Unlearning Fatphobia is Your Responsibility, Full Stop

Around two years ago, I was still in graduate school, still in semi-early recovery (again), and still trying to navigate support groups and fat acceptance all at once.

As a recovery practice, I began getting comfortable with using the word ‘fat’ as a self-descriptor around in my shares at group and in conversations–until I was called out and told not to come back until I could figure out my language and how to stop saying ‘fat’ because it was triggering to others.

I understood that. I understand that for so many people, fatness is a fear, and that fear can coexist with a mental illness (like anorexia, bulimia, or body dysmorphic disorder).

But I was also grappling with the fact that societally, fat is set up to be an insult, and I was tired of that dynamic, especially in ‘recovery’ spaces. I wanted to reclaim the word and remove its pejorative use from my consciousness. So I did, in my speech, shares, and writing.

Fatphobia is insidious in virtually every corner of our culture, because it prioritizes the politics of desirability over health. This happens even in spaces that are meant for people in recovery.

Fear of fat or becoming fat is not a diagnostically supported symptom of body dysmorphia; it is a socially constructed symptom of diet culture that has trained people to value aesthetic desirability over health. Fatphobia still comes in so many forms, even in spaces that claim recovery. It sends the message that recovery from an eating disorder is possible, but only if it’s done while in a specific body.

There are still so many recovery spaces that support the sentiment that it is okay and valid to not want to look like me. These same spaces are the kinds that have historically validated the notion that “fat” is an emotion, as if it can be removed from one’s consciousness embodiment the same way that sadness or contentment pass. My body type isn’t an emotion, and I can’t just get rid of it; in fact, I spent over half my life trying to do just that…and it was called an eating disorder. 

yourfatfriend is the best ok

Nobody wanted to call it that, though, because for most of my active illness I was in a body deemed aesthetically acceptable. How I got that desirable body wasn’t investigated, it was just assumed that I must be doing something right because my body was “right.”

The endless calorie deficit spreadsheets and the six to ten times a day I would weigh myself suggest otherwise. 

I have learned and come to the conclusion that I am under no obligation to assuage thin peoples’ insecurity about the possibility of looking like me. I certainly have compassion for where they are and the ways that diet culture has manipulated them, but at the end of the day, my fat body will not be used as an example, will not shrink itself to make space for bias, and I do not and will not ever be responsible for the ways that someone’s triggers are justified at my expense.

It’s not anyone’s fault that they learned that fatness was evil, bad, immoral, lazy, or undesirable. At the exact same time, it’s not my job to soothe the deep-seated hate for my body and others like it. It’s that person’s job to unlearn, question, shift and not project what they were told about fat bodies, and theirs alone.

Fatphobia comes in the form of silencing, health concern trolling, food policing, making spaces inaccessible (and much much more), and ignoring that Health at Every Size is more than a movement; it is and has always been a well-documented and valuable scientific approach. Do not mistake Health at Every Size for HealTHY at Every Size (Thanks M for that one), because not every single body is healthy.

Thin bodies can be diabetic, have heart problems, or high blood pressure. Fat bodies can be anorexic, have osteoporosis, or be poorly nourished. No disease is exclusive to a body type. My weight alone does not guarantee that I will get sick, just like thinness alone does not guarantee health. My body has a GI disorder that is entirely genetic, and correlated to my mental illness (anxiety), also genetic.

What’s more, I don’t owe anyone in the world receipts for my health in order to claim recovery. I had to unlearn fatphobia completely on my own, just like I learned it from the beginning both blatantly and subliminally. The ways that it is STILL pushed upon me are an unnecessary burden, and inevitably do harm, but it is solely my responsibility to make sure that I don’t project that harm or that burden onto other bodies.

Same goes for fatphobic conditioning, comments and advice you may think is rooted in health. Unless that person is paying you for advice, save it. And even then (because some doctors literally get paid to fat shame people)–THINK–is this thoughtful? Helpful? Important? Necessary? Kind? The ways that fatphobia is expressed onto bodies, often (almost always) without their consent. What people fail to understand is that fatphobia and weight stigma itself is health-compromising, “good intentions” be damned. 

