One of the questions I get asked the most by both sufferers and parents/partners of sufferers is; “how did you find the motivation to recover?” often followed closely by, “how do I find the motivation to recover?” or “how does he/she find the motivation to recover?”
These are very important questions when we are talking about adults with eating disorders. But before we get into that. Lets look at this:
Does it matter if you are motivated to recover or not?
It helps, but it is not a requirement to weight restore. Weight restoration is possible without the individual being motivated to recover. Weight restoration is not full recovery, but it is a required step towards full recovery.
The desire to get better increases and the will to do what the eating disorder wants you to do usually wanes as weight restoration and mental restoration progress. One doesn’t have to be motivated to recover to recover. One needs to be fed. You can be resistant to recovery and still get better so long as someone is feeding you and your body is gaining weight. I have seen some very resistant people go into inpatient treatment against their own will and come out later having put some weight on in a much more recovery-focused frame of mind.
You do not have to be motivated to recover in order to recover. But you do have to be fed.
But … that is all well and good when dealing with children and teens under the age of 18 and living under the parent’s roof. Whether a child wants to recover or not is beside the point. You make them recover by feeding them and it works!
Not so straightforward with adults is it? You cannot make them eat. And so whilst it is certainly not required that a person with an eating disorder wants to recover or is motivated to recover when that person is a child, it is relevant when that person is a “functional” adult with an eating disorder. Because functional means just that. They can get by … ish. They can exist. Just not very merrily and in a compromised state of physical and mental health. The half life.
Most of us resist intervention and live a half life until we lose it and decide that full recovery is the only option because we are so miserable. Sometimes “functional” can last too long because we are too comfortable. I hate to say it, but misery is a big motivator for many of us when we finally make that “recovery or die trying” decision.
Your recovery motivation may be because you want to have children. Or because you want to be able to look after your children. Or because you know you need to recover fully in order to have the career you want. Or maybe you had a big health scare recently that has made you realize you’re not invincible after all. Or maybe, like me, you are exhausted. Sick and tired of always being irritable, thin, cold, lonely, and stagnant.
My own motivation came from a place of wanting to die rather than live one more day in the hell I was in. I wasn’t living. I was existing … barely.
It has to get personal. Reaching full recovery is hard work that there has to be some underling motivation in order to make us want it enough to fight for it.
I’m not the sort of person to do a ton of hard work for an outcome I’m not invested in. As an adult there is nobody to make me do things I don’t want to do. I have to be motivated to do them — usually this motivation comes from financial reward, personal happiness, and ambition. (Recovery brought me an huge return on investment for all of those things)
How do you find the motivation to recover?
I don’t have an answer for this. I can’t answer this question for you. I can provide suggestions and ideas as to why you should want to recover, but I do not know what the thing itching at your soul is.
And if you don’t know, I have a different question for you. One that I think helps many of us understand just what is holding us back:
What is holding you back from recovering?
Sounds whack I know. Especially for those of us who hate our eating disorders and want to get better. But there is a space in there between wanting to get better and being scared to get rid of the eating disorder — or at least being too afraid to stop doing what it makes you do enough to actually stop doing it.
That is real fear. It is an inappropriate fear response, yes, but that doesn’t make it any less real. It is real. I know because I have felt it. In fact, it is a fear stronger than any other type of fear that I have ever felt in anything I have done in my life. So it is not just a real fear. It is a really fucking strong real fear!
Fear of losing identity
Oh, that old chestnut. It sounds a bit too psychoanalytical for me, doesn’t it? Much as I would like to argue that this had nothing to do with the stagnation of my recovery. It did. And it irks me because it is so fucking stereotypical. It irks me even more because I didn’t even like being any of the things that my ED wanted me to be yet I was still afraid to not be them!
I’m going to name a handful of the Anorexia identity traps I go stuck in:
Athlete
Athlete. I remember one time I was at my Drs in Edinburgh when I was 18 and that I saw the she circled “athletic build” on my intake chart. I guess they didn’t have a check box for “emaciated.”
I wasn’t athletic, I was starving. And in fact, is was only after this that I developed my exercise obsession. However, years down the line, whenever I tried to stop running that voice in my head told me, you’ll lose the athletic body type identity.
I kid you not. And the kicker is that pre-ED and post-ED I don’t give a darn about being an “athletic” body type. It is not a value I hold dear. I don’t think a person is of more or less worth for being “athletic” body type. But Anorexia did. Anorexia cared a lot about that.
