the point that queer relationships are intentionally made up of differently gendered individuals. 

These revolutions need ALL bodies to be there. LGBTQQIPPA people are worthy of respect and if you aren’t a member of our community, remember that we are inviting you into our home, and trying to mitigate the injustice that has been done unto our bodies. 

 

 

Marriage equality and pride parades are great but they are still such small steps. Basic dignity, representation, and a movement away from only the “acceptable” queer relationships being visible (i.e. trans relationships, trans representation, fat queer/trans relationships), comprehensive inclusive healthcare, job security, and legal personhood recognition are only just some of the things we still need.

Right now, the basic essence of what it is to be trans is still listed as a disorder in the DSM, the same way that fat phobia is still seen as best practice in medicine. If we want to be liberated, we have to recognize all of these things simultaneously, and combat them simultaneously–and it takes more than a parade and a month of recognition to do just that.

For some of us, pride month is still inaccessible because it’s not safe to be out to our families or our work spaces. This prevents people from living congruent lives, being the same person in all spaces and at all times, and thus, from living with complete integrity. When we are forced to live a dishonest life, one mired in shame, our bodies break down. And these revolutions in social, societal and global change desperately need our bodies to be there, to show up, and to represent everyone.

Nobody should be expected to live from the neck up; only acknowledging their thoughts as a function of what makes them different. Our bodies are the center of how we live, what we do, who we are, and they deserve to be given space and acknowledged and loved. Our bodies should be seen, celebrated, and acknowledged for how they are gloriously, beautifully different!

Happy pride!

PS watch this music video it is everything 

When Accessibility Doesn’t Come in Your Size

I’m so excited to be co-authoring this week’s post with the awesome body positive mental health advocate, fellow content creator and recovery warrior Lexie Manion!

One of her Instagram posts about being in a larger body and not fitting into a lot of the spaces that thin people can fit into inspired me to ask her to co-write this post with me. We’ll share our experiences about spatially exclusive items that thin people, for the most part, use every day without a problem.

 

https://www.instagram.com/p/BfXZAsLhzbr/?hl=en&taken-by=lexiemanion

 

The idea that there are certain everyday items, places, arrangements, and accommodations (publicly accessible things) that are not even a second thought for thin people is one of the many examples of thin privilege.

In its most basic form, thin privilege is used to describe how thin people in society are commonly accepted — even celebrated. Thin people have the upper hand in many everyday parts of life, including physically and metaphorically fitting in with ease, having no issues shopping for clothes, eating food without being questioned, “are you sure you want to eat that much?” 

There’s this fallacy that gluttony and laziness are the true problems that make fat people fat, which is so far from the truth.  Unintentional weight gain or weight distribution throughout the body can be caused by aging, medications, physical illness, mental illness, and what Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch call our individual “genetic blueprint. (Intuitive Eating Principle #8).

It’s a shame the general public denies that many fat people are actually fat because of circumstances beyond their control, and that diet programs are one of the only products in our consumer market that blame the user for a receiving a defective item.

It’s worth saying that in our diet culture, not every fat person wants to lose weight. Each person’s health and wellness is their own. I (Lexie) personally can not recall anytime I’ve heard a fat person shame a (thin) person who smokes or drinks excessively.

Correcting other people’s behaviors or assumptions about their behaviors, especially strangers, can never be justified because it’s rude, unnecessary and counterproductive. Meeting a perceived problem with judgmental eyes will never help.

It’s also worth saying that the fat acceptance movement isn’t going around demanding that every single person be fat or live in a larger body–but that society at large is demanding that everyone be thin, fit, eat “clean” (ugh), and have a certain ideal body type that requires taking up less space. The fat acceptance movement is the thinspo, fitspo and thin privilege clapback, not a demand to standardize fatness.

And when we discuss thin privilege in the Body Positive community, it echoes the similarities of other unearned privileges of identity such as white privilege, able-bodied privilege and heterosexism. Admitting that we have this privilege isn’t a bad thing either (another fallacy). Lexie–a white and able-bodied person; Cait–a white and able-bodied cis person; Stating our privileges is acknowledgement that while we are all created equally, not all bodies are created–or socially treated–equally. Racism, sexism, ableism and fat discrimination are all very alive and well in our world.

