Bulimic and Lost No more

This woman’s vicious cycle of bingeing, purging, and living a double life was finally arrested when she found the safety she needed and craved to face the pain of childhood incest and trauma.

I suffered from an acute case of total and utter worthlessness, feelings of complete insecurity and inferiority, intense self-hatred, shame, and self-condemnation. My job from the very beginning was to make sure no one else ever found out how I really felt about myself—friends, family, neighbors, teachers, classmates, professors, employers, co-workers, strangers and the like. It took a lot of energy to live that way, and over time, those intense feelings of self-loathing got progressively worse. I had a good reputation, did well in school, was active, and had a lot of people telling me how great I was, but I could never believe what they were saying deep down inside where I lived. I always had this voice saying, “….don’t you know what I am really all about? Are you really that dumb?” As much approval and praise as I collected, the sense of worthlessness I felt continued to intensify year after year.

Starting from early childhood, I desperately needed people to tell me that I was OK. The sad part that kept me dragging this on for years and years is that I was able to pull it off on the outside for a long, long time. I had a lot of friends and was popular in the circles in which I traveled—my survival depended upon it, so I thought. I couldn’t sit still with myself and was busy all the time. I thought I was just being social and outgoing. I had no idea I was running from myself. After all, I fancied myself a together person. All my time and energy was devoted to making sure people liked me. If I thought I was losing someone’s favor and perceived I couldn’t reverse the situation, I managed to end that relationship, job, or activity to avoid being exposed. It was an exhausting, lonely, and painful way to live.

Being as driven as I was, I needed a lot of energy, and was dependent upon food from a very early age to keep me going. I required a lot of it based on the amount of fear, uncertainty, and insecurity in which I lived. Food was my comfort. My life was one big cover up and food kept me propped up with false courage. I may have come across as confident, but just underneath I was quivering. Food quieted that fear, and I was dependent upon it all the time to get me by. If I wasn’t eating, I was dreaming about eating. I had always been a slender kid, so I never saw any of this as a problem. In fact, it was the solution to my problems.

I started gaining weight, however, when I went away to college. Since I didn’t have a weight problem up until that point, I had no occasion to look at how I was eating or try to stop overeating, for that matter. I quickly became distraught over the weight I was gaining and my inability to stop it, and it was at this time I learned about bulimia. In an attempt to control my weight, I started vomiting to offset the huge quantities of food I was consuming. I was growing more and more depressed each day and didn’t know what to do.

In an attempt to escape the mire of food obsession, weight gain, bulimia, and depression, I tried many different things that I prayed would fix me. I went on an Outward Bound trip with hopes of becoming a new person. I spent a month studying abroad and knew that would make me happy. Another time, I spent three months traveling with a friend around the United States with plans of finding myself. The slight little problem was that on each of these excursions, I took myself with me.

While I was in college, I started seeing a counselor and spent the next 6½ years in individual and group therapy. The counselor introduced me to 12 Step programs, and I attended meetings regularly for over six years, including Codependents Anonymous (CODA), Adult Children of Alcoholics (ACOA), Alanon, Survivors of Incest Anonymous (SIA), and Overeaters Anonymous (OA). In the middle of my junior year, I went away to a rehab for 5 days that specialized in co-dependency, adult children of alcoholism, incest, and addictions. All that trip really did for me was allow me to hide out from my problems for five days, but nothing had changed inside of me, and it took no time at all before I was back in the pain, stress, and misery from which I had been running. In fact, I was even worse off because I was made more aware of more problems and still had no solution. Not knowing what else to do, I went back to school and continued on. I even went so far as to start a support group on campus for women with eating disorders, when I couldn’t even help myself. I read self-help books, tried positive affirmations and all kinds of “self-esteem building activities” such as taking a bubble bath, making myself a cup of herbal tea, treating myself to a movie, or buying myself a gift. I got instant relief from some of these things, but I never learned how to feel different about myself long term. It never took long before that deep pit in my stomach returned, which more food would soon deaden. I felt hopeless because nothing was working.

My eating continued to get progressively worse, as did the bulimia. I was going down and I knew it. No one else knew how bad off I really was, even though I talked openly with therapists and close friends about the bulimia and other things troubling me, because I still appeared happy to them on the outside. This only furthered the pain, loneliness, and separateness I felt on the inside. Things got so bad and I felt so hopeless that I figured the best I could do would be to accept myself as I was—keep smiling and holding on. I knew, however, it was going to be a long road and I didn’t know how I was ever going to make it through. I was too much of a coward to commit suicide, but I would have welcomed going to sleep and never waking up again.

