Today, I am thriving. I am free of food and body obsession, free of self-hatred, and free of needing to escape my feelings.  Instead, I am able to embrace my life and be who I believe I was intended to be before any of this happened and am no longer ashamed of myself, or my past.

There has been great relief in telling my most shameful secrets and by holding up to the light all the things that were unacceptable about myself.  I used to believe that no one was as damaged, crazy, or incurable as I was and that no one had been molested for as long as I had been.  This simply is not true. 

There are many people with painful secrets and life stories -
and of those, many of them are recovering, happy, and successful today.  Incest is not who I am, it is only a part of my story - a part of my past and while I cannot change what happened to me, I can change the way I view it and the way I feel about myself. 

My struggles and triumphs over self-hatred, food, weight, and voicelessness have made me who I am today.   They have given me the gifts of compassion, wisdom and strength, and a real love of singing and truth-telling.

I hope my story will convey to those who are struggling that nothing is too big, too shameful, too dark, or too difficult to be overcome and turned into a source of light and usefulness to others.  I love myself and my life today – this seemed impossible when I was living with an eating disorder.  I know that my worth is not my weight but rather the love in my heart and the light I shine on the world. 

Each woman who struggles with disordered eating has her own story of pain, her own song of truth, and her own right to tell a new story so that she may transform her life.  I am a different person today than the girl and young woman who had no voice and who hated herself, who wanted to disappear by either being so small that no one would notice her, or so large that no one would want to take advantage of her.

My eating disorder had its roots in my early childhood but did not become noticeable until my adolescence. In my family, food was love.  It was also a sign of abundance and the only allowed indulgence in a very religious home.  My mother took pride in supplying a great variety of baked goods and candies and showed her love by cooking our favorite foods and preparing big Sunday dinners.  

I was my mother’s helper and loved to cook and bake with her, often sneaking extra bites of sweets. As the youngest of three children my role was to make everything look good from the outside.  I did this by being the classic “good girl.” I baked cookies, ironed my father’s shirts, got A’s in school, and went to church.

I come from two generations of Christian Scientists on both my mother and father’s sides.  My mother was a faith healer and a teacher of the religion. 

My family did not drink alcohol or caffeine, smoke cigarettes, take any kind of drugs or medicine, get vaccinated, or even go to the doctor.  We never talked about, noticed, or paid any attention to our bodies and my parents turned off all TV commercials that talked about sickness or the body. 

Sex was only for procreation and never mentioned.  The only physical contact I saw between my parents was my dad’s off to work peck on my mother’s cheek each morning.  We had a “no talk” rule, never talking about anything but love, peace, and joy.  We had no ability to understand or talk about feelings or process conflict.  So, when I was sexually molested by family members, I didn’t know how to tell my mother. 

This abuse went on from the time I was 2 until about the age of 12.  After that age, the abuse was emotional and physical but no longer overtly sexual. 

I was afraid to tell thinking it was my fault and thinking I would be blamed for wanting attention.  I also was afraid that the abusers would get into terrible trouble. 

More than anything, I had no way to communicate about or understand such a forbidden subject. Over time, I buried those events in my unconscious.  As many young children do, I believed my home and family were perfect and my parent’s God-like.

My family moved when I was in the 8th grade from a bustling community in Michigan to a sleepy little town in Ohio. I went from a private fine arts school to a public school.  We moved in the middle of the year and I was terrified and shaking my first day of school.  Worse, all the girls at the new school decided they didn’t like me.  At a party one night they cornered me in a room to confront me with all the things they didn’t like about me. 

They didn’t like the way I acted or talked. 
They didn’t want me to have anything to do with their group. 
They thought I was conceited.  

I was completely shocked, filled with shame, and I told no one as I felt I must be bad to be treated in this way.  School became unbearable. I decided that I would do whatever it took to be liked, asking these girls how I should be and how I should talk. 

I became even more pleasing and sweet and gave up my power to the popular crowd.  I began asking all the wrong questions, such as am I ok with you? And, what can I do for you to like me?  I even did the other girl’s homework for them and let them cheat off my paper during tests. I lost myself in order to be liked and became someone I didn’t know and didn’t like.

At the end of eighth grade, I went on my first diet and discovered that I got attention by losing weight. 

To me, I had found the secret of being liked; if thin was applauded, then thinner was better.