 

The same message is spread when fat people can’t access certain things in public spaces, or even in private spaces, that affirm their bodies and make them feel like they belong there. Let’s take a look at some examples:

Straight Size Clothing

Lexie: I am a huge Demi Lovato fan and was checking out her merch for her past tour a couple months ago. Sadly, her store doesn’t even accommodate to my XXXL/XXXXL size. What irked me though is that a fan could buy an XXL shirt, but there is a catch. We all know that singers and celebrities over-charge for their merch already (because they can because the fans are so loyal!). So, get this: for $34.95, plus an additional $2.95 (shipping not included), you can be the proud owner of a Demi Lovato shirt (if you can fit into an XXL, of course)!

Cait: This interests me to hear about Demi’s clothes and merch, considering she is a person in recovery. That brings me to another issue: the idea that bigger bodies aren’t the ones with “real, medical eating disorders” and that we all just lack willpower and self control and that that somehow makes us less of a person.

At almost every store I go to, there is a plus size ‘section’ full of maybe an area of clothes that fit me that’s no more than double the size of my bedroom. And everything that fits plus size women like me is always in an irrationally unfashionable assortment of animal print. As someone whose style leans more toward the fat version of Janis Joplin, I don’t want to look like a bloated cheetah or a zebra or Sylvia Fine from The Nanny. And I most certainly don’t want to be charged more for it.

 

Transportation

Cait: I haven’t been on an airplane in a couple of years, but I’ve heard so many stories from women who are larger than me about being charged for needing to buy two seats on a plane just to be able to travel. For a lot of people, this extra money is a hardship; and it’s unfair that a person has to have more money to take up more space. This has become a phenomenon by passenger rights advocates known as the “fat tax.” (read more from this BBC article).

Trains are different, though. I see a lot of weirdness on the LIRR as a native Long Islander. For instance, there are fold-down seats for folks who have disabilities and their caregivers so that they can access the train and get on and off without a hassle–fitting their wheelchairs if need be. Plenty of able-bodied people occupy these spaces when there are no room in the standard seats provided. I’ve seen people get really perturbed about having to sit next to a fat person on the train, because the amount of space they take up is met with judgment--but the same level of annoyance doesn’t get expressed for thin people who put their bag next to them on a seat or who do things that are just not generally so courteous. Fatphobia runs rampant in public spaces; and it boils down to simply prejudice.

 Academia

In a recent Food Psych podcast episode that Christy Harrison did with activist (almost) Dr. Joy Cox, she discusses the idea that desks and seating arrangements in higher education–and for that matter, secondary and public education–aren’t accessible for large bodied people. 

Fat studies and health at every size has also barely entered the realm of academic discourse as a branch of social justice/sociology/studying discrimination. Joy talks a lot about how weight is not yet a federally protected class and how this ideology spills over from the idea that weight and body size fully function as a choice. 

I (Cait) having sat through six years of higher education and having a semester to go on my Masters, have never truly, totally embodied this problem, as I was often small enough or “just fat enough” to be able to fit. But what happens when we add arms and non-movable desks to seating in academia, where fat bodies can’t fit in the space between? We close out academic access to fat people and perpetuate their lack of access to education. And denying someone access to education is one of the many systemic realities of discrimination. 

Fat people aren’t any less able to learn or get degrees because they are somehow less competent, smart or capable–they are locked out because they literally don’t fit in.

As a teacher, access to information, good professors, life-changing classes and academic discourse means THE WORLD to me. I don’t know what I would have done without one of the last classes of my undergraduate program, entitled Feminist Pedagogies. In this class, though it wasn’t pertinent to me yet, we did touch SO MUCH on embodiment and the idea of education as a visceral process; one that fat people aren’t entitled to until they conform to yet another standard of cisnormative, heteronormative white classist privileged education systems in America. And luckily, we sat at tables with armless chairs; so the space itself was fat friendly, but I can’t say the same for all the learning spaces in either my undergraduate or graduate work institutions.

In order to combat this, we HAVE to include weight and body size in collegiate and academic rhetoric about diversity. Because discrimination against people of size is too real and too widely unnoticed. And in colleges across America where students are learning the value of multiculturalism and diversity, fat people are locked out or expected to change yet again.

