I ask, because I am not sure that I can!
I have found that it is very difficult for me to explain to someone who has never experienced an eating disorder how deeply engrained TED is in my life. I first have to explain why I have called my eating disorder, TED. For me, my eating disorder started out as a way to punish myself when I failed to achieve what I thought was within my potentially to reach. At each failure, this voice in my head constantly would remind me that I am not going to amount to anything, I am not loveable, and most importantly that He is the only one that understands me and will love me despite all my faults. And, of course, the only thing I can do to make it better is to punish myself. He is so real to me that I have given him an idenity. But it is important to say that I only have given him an identity since starting on the road to recovery. When I was in a position where I had to try to explain to people why I did what I did, it sounded a bit “crazy” to say that I felt like I should be punished for not achieving something (ex: an 100% on my test, the perfect # on the scale, just anything I did not accomplish) because deep down, I knew that I should not be punished. No one else expected me to be perfect, except for me and TED. For whatever reason, I accepted that the fact that if I punished myself I would learn to do better the next time or someone would love me more.
This topic has been very difficult for me to put into words what I experience on a day-to-day basis. I feel that I have hit a wall in my forward progress because I cannot. I believe that it is important for me to be able to put words to the devistation that this eating disorder has caused me. Maybe as I move forward in this journey, I can.