My fear about losing that identity was Anorexia driven. Ironically when I was recovered enough not to fit into that body type category I was also recovered enough not to care.
Thin
I hated being thin. My opinion or my personal preference for my bodyweight didn’t matter because Anorexia wanted thin so Anorexia got thin.
In recovery I had to fight thin. Additionally, I had a huge anxiety response at the thought of not being thin. This anxiety was both irrational and inappropriate considering I didn’t like being thin. But those truths didn’t make it any less of an anxiety response. It was crippling.
I had been thin for so long that I think my brain registered homeostasis as thin. Therefore trying to imagine being alive and not thin felt as possible as trying to imagine morphing into a cat. One person I work with described it very effectively as feeling like she is being asked to grow a second head when she tries to think about putting on weight. Nailed it.
If somebody told you tomorrow that you would have to grow a second head next year you would probably feel a little anxiety about that change too. Not because you don’t like second heads, but because it is a change. Different. If you think about it rationally, growing a second head is a fantastic idea as you would have two brains so be twice as smart — but does that rational thinking make it any less scary?
Would I still be me if I had two heads?
Would I still be me when I was no longer thin?
Did I care? Turns out when I was thin I was the least like the version of me that I love. Probably because I was infested with Anorexia, and Anorexia is quite the personality.
Endurer
Anorexia loved the thought of this. Being someone who endures. I know that when I was sick, I was scared of losing my illness because I thought it was what made me stronger, more resilient, “better” than anyone else. Special.
I could run 6 hours a day — who else could do that? (Who the fuck wants to?)
I could go weeks without eating a thing — who else had that discipline? (Who the fuck cares?)
The truth is those were lies my eating disorder told me. I was not “special” I was sick.
But even when I began to know that, I was still scared of letting go of the identity I had worked so hard to be. Especially with the running. A part of me thought that if I stopped running even for a day I would never start again (because I knew how good a day off would feel and I knew if I allowed myself to feel rest I would not be able to resist resting) And honestly that was true. One day I stopped running and it was such a relief I didn’t ever want to have to do it again. That was also the bravest day of my life.
And it was that fear — fear of losing my “specialness” that kept me in my rituals and compulsive behaviors. No matter how large or how small, every time I tried to stop or change a compulsion that same thought came back to me.
If I tried to not go running in the morning You’re losing it
If I tried to add more food to my breakfast You’re losing it
If I tired to allow myself to sit down during the day You’re losing it
If I tried to stop pacing in my flat at night. You’re losing it.
It took years of failed attempts to ear more and exercise less before I countered those thoughts with: Losing what? What exactly is this “it” I am supposedly losing?
I needed to get to rock bottom to stop caring enough that when my eating disorder told me you’re losing it I was able to respond with I don’t want it, what is the point?
What was the point of any of it?
Martyr
Anorexia loves to be a martyr.
Always be the one to eat the least. Always be the one to eat last. Always be the one to spend the least on food. Always be the one to get the least joy out of eating.
Anorexia valued martyrdom highly. Tabitha does not.
Sod that! I’m going to enjoy myself. And the best part of that is that when I enjoy my life, other people enjoy me more too.
I drew a line at all these identities that Anorexia valued that are not and were never me. And while It was terrifying to defy Anorexia and leave them behind. I did it and so can you.
If you eat.
There is so much more to you than your eating disorder
My eating disorder got me fired; rendered me unable to really work; lost me my riding career; left me alone with no friends; single; joyless; lifeless; a sad young spinster; miserable; and finally suicidal. What was the point?
Something that comes up for most of the people whom I know in recovery who have had a long-term eating disorder fear/guilt of losing their identity. Some of us go through a mourning period for it too — even if it wasn’t an identity we liked!
It’s okay to be afraid of moving into recovery. It’s okay to be anxious about losing the (often undesirable) identity that the eating disorder enabled. There is no right or wrong way to feel about this process.
However you feel about it, know this: You have to eat. You can eat.
Recovery did not happen overnight. I had to 10 years of behavioral and cognitive patterns to work out. I had to re-learn how to eat. I had to navigate eating despite fear. Frankly I had to learn how to be human again. I mean, I didn’t even know what it was like to go to the loo out of need rather than because I had a “rule” that I had to walk to the upstairs loo at least once an hour. I had to relearn everything.