Yoga

Lexie: As someone in recovery from an eating disorder, I was introduced to the yoga world early on; the treatment centers I went to offered a class here or there during the day. While there is no obvious size or weight limit to practice yoga or stand on a yoga mat, it’s very apparent that much of the yoga world seems to accept only thin women into their practice.

I know as a plus size woman that I can’t do every single pose perfectly (or at all), and thankfully there are modifications for fat people or people with injuries, people with mobility issues so they can more comfortably get into the position. However, fat shaming can easily carry into a yoga class consisting of one instructor and several other members.

 

https://www.instagram.com/p/BhnOmt_BUNu/

Fat people can feel out of place in yoga classes, especially if the instructor calls attention to it by showing the fat person additional support with or without their consent.

Cait: The criticism of yoga as an increasingly problematic space for body diversity is nothing new. In fact, it goes beyond the scope of fat and differently abled bodies.

Like Lexie, I gained weight and changed body shape in my recovery, which has kept me from accessing the poses I could once do when I was stronger, leaner, but also sicker. I was never able to do crow, but could do a pretty kick ass shoulder stand. And while I’m working on it and my rolls often get in the way, I sometimes have to stop my dysmorphia from beating me up about taking modifications. Yoga, or unity in Sanskrit, is about the process.

Yogis like Dianne Bondy and Jessamyn Stanley have talked extensively about the thin ideal that permeates a lot of yoga practices. Yoga for fitness (ugh) has become increasingly popular among thin, suburban white women, and it dilutes the spiritual practice that is the entire point of yoga in the first place. Yoga’s original intention was to help Buddhists, Hindus and the dozens of other meditating Eastern religions to be able to sit and meditate for longer periods of time. I am a regular yogi, a practicing Buddhist, and lover of yoga–but I am also an exercise bulimic and a recovering perfectionist.

View this post on Instagram

Down dog, 🐶half pigeon 🐦 and shoulder stand 💪🏻 shoulder stands are a "skinny girl pose" in the world of co-opted yoga. They make your shirt fly up and your pudge stick out (in my case, full belly hangin out), and feel like your own weight will topple you over. They've become more challenging as my body has put weight on, distributed it and made me more torso-dense. But it's one of my absolute favorites and I still do it. Yoga's eight limbs are a way of life; thus, a practice. Today I listened to @krystalslusciouslife verbalize the meaning of "ahimsa" – nonviolence – as nonviolence against the self. I was sweaty and started getting frustrated by my third vinyasa, but it's no excuse to give up. I found joy when I found yoga, and I have to get back to the core values that allow me to practice self-compassion and spiritual health. This body can do most anything and I'm so so grateful. #bodybyyoga #fatgirlyoga #eatingdisorderrecovery #nutritionalreorientation #healthateverysize #redefininghealthy #shoulderstand #recovery #recoverywarrior #asana #septemberselfcarechallenge #meditation

A post shared by theinbetweenqueen (@theinbetweenqueen) on Sep 14, 2017 at 2:53pm PDT

I often have to remind myself that yoga is not about weight loss or weight redistribution or calorie burning, and that when I stray from my spiritual intention in the practice itself, I am effectively engaging in cultural appropriation.

If you’re struggling to take up space in this world, or the world is struggling to make space for you, demand it. So many movements have been successful in our culture to bring marginalized people into the forefront by them simply demanding space, and resisting the idea of being left out because of something that made them different.

If you struggle to give fat people space, try saying the word ‘fat’ as a non-pejorative term a few times in conversation. The word may trigger some people, but that’s a great place to begin. Find out why people find it so offensive, and remove its moral meaning from the understanding that diet culture has given you about fatness. Bust down the stigma that is associated with it; and learn to just let people live their lives.

So much of what I see on the internet surrounding peoples’ discomfort with the fat acceptance movement and their willingness to only allow “acceptably fat” bodies into the body positivity sphere is exclusionary, and turns out to not be very positive for a lot of people at all.