If my body or the words I use to describe it are triggering to you, that has little to do with me or with disordered eating, and a whole lot to do with the potential work needed to dismantle anti-fat bias. Look within and examine unconscious stigma. What’s so terrible, scary and disgusting about being in my body? All I see when I watch this play out among fatphobic people, unconsciously or not, is that what they’re truly afraid of is losing is 1) their perception of thin as superior, 2) the indignant self-righteousness of “health and wellness”, and 3) their ability to feel power when they make anyone over a size 16 feel shame. 

It can be really hard and terrifying for someone to come along and burst what’s familiar to you, but get used to it. It’s not my body or the fact that I say FAT that makes them uncomfortable, it’s the fact that the same science that privileged thin existence for all of the 20th century is just now concluding that I am capable of health and deserving of recovery.

Regardless of your fear, my body is still here and I still love it for what it is; in fact, I have done more health-promoting behavior holistically (mental, spiritual, physical, etc.) in this body than I have in my entire life. If that’s a threat to your joy or your pursuit of desirability; that baggage ain’t mine. Stay mad. 

xoxo

 

Letter to an unaware fatphobic workshop presenter

This week, I went to about 10 minutes of a twelve step study workshop before I shut down. 

Literally, full trigger tears and an overwhelming sense of being immediately alienated from the room.

This person opened a workshop about the 12 steps by addressing and creating alarmism (a “hook” for her audience, if you will), around the “obesity epidemic” and the faulty statistics that go with it.

In my recent work on steps 6&7 in my eating disorder recovery, I have been learning to still give feedback that is important for the cohesiveness of my existence with the world, without stomping on that person’s truth altogether and making them feel small simply because I am hurt by their actions.

A close friend encouraged me to give the feedback, because as she said, so many people are unaware and feedback (but not attacks on their personality or their lack of knowledge), ultimately makes us better people. So I wrote an email when I got home.

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Hi (name redacted),

My name is Cait, and I am a volunteer and regular participant at (organization redacted) I was at your workshop briefly this evening and I want to address some feedback that I have regarding some of the opening statements you made.

As a person in solid recovery from three different manifestations of eating disorders, and someone who lives in a body that is probably classified as either “overweight” or “obese”, I found myself immediately shutting down when you brought up these statistics and let them stand on their own to be falsely conflated to the disease(s) of alcohol & drug addiction.

(Organization) is the place where I was able to explore the information I am about to share with you, and personally, it was really triggering for me to hear the opening of your workshop in this context, as this very process of disembodying the social construct of weight being a function of “disease” used in this way is inherently somewhat problematic.

This kind of thinking is the very same thought pattern that perpetuates the diet industry, which makes more than 65 billion dollars a year letting people know that they are always one bite away from being a walking health risk (despite the fact that our consumption often has little to do with it, as 77 percent of our bodies’ health predispositions are determined by genetics), that they are broken people who can be fixed by following a magic set of rules that will change not just their body size, but how the world perceives, welcomes and includes them. 

Obesity as a standalone issue in our society is socially constructed, and in a lot of cases misused to create outright prejudice around the people who meet the ‘criteria’. It is a fact that any qualified statistician can tell you that the very act of weight causing disease and weight being correlated with any given disease are not empirically the same set of information.

When you said 70 percent of Americans are obese, there was no acknowledgement of the fact that there is buy-in from a diet consumer culture that creates those statistics. I know that “breaking down weight stigma” isn’t the workshop you’re running—but letting this statistic hang in the air as a way to analyze the steps seemed to serve only the purpose of creating a “wow” factor that confirmed sizeism and healthism among members of your audience.

Several years ago, the set of standards for what “obese” is was shifted, such that millions of Americans became suddenly obese overnight, based not on consumption of food but on a deliberate, fatphobic shift in the data. This shift in numbers was purposeful and meant to create a panic—we live in a world where politicians have literally said that fat is more of a risk to American society than terrorism. In one fell swoop, our war on terror became a war against fat—and thus, against fat people.

Food as an “addiction” has also been long debatable. I am an ex-member of Overeaters Anonymous, and it is my truth that the way I was guided by almost everyone I interacted with to view food and my body in that particular fellowship made me more paranoid, obsessed with food, and disconnected from my body’s needs than I’ve ever been.

It actually kickstarted the most recent manifestation restrictive end of my eating disorders, which were a part of my life for nearly 15 years. It is no surprise that OA works for so many, because it still has a mental framework that props up weight loss as a back-burner goal. It is a function of diet culture.