Those same girls that wouldn’t speak to me, now wanted to know how I lost the weight.  I kept losing weight until I was frighteningly thin. Always anxious, I became even more afraid and began pulling out my hair compulsively.

During the 9th and 10th grades, I wore a bandana to school each day in order to cover my bald spots.  The only concern expressed from my family was from my mother who told me to pray to relieve my anxiety. As a good girl, I did, but without results. 

My body was screaming the shame and pain that my mind was not aware of. At the end of the 10th grade, I got too much sexual attention from boys and my eating switch turned to on and it wouldn’t go off. 

I gave up pulling out my hair and began to use food to quell my anxiety.  I gained many pounds rapidly….then more and more…. until I had gained nearly 100 lbs by my first year in college.  My body size said the “no” and set the boundaries with boys that my voice simply could not speak.

Food was my comfort, my numbing, and my safety. 

It was my relief from all the things I couldn’t talk about and yet, I hated being overweight.  I was at war with myself hating my body thinking it had betrayed me.  This was now a vicious cycle of dieting, exercising, and bingeing that only masked my self-hatred, shame, and loneliness. 

I simply could not stop overeating.  Food was my best friend and I turned to it for everything…..fun, relief from boredom and stress, and a way to bond with others. I took on the role of being everybody’s friend and the “fun girl” but secretly longed to be like my thin, beautiful girlfriends.  I did not have a boyfriend from my sophomore year in high school to my senior year in college.  I wore skirts every day so that I could hide my fat, and my sexuality. 

I exercised fiercely though and tried every kind of extreme fad diet and even fasted.  Every one of these attempts ended up in failure.  Diets would always end with a binge followed by eating continually until I gained back whatever weight I had lost - plus more. This created more shame and self-distrust.

I discovered bulimia in my senior year at college and a whole new struggle began.  I felt possessed by a gnawing energy or anxiety that would take me over and the only way I could deal with it was to throw it up.

I threw up the inner tyrant of perfectionism that demanded I be brilliant, successful, and land a great job when I graduated. 

I threw up my mother’s demands that I be the next healer in the family, marry a Christian Scientist, and carry on her work.  

I lived a double life, smiling on the outside and dying on the inside.  

My life was a carbon copy
of my mother’s life. 

By my senior year of college I was dating a Christian Scientist from MIT (my father attended MIT). I worked on Capitol Hill in Washington DC (as my mother had) after I graduated from Wellesley College (her alma mater.)  I then worked at the Christian Science Monitor (her dream for me) – the whole time bingeing and purging. 

My mask of having it all together began to crumble as my days became solely about how to get food and how to get rid of it.  Bulimia took over my life and for five years I binged and purged up to 6 times a day.

I hit a bottom at 24 when I found myself completely alone, unable to work, throwing up blood, and  shaking - all the time.  I desperately wanted to stop the bingeing and purging – I actually had dreams that I was going to die – but I couldn’t stop.  I had to hit a bottom where the pain of bulimia was worse than the pain I was trying to stuff or purge. 

My miracle happened when I finally and simply asked for help. I got into a minor car accident which led me to run into an old acquaintance, a woman who just two years before had been dying of anorexia.  When I met her again on that day, she was clearly happy, healthy and her eyes were sparkling.  She talked to me about how she had gotten well and gave me hope and encouragement that I could get better too. It was through her that, I found help and a recovery community.    

It was shortly thereafter that my therapy began and I started remembering and talking about my secrets and the pain of the things that had happened to me.  The healing process of telling my story to someone I could trust allowed me to begin to recover from bulimia as I was able to find my voice and let go of the shame of being abused.

After several years, I was finally able to pursue my own life’s passion (not my mother’s)  ...singing and songwriting.  I moved to Nashville, found love and a music partner and began to travel the world performing, truly living a dream. 

I wish I could say that I lived happily ever after, but I can’t.  Recovery for me has not been a straight line but a spiral of learning, healing, falling down, and getting back up. My last bout with anorexia ended almost 8 years ago when I got sober from alcohol. 

I had been performing music for 10 years internationally in a traveling band, unaware that I was drinking more and eating less.  My bottom with alcohol happened when I was faced with my husband’s secret sexual addiction.  I realized I had created the same fantasy and blindness that I did in my childhood – I had a perfect family and a perfect marriage. In a moment of truth, I was able to see myself clearly and my alcoholism. 