The rest is straight up hateful. But that’s to be expected when you don’t understand something. Just look at Google:

Read books like Body Respect (which Cait recommends all the time across this blog!) and take the body respect pledge; not just for other people around you, to help you combat fat shaming and weight stigma…but turn that ish inward, too. Too often when we try really hard to learn about and accept others, we forget ourselves. 

Have a great week, y’all!

xo,

Cait & Lexie

Taking the words back

Sorry it’s been about 3 weeks since I’ve posted, y’all!

January has been a really busy month, and it’s about to make the next few months even busier. I’m in my second to last semester of graduate school, I’m working full time, and I’ve made my mental health and discipline in the practice of self-care a tremendous priority (as everyone should!) 

This past month I have had a lot of interactions with diet culture, weight stigma, and fat phobic comments and questions and situations. Before I address that (next week), I have to address the root of all the feelings that stir up when people’s comments, attitudes, projections, and investments in diet culture come about: the trigger.

‘Trigger’ has taken up a lot of space in political dialogue, thanks to human dumpster fire Tomi Lahren. It has been taken to mean “weak”, “sensitive”, but has actually been a legitimate colloquial term in the mental health community for years.

To those with mental illnesses, namely ones associated with trauma, a trigger is something that sets off their symptoms or problematic behaviors. It is the stimuli that creates a reaction that is indicative of the symptoms of one’s mental illness or disorder, such as a PTSD flashback or a panic attack or an episode of self-harm. I didn’t need to live through any experiences to know this; all it takes is a little research and a dash of compassion. 

I’ve spent the past few weeks feeling really triggered by my family’s weight biased comments, grappling with my own internalized weight-stigma-turned-body-dysmorphia, and trying to sort through all of it with a lot of self care and a lot of patience. It can get really exhausting being hyper vigilant of the fact that your body is rendered as an object of lesser value, and it gets even more exhausting to explain to people why I am valuable as a not-thin person. 

There is also a lot of discourse around the word ‘trigger’ being associated with violence and the idea that it’s being moved away from in a lot of talk about trauma. While I see the point in this, and know that language is important to a lot of folks (myself included), to police the use of such a term among other people if it makes the most sense of them is the opposite of social justice.

For the sake of example, I am trying to avoid the generalization of the term ‘queer community’ in a lot of my social justice talk with others. Because while I identify with the term queer as a word that dislodges my personal identity from heteronormative ideals, I understand that so many people have been harmed by that word and that it is still in very many cases an antigay slur.

Similarly, there are people with a lot of investment in diet culture who have not personally reclaimed the word fat as a self-identifier, and I have, since inhabiting my fat body, been corrected for addressing my own body this way–‘fat‘ in our society is still viewed largely as pejorative, and while I get frustrated often with waiting for people in and out of the eating disordered community to play catch up, I must also remain patient and remember that fully actualized fatness is not everyone’s truth. 

Like I mentioned earlier, this constant cycle of having to defend what makes sense in order to maintain a general mental and emotional homeostasis can get really daunting and really exhausting after a while.

I am happy to explain to people what my eating disorder means on an intellectual level, and as far as the science behind my body type and the reasons for my behavior, I’m pretty well armed with the facts about what’s immediately important to me.

But being prepared for battle and always having to step in front of people and assert my boundaries around their problematic, weight stigmatizing, inconsiderate or even sometimes outright fatphobic language and behavior is not my job. There are countless resources (some of which are linked directly to this blog for allies and ED survivors alike to learn more about the varying experiences of eating disordered folks like me). 

This frustration has, in the past, graduated to becoming anger–but that’s not the tone I wish to convey in this post in particular. More than anything, I hope to urge people who don’t understand the eating disordered brain and the psychology of food fixation, perfectionism and dysmorphia to perhaps just listen to their peers, friends, family and even strangers they meet who are affected.

Understanding how to treat people with EDs, and most importantly, how to work really hard not to trigger them, is critical to our recovery and the active dismantling of the diet culture that affects all of us–fat or thin, eating disordered or not–so, so negatively. 

For eating disordered people, triggers mean anything that can spiral us into shame about our bodies, no matter what size they actually are. This shame spiral can bring an eating disordered person deep into their behaviors, whether its bingeing, restricting, purging, exercise or other forms of food compensation.