Letting this rhetoric about “obesity” and the idea that “food addiction” and substance abuse are biologically the exact same process circulate is potentially harmful to people, and frames shame around people in larger bodies when this stuff is spoken about.

Eating disorders—because that’s what we’ll call the whole spectrum, from restriction to exercise bulimia and orthorexia to compulsive eating—are similar, but not the same, as drug and alcohol addiction. I have experience with alcohol abuse and if I treated my ED the same way I recovered from alcohol, I assure you I probably wouldn’t be alive to write this feedback to you today.

Compulsive eating is just as much an eating disorder as anorexia, but neither are an “addiction”. What people with ED’s are addicted to, most of the time in one way or another, is perfectionism and a sense of self that involves intense anxiety, control issues, and body dysmorphia. 

Furthermore, there is no conclusive evidence yielded from studies done on humans that food addiction actually exists. The brain lights up in response to food being eaten, but that’s literally what it’s supposed to do. It’s our body’s way of reinforcing that it needs to be fueled in order to survive, and to work together with other complex body systems to help us do just that using the nutrients we put in. When we eat, we create neurological connections that form patterns that make this behavior a regular occurrence for the sake of our species’ existence.

Food is meant to be a pleasurable experience that drives us to do, be, achieve and think clearly. Anything that suggests food as an addiction positions the so called “food addict” into a shame spiral and this thinking is rooted in diet culture and weight bias/stigma. Addictions are not eating disorders, and eating disorders are not addictions, and both come with their own degrees of shame on their own. This gets further reinforced when we try to carry this mode of thinking over to something that our bodies need in order to survive, that we have no choice but to have a working relationship with from birth until death. (See Christy Harrison’s episode of Food Psych Podcast for this exact information, articulated so wonderfully by Marci Evans).

Food is a substance, just as water or hydrogen peroxide are substances, but not a “drug”, and is something we need to regulate our bodies for the purpose of sustaining life. I gained more weight in my recovery than I ever did while actively in my eating disorder, and am in perfect health—but that’s not the fat person’s job to justify to the world.

Creating discourse around this that lets obesity stand alone and conflate a lot of its causalities with drug addiction doesn’t leave room to explore the socially unjust implications of disembodiment in this process. It is statistically, sociologically and psychologically known that weight stigma is actually far more of a health risk than being fat itself is. There is empirical information to support this, which I would really recommend looking into.

Some of the best resources I have read to this point are Intuitive Eating by Evelyn Tribole & Elyse Resch, Body Respect by Dr. Linda Bacon & Lucy Aphramor, Health at Every Size by Dr. Linda Bacon, and The Fat Studies Reader by Ester Rothblum & Sondra Solovay.

Their work is integral to breaking down what we have been conventionally sold about our bodies and how they work, how they should be treated in society over a certain size, and how to deconstruct this information using research that supports all bodies.

Thank you for taking the time to read this email.

Cait O.

Big Bodies are NOT a Big Problem

…But thin privilege is.

Why are we talking about this? 

I was recently at an eating disorder support group where I expressed ‘fat’ as a term that resonates as part of my identity. It has been paramount to my recovery in recent months, especially with all the noticeable changes/stretching my body has done since last summer.

I was told that my use of the word ‘fat’ (even though I was using it in a manner that is strictly self-referencing, not as a slur or to denigrate anyone) is “triggering, negative or may be harmful.” 

“Fat” has the connotation of being morally equivalent to bad, undisciplined, lazy, out of control, and so many other harmful narratives that I have experienced in my own lifetime. It is a catch-22 of “I’m not fat yet, but I could be, and that would be terrible” (for thin-bodied people) and “I’m already fat, so therefore I’m worthless, undeserving, lesser than”. It has always been as if fat was the worst thing that could or would ever happen to me. 

Fatness is viewed as nothing to aspire to, celebrate, or be okay with, much less reclaim. It is not thought possible that people in larger bodies could have eating disorders, and if we do, it’s because we have absolutely no willpower.

These notions remind me of one of my favorite poems, “When the Fat Girl Gets Skinny” by Blythe Baird. She says:

“When you have an eating disorder and you are thin to begin with, you go to the hospital. When you have an eating disorder and you are not thin to begin with, you are a success story.” 

 

How else would fat people suddenly “look great” and lose a whole bunch of weight? There is no magic to the behind-the-scenes obsessive weighing, restriction, working out to the point of injury or bodily stress and exhaustion. When people lose weight rapidly, it’s probably because they’re sick. Eating disorders are a valid, but often overlooked, form of ‘sick.’

