Dear Visitors,

 

Please find below an article from the book: How to change: The 30 Steps 1-9. Please do read it.

How to Change: The 30 Steps

Steps 1-9- What underlines your anorexia?

 

I read this book few years back. I think it is useful as it offers insight into anorexia nervosa and practical advice on how to recover from the illness. Some of the exploratory exercises are very good, as they allow you to learn more about yourself as an individual. I am posting 30 steps on this blog, (I hope it will prove useful to some people who are desperately seeking recovery and do not have an access to certain recovery resources).

What happens if you try to give up anorexia?

Attempt to give up anorexia through gaining weight first of all in intensified panic about your weight. If you gain more weight you may experience once again those earlier frightening and unpleasant feelings of which you had rid yourself and which have been touched on already. Yet those around you look more cheerful, as they see reassuring evidence that you are gaining weight and hope or conclude that the problem is resolved. You yourself, however, feel emotionally much worse, and often angry at others’ failure to realise what you are going through.  Too easily this becomes a good and necessary reason for once again retreating into weight loss.

How to find out what underlines your anorexia?

Steps 1-9

Whether your aim at the present time is to escape from the grip of anorexia or to be a better adapted anoretic, you are unlikely to be able to achieve these things if you only address your eating problem and fail to recognise and come to terms, at least to some extent, with the underlying issues affecting your fear of gaining weight to a normal adult level. The following is a series of steps that we hope might help you in this later task. Remember that, emotionally, you are certainly no older than the year that this condition developed, and you may always have been young for your age (although others may have seen you as particularly mature, perhaps because you were “good” within the more  structured environment of home or school, or perhaps because you have acquired high academic or professional qualifications).

Begin now to use your diary to record your journey up these first 9 steps.

STEP 1

Could it be that your illness is helping you and others to avoid the strains of life? Remember that those strains will no longer be present- the anorexia nervosa has solved them (but brought others).

STEP 2

Ask yourself- should I stop in my tracks now and try to unscramble things before any more time is lost? You’ve given up any faith that you had in other people understanding you. You can accept this or you can try again. How can you make it different next time?

STEP 3

Try and reflect who you might be if you were not now an anoretic. Reflect on what was happening around the time that you became self-conscious about your shape and began to do something about it.

Perhaps your anorexia nervosa has allowed you to preserve (or recreate) an earlier pattern of relationships and behaviour which had come to be threatened, although this may now be swamped in many ways by the new conflict over you not eating. You see, the anorexia doesn’t work very well, does it? Think of it in terms of yourself and your position in the family even if you are chronologically in your twenties or thirties, or even older now.

STEP 4

Start getting to know yourself better.

STEP 5

Start communicating better with your parents so far as this is possible. Everyone has important aspects of their parents within them. In learning about them you will learn about yourself, including the different parts of yourself that may not be communicating well with each other! Remember your parents are in the same position as you. They may also need to communicate better within themselves and with each other. They are children of their parents. If possible ask your parents about their own adolescence. Do exploratory exercises with them. You will not begin to yourself until you have found them.

To learn to communicate requires opportunity and practice.

STEP 6

Therefore, use your friends, e.g. by going out with them. Try to think about this in a new way. Instead of panicking or regretting it, ask why you might be avoid doing it.

Like many other avoidance mechanisms, anorexia nervosa can exist in the background of anoretics and their families. Other strategies include avoiding communication, avoiding social contact, dependence on alcohol and withdrawing into depression. Anorexia nervosa itself can run in families.

STEP 7

Recognize and acknowledge that your anorexia stifles unpleasant feelings, i.e. protects you from such feelings through the effects of your low weight. Remember you are an expert in anorexia nervosa. What you to do is to develop new skills.

STEP 8

You will need to tolerate feeling bad and frightened. This is true for many of us but especially for you.

STEP 9

Be truthful. Do not deceive yourself even if you still have to deceive others occasionally. Beware of excuses- the reasons you will think of for not acting now will probably be quiet varied. Who are you trying to fool?