Even if those behaviors make no logical sense, our brains are wired to do them to keep up with a mental image of perfection and to avoid discomfort. My go-to behavior has always been bingeing, and even though I know that bingeing is often what causes dysmorphia, it is the one thing that my brain has done for so long, that it is conditioned to tell me it NEEDS it to survive so that I can be happy and safe. It is my brain’s way of protecting me from discomfort, even if I know that that discomfort is temporary, insignificant, or imagined. 

My triggers are: weight loss discourse of any kind, eating in front of certain people, eating alone, being offered food, buffet style settings, gyms, people who body check in front of me–to name most of them.

I list these not to highlight my fragility, but to highlight a specific understanding of my behavior and what goes on in my brain when I am interacting with scenarios where these behaviors play out. Too often, people don’t know what is and isn’t okay because it doesn’t get articulated, and we need to make space for that conversation to happen among ourselves with each other, whether those having the conversation are disordered in their food and body patterns or not.

Being mindful of the things we say about our own bodies and how that translates to how we feel about other peoples’ bodies is not only an act of kindness, but a step toward validating every body no matter what size, health status, or relationship to food that body has. We can all stand to lose a little negativity, be more kind to ourselves, and recognize that we as a society cannot stand for the predatory nature of diet culture anymore. I’ve said it before and I will say it again!

Somebody gets paid every time you feel shame.

It’s what convinces you to buy the newest makeup, cream, protein shake, Weight Watchers subscription. And just like in any business model, the demand only lasts so long. There’s a reason why 95% of people “fail” their diets. (People aren’t failing diets, diets are failing people).**** Not because anything’s wrong with them, but because there’s everything wrong with the industry and the idea that restriction and body hatred are sustainable practices. Resilience, self-love and radical, unapologetic acceptance is more than sustainable; its life-saving. 

---

****TW for this site: diet program ads may pop up.

Not Knowing What to Say, But Saying it Anyhow

This week’s post:

• Having to write my relapse post
• Answering the question “What can I do?”
• Fear, resentment and acceptance 
• What now? 

 

CW: Food GIFS.*****

---

 

Writing this post is like writing a breakup text, or something. It’s really hard.

What’s even harder is having to admit that this is something that’s been coming for about a month. I’ve made decisions out of denial, shame, fear, and anger–leaving very little room for prayer, acceptance, tolerance, gentleness, self-compassion and love. 

 

 

For the past month, I’ve been floating around in a sea of self-doubt, shame, uncertainty, unresolved trauma, and ultimately, fear. I’ve refused to be alone with myself, lost myself to so much service and self-sacrifice, and along the way, forgot to self-care and self-love. I worked too quickly, rushed my process, said yes to things I wasn’t ready to commit to. Believe it or not, there is such thing as being selfless to your own detriment. It’s a sort of pattern I have, and it always catches up with me.

In working through some really tough trauma experiences, I experimented with my own boundaries in a way that proved fatal to my own wellbeing. And as much as I want to resent the rest of the world for that, that decision began with me and ends with me. The real emotional blank spot came when I realized that I didn’t at all truly believe I deserved love; true, authentic and unconditional love–because I am  far from “normal”, because I am broken, but most of all, because I live in a fat body.

 

 

I didn’t realize the stigma that came with living in a fat body until I lived in one myself. This sounds so unbelievably ignorant, especially because I can account for a working understanding of other oppressions–sexism, homophobia, and mental health stigma to name a few. But fatness is something I have been taught to fear the most, because in the dynamic that I come from, fat is seen as the worst thing that can happen to a person. 

However, as I’ve come to define and understand privilege, it is essentially the idea of not having to think about existing as a marginalized person. There are micro aggressions I don’t have to think about with regard to my race, gender identity, or straight-passing; But the fear of becoming and of being a fat person is a fear that I have been taught to see as the biggest threat to my own existence. I think this is true for all of us; fatness is a thing that can happen to anyone; so as a collective society, we vehemently reject it and try to situate ourselves as far from it as possible. These types of attitudes call me to declare war on myself, and it creates a sense of lingering self-hatred I don’t know what to do with. The kind of attitude that leads to extended periods of body dysmorphia, and ultimately, to relapse. 

At present, I have a lot more clothes that don’t fit me than clothes that do (triggering), I live and work with the food and exercise police (really triggering).