 

Fat people are often associated/stereotyped with binge eating disorder, when the truth is that many fat people have used dietary restriction (myself included) as an eating disordered behavior. There is also evidence that dietary restriction is actually directly correlated to fatness, or higher set-point weight. In other words: the more you “diet”, the larger your body will be over time; because you are increasing your body’s threshold for fat preservation by frequently forcing it into deprivation/survival mode. 

The reality of the matter is that when someone in a thin body is discovered to be eating disordered, treatment is the first thought of those around them. When someone in a larger body is noticeably engaging in ED behaviors, the first thought is “Just lose some weight!”

Actual “suggestions” from people who noticed me bingeing, but didn’t acknowledge it was bingeing/that there might be an issue to further explore than just my “lack of discipline”:

• “Take human bites!”
• “Haven’t you had enough?”
• “Save some for everyone else.”
• Do you want to go to _(insert exercise plan the speaker claims to swear by)_ with me?”
• “If you want to lose weight, you need to portion control.” (I did not want to lose weight, nor did I indicate that I did)

Fat people get unsolicited advice in the interest of their “health” all the time; but no one ever stops to think about the effect that this has on their mental health. It takes away from the things that fat people can and are doing like getting up every day and taking care of themselves, going to school, finding cures for really crazy diseases, teaching someone else’s children, or volunteering to help bring food security to low-income families. We are not seen for what we are, for who we are, all because physically, we are “kind of hard to miss.” So why are our other attributes so easy to dismiss?

 

The answer is simple: there is a blatant prejudice that exists against larger bodied people thanks to the media, the medical industry, the diet industry (which, by the way, grosses $60B annually). We are not given a solution other than an unending list of “If you would just”s. 

We are instructed to aspire to thinness or “normal” weight, and used as an example of what not to become. We are invisible because the society at large is afraid that if people see us, they will think that (gasp!) you can be happy while you are also not thin. Thin people fear us because they desperately do not want to look like we do.

 

 

But wouldn’t that be glorifying obesity? Ah. No. I am not walking around telling everyone they NEED to be fat, they need to live in a larger body, that they MUST subject themselves to the everyday size discrimination and ridicule and invalidation that fat folks experience!

If anything, our society is doing the opposite; going to any lengths to glorify thinness–thin people are visible everywhere, and “fight the fat” ads troll local strip malls with exercise studios where I live in the suburbs. There’s a very strategic, discriminatory reason that there are advertisements for Weight Watchers, South Beach, YourWeigh, Nutrisystem and a gazillion other corporate diet garbage being projected into our consciousness. This is not the same as fat people asking for representation of their reality; the presence of fat people doesn’t immediately suggest that they are “pushing their lifestyle on the world.” They are simply asking to be seen and heard without being asked to change anything about themselves. Diet culture doesn’t ask–it demands–that we change everything about ourselves. I live in a society that tells big girls that the only way to exist is to be small–and eternally is reminding us that we aren’t doing it right.

There is no natural way for a fat person to keep up with “normal” weight standards without dietary restriction, invasive/ineffective surgery, or laxative abuse; shouldn’t that tell us that maybe the answer is to altogether stop trying to manipulate our weight? 

 

 

To tell someone who lives in, identified with, and accepts their larger body in an eating disordered community that they cannot refer to themselves as fat takes away their identity, cuts off access to their own reality and renders it a ‘problem.’ It is nearly as harmful as “You’re not fat, you’re beautiful!”…as if they cannot be both all at once. Fat is not a bad word, it is not a blemish or a curse. It is just as much a part of me as being white, female, queer, or a teacher or a graduate student.

But to dismiss it altogether privileges recovery of thin-bodied people in a way that says they deserve compassion while suggesting that fat people aren’t “really” eating disordered. It keeps the word “fat” in negative terms, further other-ing fat people in the eating disordered community specifically. Taking other peoples’ fatness away from them minimizes their experiences, and perpetuates the fear mongering around a larger state of existence that our society can no longer afford. 

It also doesn’t take into account that maybe a person’s large body and acceptance of the fact of their body can be a way of liberating themselves from their eating disorder–their decision to not engage in behaviors like obsessive weighing, portion measurements down to the gram–and just acknowledge that their weight will fluctuate the way it needs to based on stress levels, water intake, hormone reactions, and other body chemistry related factors. 