This led to another round of surrendering and knowing that I was powerless without help, recovery work, and a deeper and lasting healing. In this process there was a great deal more work to do with my family of origin, changing the dynamics with them, and again finding the places I had abandoned myself.

My recovery and my courage allowed me to go back to school to get a degree in therapy.  This healing spiral of recovery is about gaining self-knowledge, living more and more in my truth, maintaining integrity and honesty with myself and others, and of loving myself.  My heart became open to life and love again when I was able to truly forgive those who had harmed me.

Recovery from disordered eating is a journey.  It is NOT about being perfect.  In fact, it’s about learning balance and developing a calm and loving center.  I had a lot of slips at first and learned to view them simply as reminders to show me what needed my attention. Instead of self-criticism, I developed patience with my progress, commitment to my journey, and curiosity. 

To recover myself, I had to stay with myself and learn about me; who I am, what I care about, value, and desire most. Instead of blocking out my feelings, I had to learn how to cry and to make space for all my feelings without judging any of them as wrong or bad.  Setting boundaries, saying “no,” and developing assertiveness were essential skills I had to learn in order to be in relationship without giving myself away. Instead of turning to food for love, comfort and relief, I had to ask for what I needed from others who were safe and I had to be able to know who those people were.  I also learned to nurture and calm myself and to find and fill my deepest hungers in healthy ways.

Today I do not view my eating disorder as something I hate or even regret.  It was how I survived and kept the truth of my childhood from myself until I had the support and strength to deal with it. Because of the early abuse, it was important for me to develop my own spirituality - one that allowed for hope and healing in spite of the horrible things that happen in this world and had happened to me.  I created my own “family of choice” or supportive community.

This is what I learned:

To stop abusing myself, I had to feel the pain of having been abused

To have a voice, I had to give back the shame that silenced me to the ones who had abused me

To stop being a victim, I had to own my power and build relationships that are respectful and supportive

To heal my sexuality, I had to learn that I truly do matter and that no one ever has the right to touch me sexually if I don’t want them to. 

I now have my family back in my life in a healthy way.  What a gift!

Through the years of struggle with food and fat, I had completely lost touch with whether I was hungry or full.  This was a skill that I had to develop almost from scratch by constantly practicing how to listen to my body’s subtle cues.  I needed to restore my relationship with my body as I had hated, abandoned, and abused it for years and did this through yoga, dance, hiking, and massage.  I learned what foods were healthy for me and what foods actually set up cravings. It became necessary to separate emotional from physical hunger and commit to eating only when I was actually physically hungry and stopping when full. 

My eating disorder served as an early warning system that gave me important information before my conscious mind was even aware there was a problem.  If I reached for food when I wasn’t physically hungry, I had to find out what was beneath the craving and then take action to get this need or desire met.  I did this by asking myself what is it that I don’t want to feel or to know.  Then I would write in my journal, talk to a fiend, pray or sing until I became clear about what the real issues were.  Its amazing to me that talking or writing about whatever is bothering me – especially the things I am most ashamed of -- takes the compulsion away.  

At first, recovery used to take up most of my time.  There is the saying “five miles into the woods, five miles back out.”  This meant that, in the early stages, I would need to spend as much time and energy on my recovery as I did in my eating disorder, which was most of my time.  Today I do not spend my time worrying about food or my body. I always remember who I am and where I am coming from. 

I am able to productively live with the knowledge that I have an anxiety disorder, am a trauma survivor, and a recovering alcoholic/addict.  As a result, it is important for me to continue working a recovery program, have a healthy lifestyle, and get help whenever I need it. 

Unfortunately, the years of struggling with anorexia, bulimia, and compulsive overeating have caused permanent damage to my body –  to my digestion, metabolism, thyroid, and reproductive system.  Considering all the years I abused myself, I am grateful to be alive and as healthy as I am.  And allowing myself to be human, occasionally, I have bouts of perfectionism, shame, negativity, or fear.  The difference now is that I can trust myself to treat myself lovingly and make healthy choices despite my feelings or problems. There are many tools for changing the channels of negativity and fear.

I am free physically, emotionally, and spiritually and am living a life beyond my wildest dreams. I know that anyone who is struggling with an eating disorder or a difficult past can also find their way to freedom.