# Eating Disorder Recovery Challenge: Anesthesia or Genuine Human Experience?



## David Baxter PhD (Jun 14, 2016)

*Eating Disorder Recovery Challenge: anesthesia or genuine human experience?*
_by Joanna Poppink, MFT, Los Angeles eating disorder recovery psychotherapist_
June 14, 2016

If  you want to start, improve or speed up your eating disorder recovery  you may ask, "I know what I'm supposed to do and what I want to do.  Why  can't I do it?"  

This  is a reasonable question. The answer is not because you are weak or not  trying enough. Your solution is not about bearing down harder on the  methods you are using, particularly will power and self criticism.

Understanding what's really going on will help you get on and stay on your recovery path.   
When  you set recovery goals for yourself without a real appreciation of the  structural dynamics of your eating disorder you can set yourself up for  frustration and what you consider to be failure.  Your goals are based  on wishful thinking about the strength of your will power.

Your  emotions have a powerful influence on whether your binge or starve. You  may not be able to resist an urge to binge,  You may be too terrified  to eat at all. This is not weakness. This is finding yourself in a  stressful situation that has gone too far.

Whether  your binge or starve you can believe that controlling, minimizing or  eliminating your normal human emotions will free you from your eating  disorder behaviors. 

Some  people think or wish that success in giving up eating disorder  behaviors is equal to becoming automatons with no feelings and a surface  facade of agreeable charm.

If  this is you, your goal is to create yourself as an anesthetized  presence with a pleasant smile and perfect body.  Human feelings of  fear, stress, pain, greed, rage, love, need, shame, vulnerability,  separation and rushes of grandiosity or inferiority would then pose no  difficulty. None of the emotional triggers for your eating disorder  behaviors could exist in your anesthetized state.

If  you could make this condition your daily normal experience you believe  you would not need your eating disorder and you would, at last, be free  of your self-criticism and growing despair.

However, this dream is a paradox, a tricky twist based on the actual structure of your eating disorder. 

Your  eating disorder contributes to creating your anesthesia and functions  to block you from your feelings.  Your actual question is:  "How can I  be numb without using the eating disorder as an anesthetic?" In other  words, you are asking for a substitute anesthetic.

This  is not only frustrating but dangerous since, in early recovery stages,  people caught in looking for a substitute anesthetic, may experiment  with substituting eating disorder behaviors with sex, drugs and alcohol  behaviors. 

So what is the answer and how do you meet your recovery challenges?

Before  you can know and recognize your feelings, especially your trigger  feelings, you need to be open to accepting yourself as a human being.  You don't have to understand what that means right away.  You just have  to accept the fact that you are human and are about to learn what being  human really means.

Putting  yourself, not only at the beginning of recovery, but at the beginning  of understanding the nature of being human, gives you a solid place to  stand in your learning and healing.  You can relieve yourself of  impossible expectation burdens you've been carrying about yourself and  start at your realistic beginning.

False assumptions can go. 

*About Being Human*
Healthy humans feel the full range of what humans are capable of feeling. 

To  be healthy and live a full life you need to be able to access your  feelings, tolerate them and be able to think, make choices and function  at the same time. Otherwise, the automaton is in charge. Choices that  lead to painful or destructive consequences are made through oblivion  since automatons don't feel anything and so don't consider painful  results a consideration. If the automaton is you, trying to pass as an  unfeeling creation, you will find yourself dealing with bewildering and  painful situations.

Your  recovery work in your psychotherapy is about understanding and learning  to live and function with feelings you can't yet bear. Sometimes, to  avoid those feelings because they are uncomfortable or painful or set  off  an anxiety or a panic attack, you will seek a rush. You will put  yourself in a high stress or high drama situation full of illogic,  unpredictability and high risk. 

In  such a situation you will be aware of powerful sensations that convince  you that you are not numb and that you are feeling emotions. But the  extreme sensations that flood your system are a device to block or numb  your authentic human emotions. If you find yourself in highly dramatic,  dangerous, exciting, frightening or exhilarating situations you may well  be flooding yourself to avoid experiencing your unbearable emotions.  You may be avoiding even the knowledge that those emotions exist.

Eating  disorder behavior may be an attempt to avoid feelings and risks, but  the eating disorder thinking and behavior creates risk to life, health  and happiness.

*The Only Option*
Living  a satisfying life, free to pursue your deeply valued desires, requires a  real presence in life. Becoming a nonhuman is not an option. The only  option for healing and life is to become a more evolved human. 

When  you reach the point in your recovery work that you acknowledge to  yourself that personal evolution is your goal, recovery speed picks up.

As  you embrace your humanity you learn to recognize feelings and bear them  in genuine life situations. When you can feel and think at the same  time you can rally your courage to make choices that permit you to  strive for your true heart's desire.

As  a clinician, I have learned that once my client's goal is to outgrow  the limitations that make her eating disorder necessary, we can  cooperate with the power of evolution. We can reach for a more solid and  clear presence in her relationship not only with food but with a full  range of people, experiences and surprises life presents to all of us.

Once  you are on this path, teachers, helpers, benefactors, and opportunities  for right action, invisible to controlling perceptions, seem to  synchronistically appear as you awaken to your true nature, speak your  truth and honor yourself. 

This is not magic.

This  occurs because perception based on authentic feeling is more clear than  perception based on an anesthetized  condition. You are now attracted  to and attract people and situations that are healthy and that encourage  even more health in you.

 From  this evolving place former eating disorder habits fall away. A more  realistic and healthy life begins. At this point you appreciate your  humanity, use all your feelings as information, make decisions based on  thought and feeling,  and live a more satisfying, and genuine life. The  eating disorder is gone. You've evolved beyond it.


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