I took back the word fat as a self-referencing term because as was said by Audre Lorde: “Nothing which I know about myself can be used against me to diminish me.” For a lot of my life, in school and at home in my basement where I used to work out for hours, in the pages of the journals I used to tally up the amount of calories I burned just standing, I was preoccupied with never letting fat “happen” to me. Even when it was hurled at me in the hallways of my middle school or brought to my attention by a teacher, I internalized my otherness to mean something dysfunctional about me.

Now, it is a reality that I have come face to face with and not only just accepted but made complete and total peace with. It makes getting through brain-induced dysmorphia days a lot easier. It makes freedom a lot easier. Freedom from the venom of the word “fat” has been my entry into freedom from fear; and I’m never going to stop saying it. 

 

 

A lot of folks are triggered by the word ‘fat’ for a lot of different reasons. Maybe it was used to invoke violence on their psyche on the playground growing up. Maybe it was a value that permeated the walls of their household before, after and during meals. Maybe it’s the thing that people aspire never to become.

And I encourage those who resonate with the latter to understand that this fear of fat is rooted in nothing more than fat phobia. Maybe you didn’t intend for that to happen. You probably didn’t. Society sucks, like I’ve already mentioned–it sucks for thin people and fat people and people of color and trans people and LGBTQ+ people and disabled people and indigenous people and all marginalized people. But if ‘fat’ invokes fear in you, it’s time to fight back against the current that perpetuates this myth that fat means something bad.

Because if fat phobia continues to exist in spaces where people are trying to heal, recovery becomes less accessible to all of us. 

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I’m walking in this year’s NEDA Walk on Long Island! Please donate! Any little bit helps in the fight for eating disorder recovery. Love & Light ❤

 

A Medical Drama–with Body Diversity!

Y’all know how much I love Chicago Med–one of the four #OneChicago series written by Dick Wolf, the original creator of Law & Order SVU. A few months ago I wrote a post about my favorite TV characters and what they mean to me; but now I love them even more!

Season three of Med has just started and there’s so much good stuff being addressed. In the past two seasons, they’ve covered so much, from trans* health issues and family dynamics. Not to mention, it’s the first show I’ve ever encountered that covers psychiatric disorders in a nonstereotypical, non-trivial way. 

This past week’s episode had several patients and several staff-to-staff conflicts. But I was particularly impressed with how they managed to portray a rather underrepresented eating disorder. 

Pardon??? #ChicagoMed pic.twitter.com/UXn0hdPj8U

— Chicago Med (@NBCChicagoMed) November 29, 2017

Orthorexia  is a type of eating disorder that is characterized by a compulsive obsession with and fixation on “healthy” or “clean” eating. It is often coupled with symptoms of anorexia nervosa and anxiety disorders. In this episode, the patient is pregnant with a severely underdeveloped fetus, and has been eating organic, GMO and chemical free locally sourced foods only, causing not enough nutrients to get to her baby.

Orthorexia is not a DSM-5 recognized disorder, but medically doctors have started to put language to the idea of compulsive and irregular fixation on healthful eating. Though we live in diet culture where “health” and “wellness” have come to mean “thinness” and compensatory exercise, I am glad to see that there is some medical recognition of these attitudes and behaviors taking over a person’s life to the point where it is unmanageable.

For the rest of the episode, the pregnant patient fights with the doctors and in a debatably unethical move, Dr. Manning hooks her up to IV nutrients that will help her baby stay alive, but aren’t free of all the things she has compulsively and strategically avoided for her entire pregnancy. Ms. Goodwin argues with her, letting her know that people like this patient often do not trust the medical profession to care for them, so they take matters into their own hands. 

Meanwhile, Dr. Rhodes is fighting with Dr. Bekker to get high-profile heart surgeries on his docket. He is in hot water when one of his surgeries fails, but later it is found out that it’s due to no error on his part. The devices inserted at the time of surgery were ineffective due to a manufacturing error, and they are able to re-do the surgery so that it will take. The patient is a man of size, and much to my impression, nothing is said to this patient about their weight being the problem (which is often an experience that fat people have with doctors in real life).

