Holidays are for most people, a time of excitement, gathering with friends and family around tables of festive foods and traditional dishes that elicit warmth and fond memories of childhoods and closeness.
For someone with an eating disorder, full-blown or in some stage of recovery, they can also be a mine field of emotional triggers, unexpected comments and constant banter from media, co-workers and friends about dieting and resolutions and magazine articles proclaiming one needs "tips" for navigating the Holiday buffets....
This external noise, replete with the potential to send someone battling with recovery into a dance with relapse, pales in comparison to the raucous derision that is ignited inside the head of one afflicted with an eating disorder.
It's the perfect storm really.
Food, family, food, friends, food, stress, food, emotions, (did I mention food?)
From Halloween until New Year's Day we are steadily fed a diet (see what I did there?) of "healthy treats", images of smiling faces on nuclear families dressed in perfect outfits with expertly coiffed hair in front of trees trimmed with the precision only Martha Stewart disciples could execute.
It's enough to tip over even the most affirmed in their recovery, because of how emotionally charged these occasions can be.
"Do it right."
"Do NOT eat like they do...you are special and have intense will power. It is what makes you strong and protects you from others' sneers. You can do what they cannot."
"You don't deserve to eat this food. You are not worthy of being here with this family...you have caused too much turmoil here."
"Be small. Don't eat. Drink some more to make the pain go away."
"Don't eat. Ignore your hunger and be rewarded again with the power you get from restricting."
"Look at how everyone is talking and laughing. You can't join in because you are too pathetic. Everyone here just tolerates you because you are family".
"Don't eat".
"Do it right"
"Don't eat".
This goes on inside our heads thinking about the Holidays on the horizon, the Eves and mornings of big holidays, and gets the loudest during the meals we are trying to participate in like normal people do...trying to navigate the comments, the diet talk, the resolution talk, pass the potatoes, have some butter, what's for dessert? ("Oh, I don't eat carbs")...
So many of our Holidays center around meals and traditional foods.
For people with healthy attitudes towards food, Holidays are exciting times to look forward to with the only consequence perhaps, a sour stomach or need to loosen a belt.
For people who are active in their eating disorders or who are trying desperately to maintain the gains we have made in recovery, they can be a secret, slippery slope to relapse, without warning or return.
Add to this, the charge of emotion that swirls above the dinner tables of fractured families, trying to enjoy traditions that evolved over time without evoking sadness or feelings of loss and resentment.
A feeding frenzy for Anorexia that makes shark week look like a sunny picnic at the beach.
"It's all your fault that your family isn't together during the Holidays".
"You don't deserve to enjoy this food and fun".
"Don't eat. You don't deserve to feel joyful".
"If you weren't so pathetic, your family would still be together".
"Don't eat".
"You don't deserve joy".
"Don't be happy or festive or joyful. It's not yours to have".
The battle for even the most determined in recovery is probably the rockiest during the Holidays. If I am honest, this is true for me.
This year, my family knows.
It is the hardest thing for someone in recovery to come clean about eating disorder behaviors because it takes them away.
Accountability both supports and promotes recovery.
It incites our eating disorders that wish to push us back to the comfort of anxyolitic behaviors which promise underhandedly to take the guilt and shame and pain away.
But it is accountability where strength is borne.
Hence this night's blog.
Because it is true, though an overused cliche, that no person is an island.
And recovery is hard.
Especially when emotion is high.
As my dear friend once said, (hi Julie!) :
"When you drive through town, you see cute little houses with the lights on but you never know who is inside and what pain they might be in"...