 

Fat phobia is real and it is pervasive and it is unacceptable. Truthfully, when I was restricting (netting 700 calories per day) between ages 12-15, I was never, not even once, regarded as sick. But now that I am “fat,” I am viewed as someone who has simply just “stopped caring” about her appearance, stopped trying. In “existing while fat”, I am not entitled to an “eating disorder”; I am merely regarded by diet culture as lazy, insecure, unhealthy, and lacking self-esteem.

And in a sense, this outsider appraisal of my appearance with respect to my behavior is somewhat spot on.

I have stopped caring about diet culture, stopped caring what the scale says, stopped measuring, counting, obsessing, stopped prioritizing thinness over compassion. I have given up on spending 95% of my time trying to manipulate my own body to look like someone else’s. This is recovery, right? 

 

 

I’d like to say yes–because those are steps in the unlearning process that I have taken in full stride. For instance, I no longer exercise for exercise, but for movement. I no longer count calories and I eat what I want to when I want/need to. But as I have done so, I have changed my body shape; but having always been a “normal weight” even in my most disordered behavior patterns, I’ve never had to contend with the thin ideal from a body that opposes the thin ideal in every way imaginable. 

I’ve ditched the diet sh*t, but not the internalized fat phobic body shaming self-hatred that comes with existing in a society that values and privileges thinness above all body types. This, for me, has created more dysmorphia than I ever remember experiencing, even when I was restricting or bingeing the most. I still struggle with exercise aversion, eating in front of my family, hiding food, and saying no to food just because it’s there. This relapse has been one big emotional bottom, with all those behaviors occurring intermittently between.

 

 

In seventeen months in recovery up to this point, I didn’t fully unlearn or overcome the perfectionism that I used to protect myself from the world for such a long time. From behind these walls, I came to believe that everyone deserved love and credit and compassion–everyone except me. 

But now I’m trying really hard to learn to be gentler with myself, to take care of my basic needs and first things first. This is going to come with being more thorough and honest than I’ve been since these patterns presented themselves, since I deemed them acceptable. They are no longer acceptable, and are creating so much unmanageability in my life that I cannot see my own worth, cannot access balance. And I’ve been healing through life long enough to know that that’s not living. 

The one thing I can’t seem to straighten out is that when I make the admission of relapse and people ask me “What can I do?” “What can I do to support you?” I don’t have an answer for them straight away. I have so much love in my life right now that got harder to see when I was struggling. I just know now that I want to get unstuck, and learn different. I want to do better. And that begins with taking responsibility for myself because nobody else can. 

I just want to say thank you to all the people who have been there for me so far for this past week, for these past few months, and for all the support coming to me. I know I can do this, and that I will. I appreciate and love every single person who reads what I have to say, and lets me share my journey with the world. It’s all part of the process. 

Much love,

Cait

---

Link for Loved ones:

“Slips, Lapses, and Relapses” (NEDA). https://www.nationaleatingdisorders.org/slips-lapses-and-relapses

Calling Others Into Your Recovery (Instead of calling them out)

Anger is the easiest emotion to default to, just as defense is the first act of war. 

In active ED behaviors, I have called people out for anything you could think of, and I’ve done it often. In recovery, I have, too. But the effort taken in calling people out, singling out their ignorance of my experience and the experiences of so many with eating disorders and other illnesses or marginalized experiences, only serves to distance them from understanding and distance me from living out recovery the way I know I need to.

I have, instead, taken to calling people in. 

My first interaction with the idea of calling people in instead of calling them out is from writer Ngọc Loan Trần’s post on the subject. They speak on this with regard to race and social justice, and though it was written four years ago, its something that so many of us could use right now in the wake of what’s happening in Charlottesville.

One thing I have always maintained in my recovery is that sometimes, people don’t understand that they don’t understand. They don’t understand body dysmorphia, compensatory purging behaviors, or the effect that diet culture has on those who already struggle really hard to live inside their bodies every waking second of every day. 

They don’t understand what their words mean.