This overwhelming anxiety that comes with eating disorders is characterized clinically as an irrational fear, but the medical industry we currently live in exacerbates that lack of trust by constantly stigmatizing and shaming people by their body weight. Underweight patients are given plans and programs to get them to a “healthy weight”, but if they exceed that pre-determined ‘healthy weight,’ they are often treated punitively by their professionals and society as “taking it to the other extreme” (as an internet pal of mine expressed this week in a post!)

https://www.instagram.com/p/BcbwyrohzjP/?hl=en

Fat people and eating disordered people have a lack of trust in the diet industry because not only do 95% of diets result in gaining the weight back, but actual science defends that restrictive temporary dieting results in fatter people over the course of time. Linda Bacon, Health at Every Size researcher, talks about this in her book Body Respect — the more we diet, the fatter we will become. So often, the advice given to people by medical doctors is only going to make them fatter. 

More folks of size, particularly those in other sorts of marginalized bodies would trust doctors if those same people who returned to those same doctors were told that their fatness wasn’t to blame for their illnesses and ailments.Genetics, social oppression, and stress are predeterminates of weight and body shape/size, not illness. 

This same cycle of weight-shaming by professionals, I could argue, is what often creates diseases like orthorexia.

How often are we willing to believe that yes, fat people restrict, too?

How much does our society perpetuate the story of the fat person who’s sole mission in life is to lose weight so that they can like themselves? (Looking at you, This is Us).  

How often do we imply that fat people are only worthy of love from other fat people, or else be the butt-end of an ongoing fat joke? (Mike & Molly), and that these relationships are based on having a weight loss partner in your romantic partner?

Why is weight loss often the narrative of personal betterment and health, when health comes in so many sizes and includes so much more than an arbitrary number that we have effectively assigned to a person’s worthiness?

And what’s this all got to do with orthorexia? 

Orthorexia makes fat people desperate to be thin, to be seen as the person who’s not gorging on donuts all the time, who says “Look! See! I’m worthy of not being fat shamed, watch me eat this salad!”

It makes skinny and thin bodies (<5% of our society), terrified to be anything but thin. It is a direct buy-in to the warped, co-opted ideal of healthism and weight stigma. Orthorexia is a disorder that, in my opinion, is based on an irrational fear of being fat, and the same industries that diagnose it are responsible for its creation. 

Orthorexia is a medical phenomenon that is aided by the social idea that there is something wrong with fat people. There is nothing wrong with you if you are fat unless you are mean, a sociopath, or you hate chocolate (and that last one is subjective).

We need more shows like Chicago Med, that demystify the idea that fat people are worth medical attention and care as they are, without sending patients on their way with a prescription for thinness wrapped up in “health.”

We need shows that don’t trivialize eating disorders and correlate them to trauma or brokenness or low-self esteem (especially for fat people), and that represent all of us in ways that aren’t harmful to understanding how and why we got here. We need a society that isn’t so afraid to be fat. It’s not about glorifying obesity, it’s about FAT ACCEPTANCE.

What is Codependency?

This post is dedicated to Chester Bennington and all of Linkin Park. It would have been hard to get through all that I’ve experienced without this band, without his incredible voice, and his incredible life. 

If you or someone you know are struggling with depression or thoughts of suicide, please reach out to someone you love. Reach out to me. There is hope and help and love out there for you. Your story, your voice, matters. 

Rest in Peace, Chester Bennington.

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Codependency can mean a lot of things, and manifest in a lot of ways. For me, it is the root of all my coping issues. 

From the time I was really little, probably around when my parents split up, I was placed into the role of emotional baggage carrier. My father was an angry person, my mom full of anxiety and the frequent need to control. I learned from both of them.

My father’s anger and constant fits of rage taught me to stay out of people’s way and fear what they thought of me. It taught me to always be on alert for how I may upset other people, even when I was doing nothing wrong. It taught me to place other peoples’ feelings and states of being before my own.

I kept to myself most of the time and remember getting anxiety attacks (that would physically manifest in stomachaches and stress hives) as early as when I started kindergarten. Teachers just thought I liked going to see the nurse a lot. But really, I was terrified of the world around me and felt ashamed of my own being.

My old recovery coach taught me that shame = “I’m not okay how I am.” I internalized that from a really young age when my dad left. He left because of his own emotional issues and because he was just not happy–but I took it to mean that I wasn’t good enough, that the family we had was something he rejected. There’s more to it than that, including but not limited to his own family-of-origin issues. But I digress.

