The Hopeline
First Published July 20, 1981
Revised January 2004
I decided to call this newsletter The Hopeline because what I want it to communicate is hope. Not just your average amount of hope, but BIG hope. Hope that is deeper than the deepest oceans, taller than the tallest mountains, and more expansive than the galaxies. This is the amount of hope you will need to recover from your eating disorder. For you see, choosing to recover is the start of a journey the end of which will be one of the greatest, if not the greatest, accomplishments of your lifetime.
I have been thinking about two things since our last meeting. First, is something I read. There is a section of Hilde Bruch's book, The Golden Cage, that had an incredibly powerful impact upon me when I first read it. "This suffering is not the way to a solution...You need to feel what you're living your own life, to feel worthwhile and that what you do is truly what you want for yourself...without feeling guilty...Many of the things that trouble you are of such an order that you don't even want to admit them to yourself. At this moment, you take so much pride in being so skinny that you have sacrificed everything else to it. TO GET WELL DEMANDS A NEW, GREATER SACRIFICE--NAMELY, GIVING UP THIS UNNATURAL PRIDE IN SOMETHING THAT DOESN'T ACCOMPLISH ANYTHING!!! [of eternal value- my addition]. When you really stop to think about it, you know that pursuing thinness really does not accomplish anything, in the sense of reaching out to someone else who is hurting or of being able to love another person. All it does is consume all of one's energy..
Speaking of the book, The Golden Cage, I have to tell you how much this book has meant to me. It is an old classic in the eating disorder literature. Dr. Bruch was one of the first people to write about anorexia nervosa and, in my opinion, no one since has written as effectively. (She also wrote a book called Eating Disorders: Anorexia Nervosa, Obesity, and the Person Within that is excellent as well.) I guess the best way to put it is to say that at the time that I read this book, I was in denial that I had an eating disorder. However, a tiny, tiny part of me wondered if I might because people had been giving me articles to read about anorexia nervosa. I read them all, never acknowledging any appreciation to the giver of the gifts. In fact, I was quite defensive whenever anyone dared to mention the word eating disorder to me. There was a growing suspicion within me that there might be some validity to their concerns, but I was scared to face what that meant. At the same time, I was drawn to anything I could find that was written about eating disorders. When I found out about The Golden Cage, I checked it out of the library and began reading it later that night. I was transfixed and unable to put it down and ended up staying up until the wee hours of the morning until I finished it. I remember feeling a mixture of relief (that there was a name for and help for people like me), disappointment (that I was not as unique as I had thought), and afraid (that I had a serious problem that was considered a mental disorder). It was the sentence that I quoted above that was most significant because it was one of the turning points in my journey toward recovery. I was haunted by those words that I took unnatural pride in something that accomplished absolutely nothing of lasting value. Having a strong faith, it was very important to me to do things that were meaningful in a spiritual sense. I was confused by the fact that what I said I believed was so different from how I lived my life. I professed to worship God, but in reality, the god whom I worshipped was the god of thinness with the scale being my idol. Being a skinny hypocrite was not something about which I felt very proud!! Not being able to reconcile what I thought I believed with the way in which I was leading my life was a turning point for me. Somehow this realization broke through my wall of denial. It was then that I decided I wanted to recover, no matter how long it took or how difficult the road would be. Little did I know that it would take me eight years!! By the way, I never did return that copy of The Golden Cage to the library. I was so afraid that someone would see me return it and think I had an eating disorder that I kept it and paid the fine. It is sitting on the shelf in my office with the library name blacked out!! It is the only book I ever permanently "borrowed" from a library.
The second thing that I have been thinking about is listening. Sometimes in the group, it seems as though no one is really listening to what anyone else is saying. Have you ever felt that? I am wondering if sometimes it gets too scary to listen. When someone responds to a statement made by another group member by telling something from their own experiences, the focus is lifted off of the original speaker. Maybe that's good because it prevents things from getting too personal, but maybe that's not so good...for the same reason. What do you think? Which feels better to you? I think I like it when the focus is kept on me awhile when I say something. It helps if other people ask me questions about what I have said. Then I find I am able to figure out what I am really feeling. Usually, the first thing that I say is not the core of what I am experiencing and I need people to help me go there. Do you think we could help each other in this way?
I find hope in thinking that the energy needed to get well is not lost, it is simply channeled in the wrong direction... and if you can decide you want to rechannel it, you can ( I know because I did it, and I am no different that any of you). Each of us can control what we spend time thinking about. Even if 10 minutes a day is spent thinking about getting well, or visualizing yourself as happy and whole, that is ten minutes when your energy is directed away from food and the relentless pursuit of thinness. And this ten minutes will be the beginning of your recovery.
With hope,
Kim