As my self-esteem continued to erode, so did the expectations and dreams I had for my life. I graduated from a good college with honors, but I still felt stupid. I was settling for less and less because that is what I believed I deserved. Despite the fact that I professed to be in spiritual recovery, all my relationships were still unhealthy. I always made sure to surround myself with a few people I could feel superior to in one way or another because of how bad I felt about myself. I had experiences from my past that affected how I felt about my body and myself as a woman. I was so out of touch with my sexuality and felt so abnormal that I feared I was gay. Even though I went to individual and group therapy on a weekly basis, I was unable to touch the deep hurt I felt from my father leaving when I was a small child, and incest I experienced a couple of years after that. The feelings from these events never went away, they just remained masked. I funneled all that hidden pain, fear, and anger in to the Feminist movement where I could be angry and condemning of men and society, when that wasn’t the issue at all; it was just a convenient forum for me to be able to rage, make excuses for all my problems, including the weight I was gaining, and never have to look at myself. As evidenced by my life, this mode of operating and acting out clearly was not working. I was overeating and purging every day, was 25-30 pounds overweight, and was compulsively running long distances in desperate attempts to try and control my weight. I was so out of control, which required even more food, and consequently more bulimia and more exercise. I was caught in a vicious cycle I could not break on my own, and up until that point, no one else could help me break it either.

I was several years out of college when I started hitting bottom. I worked as an Outdoor Adventure Based Counselor with youth at risk in a depressed area, with depressed people (co-workers and clients alike), while being depressed myself. I was earning $16,000 a year and was dependent on my mother to subsidize my income, not to mention the unhealthy emotional dependence I had on her, about which another whole story could be written. I was at a breaking point. I was bingeing and purging every day. I was having difficulty keeping the façade going of a happy-go-lucky life, despite my full social calendar. I was falling apart at the seams, and there was no way out. Fortunately for me, all my years of failed attempts to get better put me in a position to be open and receptive to the way out offered through Be Totally Free!, for which I will be eternally grateful.

In meeting and talking with Roy Nelson, the inspiration behind the Metasteps process, for the first time, I experienced the first of many miracles. The compulsion to overeat and purge was lifted right out of me that very night, effortlessly. I didn’t realize it until after I went home that evening intending to binge, which is what I did every night, without exception. Once I got home and opened the refrigerator, it became apparent to me that I didn’t want to overeat, in fact, I couldn’t—the desire had been removed. I was stunned and knew at that moment my troubles were over. I had found the way out! Not only was the physical compulsion to overeat lifted, but the obsession with food had been removed as well. I never knew how consumed I was with food until all that mind space had been freed up. It wasn’t long before the feelings that drove me to binge and purge in the first place came racing to the surface, which, in the past had been too much for me to bear. But I knew it was different this time. I had found a safe place where I could finally stop running and face my life with someone who already knew all about me and could show me how to make peace with myself, once and for all.

Through Roy’s unconditional love, support, and guidance, I was able to face the feelings that had been driving me for a lifetime. My past track record proved that I couldn’t face those feelings alone and I couldn’t do it with people who hadn’t done it. In hindsight, I can see that I, as well as other people who had tried to help me, had always been too afraid and threatened by the intensity, level, and depth of the feelings inside of me that needed to come out if I ever expected to be healed of compulsive overeating and bulimia. Consequently, I never came close to dealing with the feelings at the level at which they needed to be addressed and I never got well. My new found friend, however, was not afraid or threatened by the deep dark thoughts and feelings inside of me because he had not only experienced the same thoughts and feelings, but had overcome them himself and had been free for many, many years. That was the missing link. Roy had recovered from all addictions and compulsions which is what made him uniquely qualified and successful in helping me and countless other hopeless cases break free from the chains of low self-esteem, depression and addiction.

The beauty and difference of Be Totally Free! is that it treats the whole person, which is the only hope. Its benefits are far reaching. My life today is truly miraculous. I am totally free from the compulsion and obsession to destroy myself with food, bulimia, and other substances, people, and activities. I am at the right and perfect body weight and no longer spend my days obsessed with food or my weight, by the Grace of God. I am experiencing optimum health. I have made peace with my sexuality and no longer need to hide out or act out. I am actually happy to be a woman, whereas before I was afraid of myself and my body. The deep hurt I felt over my father leaving when I was small has been healed, and there are no more hidden memories, pains, hurts or unforgiveness surrounding the incest I experienced after that. As my self-esteem and worthiness have grown, so has my financial well-being. As a result of a new-found confidence and worth, I was able to leave that very depressing career that paid accordingly and move in to a completely new line of work which has been much more positive and satisfying. I am enjoying an income five times that which I was making when I first met Roy. As a result, I am out of debt and am no longer financially dependent on my mother. My relationship with my mother has also been transformed. I am no longer enmeshed with her, nor am I afraid of her. And the most invaluable gift of all is the inner peace, joy, and sense of well-being I experience when I share with other people who feel hopeless that there is indeed a way out that really works. My heart fills with love and gratitude when I see others’ lives transform as they work with the founder of the Be Totally Free! process. Everything that has been freely given to me is readily available to all those who hurt as badly as I have hurt and who want to be free. I know there is no limit to the good that is available to all of us. The sky is the limit. You too can be totally free!