From my mom, I learned to seek her approval in all that I did. She is someone who takes fitness and body image really seriously, and in my codependency I developed Binge Eating Disorder at as early as seven years old. Other peoples’ feelings always came before mine, so I learned to just put my own feelings into food.

This manifested as I grew into subtle comments, expectations around food and appearance that were all extrinsic. My mom was small-framed, thin and athletic–and as I grew into my middle school body, I felt like I needed to look like that, too. As early as seven, I remember having a teacher say to me, “it’s like your hobby is eating!”; she was amazed at the fact that I never seemed to achieve fullness. What she didn’t know is that I was undergoing a tremendous amount of stress and that how full I was in my brain and body didn’t matter to me, because I felt like I didn’t matter. Numbness was the goal, not fullness.

As early as twelve, I ate 700 calories a day and burned nearly 2,000. All because I needed to look like what other people wanted me to. My family, my peers, my friends, my classmates, media–all contributed to that, and I needed to make them like me. I needed to make them want me, accept me, love me, to fill in for the fact that the small child in me felt rejected by the parent who left.

In high school, my mom always compared me to the other girls in my grade–particularly with regard to how they dressed. I didn’t “become” fashionable, feminine or “ideal” until my junior year, but I remember her picking me up from school one day and seeing one of my (former) friends walking home.

“Why don’t you dress more like her?” she said to me. I remember this so well. That was when my mom’s approval became a drug. I started shopping at Forever21, and always felt myself in constant competition with this girl for all the wrong reasons.

I realized over time that I didn’t dress more like her because I am me. This has been a lesson in codependency that I have had to learn every day. It went from small things like, why can’t I absorb this person’s style? To, what do I have to give up to make this person want me, how much sh*t can I take from them? 

I noticed yesterday when I asked myself this question that the phrase really says it all: what can I do to so that this person would want me–not so that they would love me, respect me, or value me.

Recovery is teaching me that all I need to do in order to achieve love, value and respect is to exist as I am. it is to know that I am okay how I am.  

The word ‘codependency’ didn’t come into my life until after I graduated from college. Discovering what that was, that it meant that I was still living in my trauma after it happened to me, was a source of my liberation from the cycle of scared, broken victim into one of empowered survivor. 

I allow myself to feel like both accordingly. Some days I am bogged down by all my identities and the trauma itself. Some days the chemicals that make my brain work are not balanced, and I can’t help it. Some days the body dysmorphia that has awakened in me gets restless. It is a combination of all of these things. Regardless, I allow myself to feel like a victim sometimes, because there’s no denying the pain of survival. Instead, I have come to understand that the pain is not permanent.

These things have all combined themselves to put me in a position at 23 years old to work really hard to unlearn the hurt and re-learn how to love who I am. I am working a program again for the first time in months. Keeping in constant contact with the people who support me, and learning how to let sh*t go–without manipulating outcomes or thinking too hard about them–is the primary focus of my life at the moment. Learning that I deserve to be in healthy, equal, loving relationships is an ongoing process. Learning that I’m allowed to say no is a process.

Buddhism has always been something that kept me anchored. I found myself and what I really loved and believed when I started doing yoga. I had an incredible teacher who was also a classmate and friend, who always encouraged me, and taught me how to meditate and release expectation. Buddhism helps me let go; of others and what they want from me, of the pressure I have always put on myself, of being fixated on certain outcomes. 

I used to struggle with the Twelve Steps because I needed them to be written differently, expressed differently, feel less rigid. But I realized that they, being tangible and written, wouldn’t change, so I had to. I had to stop pressuring myself into thinking that the Twelve Steps were written in stone, not for me, inaccessible. I made them accessible, I decided to let go of expectations and now, they bring me peace. And in accordance with Buddhist ideas, my Higher Power is kindness. 

Expectation is the root of all suffering. Expecting, forcing, controlling, manipulating and changing without growing are what codependency thrives in. These are not healthy ways to interact with people. Codependency is expecting others to do what we (think) we need them to, expecting ourselves to be malleable and fluid enough to please the whole world all at once. I’ve learned that I am not for everyone, and I don’t have to be. 

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Reach out when you need it. There is love and hope in community ❤

1-800-273-TALK (National Suicide Helpline)

1-800-931-2237 (NEDA Helpline)

741-741 (Crisis Text Line)

Twitter: @caitsrecovering

Instagram: @caitisrecovering

Email: caitisrecovering@gmail.com

 

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