This past week, someone on my Facebook friends list posted about cutting out carbs entirely and asked for advice on the subject of how to address a nutritional problem of eating too much bread and not drinking enough water. I let her know, based on my knowledge of the deficit mode our brains enter into when we cut out or restrict foods, that she could actually send her body into starvation mode so that it would only just hold onto whatever water she did intake. Healthy discussion, balance oriented, just like my recovery has been since I started really living it out.

But then someone from her family comments, “Love yourself as is!!! Its not like you’re obese or fat.”

Anger became my default emotion. I called her OUT. 

This attitude of “at least you don’t look like THAT” is so pervasive in our culture and society, and it took me stepping waaaaaay back into my own understanding of how I still interact with my body from a perspective I learned to accept rather than formulating on my own.

Since this interaction, I have had to remember a few important things:

1. Weight gain can happen to just about anyone. The problem is that we have assigned meaning to it. And we have been trained by diet culture and the thin ideal to be scared sh*tless of this possibility. In a meditation class I co-taught this week, my colleague responded to someone’s question, “How do you not ever get angry?” (he is also a fellow Buddhist, and a more seasoned one than me) with:

“I have learned to practice not allowing the person to disrespect me. Because someone could curse the hell out of me and if I give it meaning, then I will become angry.

Again: weight gain can happen to just about anyone. But we have been conditioned to believe that weight gain or going up in size actually means something. We surrender our power to this idea, we live and breathe it, we exercise around it. Industries and idealizations create doubt that puts us in a position to worship the idea of never gaining weight. 

2. Every time we hate ourselves, someone makes money. Literally. Fad diets, cosmetic products, weight loss commercials, the (pseudo)pharmaceutical industry, corporate executives and more–they all profit from our self-doubt, facilitate our self-hatred. But only for as long as we allow them.

3. When we are consumed with ourselves, we forget what’s going on in the world. And the big guys I mentioned in number two like it that way. We fill their pockets while they systemically marginalize entire communities. While wars are going on. Diet culture and obsession with weight, food and body distracts us from what’s important–calling each other in, healing, and helping the world do better.

Instead of fighting someone I didn’t know, had never met, who was probably suffering in some way from their own self-perception, too, I could have been educating folks about what’s happening, sharing and signing petitions to heal our broken justice system, or offering support and love and acknowledgement to people of color who are hurt directly every day by the systemic ideologies that create incidents of racial hatred and bias. This would have been a better use of my time.

In my recovery I have learned through exploration of faith and the practice of Buddhist ideas that I personally do not get to decide who deserves my compassion or kindness. Kindness withheld is the ego flourishing. I’m not saying that anger and compassion cannot coexist, they most certainly can. Desmond Tutu said it himself: we have every right to hate people and institutions that do hateful things. But I am no longer a subject of my own hatred, and neither are those who just don’t get it.

I am personally responsible for breaking down diet culture by teaching other people how to treat me, how to show people of size and shape and color and different ability that they are lovable RIGHT NOW, not -40 pounds from now, or lighter skin than now, or two more miles from now, but right now and always all the time. I am responsible for the people who don’t “get” what an eating disorder looks or feels or sounds or acts like, and I’m looking forward to educating them. 

I used to get angry about it; I still get angry that people fat shame and are so adamant that people with different bodies, especially female bodies (thanks misogyny!) deserve more or less love, respect and overall consideration from the world until they “fix” something about themselves. It’s personal.

 

Calling in is also personal. It’s a big action. It requires setting aside the ego and seeing other people as human: capable of mistakes, flawed ideologies, fundamental brokenness, or straight up indoctrination. It invites them into our already really messy spaces to sometimes make even more of a mess. If we are willing to reckon with their missing pieces and fill them in with our stories, there is room for growth everywhere. This is the work of healing. This is calling each other in.

These are somebody’s expectations, and other people’s expectations are not our problem. But liberating people who are still struggling with the idea that they can’t love themselves now, is where the calling in comes in handy. Invite people to stop participating in their own body negativity, and they’ll start seeing you differently too. We’re all warriors; some of us just haven’t picked up the sword. 

 

---

Connect with me! (I’m going on vacation and I’ll still be answering emails just maybe not as frequently but I still love you!!! Promise!!!!)

Instagram: @caitisrecovering

Twitter: @caitsrecovering

Email: caitisrecovering@gmail.com