Recovery did not happen overnight — but it started here.
This is great Tabs. It makes me see that I have so many reasons, besides being so tired of it!
I think your point on identity is true. Evo though last think I want to think of myself is “Me, the anorexic” I somehow have trouble to just say. “It is me”. Because anorexia makes us forget who we really are, and the loneliness we experience is also because we can’t feel and live with ourselves anymore. I think not being afraid of being us again, just us, is the hardest part of recovery.
“I drew a line…” And recovery is holding that line. Every meal. Every day. No matter how I am “feeling.” I don’t have to understand restoration or recovery in order to restore or recover. I just need to eat. Thank you, Tabitha.
Boundaries. That is a important principle that anorexia ignores. I am happy you set yours, and that you put some windows to do that we can witness your strength! @firecraker
@tabs and you form a total kill-ED team!
Sorry, I have to disagree with this part of your post – “You do not have to be motivated to recover in order to recover. But you do have to be fed. But … that is all well and good when dealing with children and teens under the age of 18 and living under the parent’s roof. Whether a child wants to recover or not is beside the point. You make them recover by feeding them and it works!” How do you make a child eat? As the Father of a (now 18 year old) anorexic, who has been fighting with the disease for 5+ years, I can say it’s not that easy or even possible. Unless you’re talking about inserting a feeding tube (and then hoping they don’t pull it out), “making” your kid eat isn’t just impossible, I don’t think that’s really part of any recovery plan. And being weight-restored is far from being recovered. From what I’ve seen with my own daughter, and many other kids who were in treatment with her, until the person WANTS to recover, they really can’t. It doesn’t matter if they’re getting the best treatment in the world (which does help) or none at all, they can’t really RECOVER until they decide that that’s what is best for them. To kick the damn ED aside and decide to move on. I don’t know what the exact motivation is, or how you help the ED sufferer to get that motivated, but until they are, I don’t think true recovery is possible. My daughter is now seeing that some of her other health issues are likely caused by the ED, and she’s tired of having it rule her life, so now she’s motivated to fight back against it. I wish everyone fighting this damn disease the very best, and to find their own motivation, because it’s worth it!
I too am a dad of a daughter who tells me she WANTS the anorexia and does not care if she doesn’t recover. She only sort of eats for Mum or me. In the meantime, I see her Mum go mad with the stress. My daughter is quite conscious and articulate and explains very patiently to us (all we – Mum and Dad – need to do is calm down) that she wants to lose weight slowly so that she can be like the girl in the supermarket whose knees were large than her thighs. The OCD behaviour is there – full on, exercise, cold etc.
My question Tabitha is – does our daughter have to get to rock bottom? This is increasingly her Mum’s view. But how can Mum just watch our daughter starve herself? Also, letting someone get worse before they can get better seems a dangerous tactic to me. OUr daugher is only a year and bit into this behaviour. She eats. Her behaviour is appalling – vicious, hurtful, venomous, abusive, sometimes physically so. Is this it until she WANTS something different. I fear for her mother’s sanity. And maybe fearing for mine will come.
The identity part is so, so true. Anorexia becomes a super important part of who we consider ourselves to be, how we present ourselves to the world, in a sick, twisted way. In that very sick and twisted way, I think many sufferers -at least, I do- like to think of ourselves as sufferers, ill people, and imagine that others admire us for enduring this -the hunger, the deprivation, the restriction. We must be so strong-willed! It’s stupid, of course. Nobody cares, and nobody who is healthy and sane wishes they had a starved body.
I was nicely surprised to learn that not all anorexics wanted to be thin or enjoyed being thin. I for one never really put thin on a pedestal (but Anorexia did, of course, and Anorexia got what it wanted…) and, contrary to what is commonly believed of most people, I used to fantasize about being bigger than I was and being a curvy and happy girl.
I feel conflicted: many of your posts make it seem like weight restoring is recovering. In my experience, any time I get even close to weight restored, I feel trapped. My thoughts are louder than ever AND I’m in a body I feel unsafe in. I don’t feel rational; I don’t feel free with food or myself. This fuels the belief that “it’s just how I am, and recovery isn’t possible for me.” Additionally, I do benefit from anorexia – it provides me with things that other things just don’t. So how — how do you find motivation to recover when 1) you don’t think it’s possible, and 2) you think the ED is better than an alternative life? How do you choose recovery when you don’t want to live because it’ll be too painful?