After dealing with some recent experiences relating to my own eating disorder, I have been forced to consider some new realities about the situation. I realized that someone who has an eating disorder is not really a ?victim? of this condition. They may be hurt and in pain living in their condition, but they are not a ?victim?. Labeling a person as a ?victim? amounts to no more than taking away an individuals sense of power to decide their own life circumstances. Calling someone with an eating disorder a ?victim? means that the eating disorder is bigger and stronger than they are, and in reality, this is not the case. No matter how difficult any experience is, we always have our free will and can choose to carry on living an experience or not. No matter how hard it is to heal, a conscious decision to heal is all it takes to get moving toward recovery. We ALWAYS have a choice and are NEVER powerless!

I can tell you honestly from my own experience, and from knowing other people who have eating disorders and other psychological/physical disorders, that people subconsciously thrive on the idea of being a victim. It?s true, we love the idea of being a victim because being a victim automatically deletes the responsibility we have of dealing with our life issues. Being labeled as a victim is the only excuse we need to avoid the fact that in the end we have the power to decided whether we keep living with the eating disorder or not. This is a key factor which determines if someone will heal or not. I learnt this because it reflects my own personal experience.

I am sorry if my point may appear unsympathetic to some of you, but don?t let your emotions mislead you. I went through this whole thing and know very well how difficult it can be to break free from the patterns of an eating disorder, and trust me, any sympathy I ever did receive didn?t get me anywhere. All that resulted in was me wallowing in self-pity, feeling helpless and like a victim and this was not far from the road toward recovery!

Eating disorders are complex and I learnt that someone with an eating disorder will do anything in their power to avoid recovery. I know that because I did it for so long and I know other people who did too. I had friends with eating disorders who had therapists and they told me that they told a pack of lies to the therapist, pretending they were trying to recover and the therapist had no idea of it! Even I told many lies to people who were trying to help me. It is difficult because it is like you have a split personality, one wants to heal and one wants to stay anorexic or bulimic, or even both! It is a complex state of mind.

The reality is that life without your eating disorder seems like a very frightening situation. You ask yourself things like ?What will it be like if I get fat? It will surely be worse than having the eating disorder in the first place! I want to stay anorexic/bulimic; it will hurt less than getting fat!? Considering what your life might be like without your eating disorder is a scary thought, even if you know that you are killing yourself. I was afraid that if I let it go of my eating disorder that I would end up in a worse because I would react badly to gaining weight. It is ironic;

Another thing is that your eating disorder eventually becomes a ?normal? part of your daily life, it becomes a way of life and then it eventually becomes you. This makes it really difficult to see and admit that you have a problem, let alone admitting to needing help. You are not able to see the danger of what you are doing to yourself when everything seems so normal, even if inside you are a tangle of confused feelings and emotions.

If you have an eating disorder which revolves around you being thin, you feel such a sense of achievement when you see your weight dropping off. At the same time there is so much pain attached to this. Personally, I chose to ignore the pain and focus on the achievement and fulfillment I felt in losing weight. This feeling sustained me, it was what I was lacking in my life and the only thing that sustained that feeling was the eating disorder. The feeling was addictive, like a drug and obsessed with it! Recovery was not an option for me. I honestly did not want to get better; I wanted to be thin no matter the cost, even if it cost me my life.

I also know how difficult it can be for other people to understand why people with eating disorders feel inclined to keep punishing themselves. Even someone who is at the point where they have almost finished their recovery process might feel as if they are stuck between two worlds of not knowing whether they still have an eating disorder or if they are free of it all. Certainly, in my own case this has been happening to me lately and I realized that to be cured does not mean simply stopping the behavior. It also requires a complete change in your psychological state of mind. In my case, it seems that my own state of mind, after spending years of thinking and feeling the same way about myself, my body and food, has returned to being balanced, and even more-so than it was before I begun developing the eating disorder in the first place. This is all very well, but lately there seemed to be a small part of me that wanted to cling onto the fact that I am or have been a ?victim? of an eating disorder.

Why is that? Perhaps it is reaction to the fear I often feel about letting myself go and handling the responsibility of investing some real love, attention and care towards myself. This is something I have never ever done in my life before! Maybe it was a lack of discipline when it came to the point of always watching my eating habits and patterns, or maybe I just afraid of eating too much? Thinking this way always keeps me attached to the fact that I was bulimic and must be careful not to fall into the same old trap again! Or maybe it was because I have been thinking self degrading thoughts for so long that they are programmed somewhere deep in my mind as my reality?

It could be one or all of those factors combined, but in the end it doesn?t really matter, as long as I stay aware of the fact that in the end I do have the choice of whether I want to have an eating disorder or not, regardless of any help, advice, attention, sympathy, therapy or medical assistance I decide to receive. It is still my responsibility to deal with it in the end. It is obviously necessary to receive some guidance to help you on your way out of a situation like this, but that still doesn?t change the fact that the last step of releasing yourself from this is your own conscious choice to carry on living this way or not and nobody else can make that decision for you.

In past articles I have referred to an eating disorder as an illness and referred to myself as being the victim. Yet, now after what I have learnt lately, I can see that by categorizing people who have eating disorders and their typical habits in this way only puts a limitation upon their ability to heal themselves, creating an indirect way of avoiding the full conscious choices that are required to be made before any of their problems can be healed once and for all.

Anyone who is reading this and actually does have an eating disorder, particularly bulimia, might argue here by stating that when they are in ?binge and purge? mode that they are helpless with their compulsion and that they feel out of control when they are going through the whole binge episode. I do agree and completely understand because I have been through those experiences so many times myself. However, in the end these habits do arise as the result of some deeper problems and had these problems been dealt with accordingly, prior to the development of the eating disorder then we would never have had the inclination to engage in such fatal habits in the first place. In reality, an eating disorder is only the symptom of a deeper problem which has not been dealt with. We have a choice to investigate the source of the symptom and heal it or not and our power to heal lies within the choices we make.

Having an eating disorder is very difficult to understand and it can be hard to see the true light of it all when you are the one who is caught up in the middle of it all because your mind is in a whirl of confusion. In one way I feel sad to have been living with the kind of thoughts I have done lately. Circumstances pushed me to the point of questioning if I had really healed of my eating disorder or not. It was hard, but at the same time I learnt to appreciate the opportunity of learning one of the most valuable lessons I have ever learnt in my life. 

The lesson was that none of us are ever really victims of anything, we do have the choice in the end of whether we choose to live in an experience or not, regardless of the circumstances. We all have power to overcome any situation in and our power lies within the choices we make in life. I had to make a choice and although it seemed easier to me to carry on my life with an eating disorder than to heal it, I still managed to overcome my fear and deal with it. It is not impossible, trust me if I did it then anyone can. 

We all have a choice; we all have the have free will to choose our own life direction, destiny, or fate. This is not only for certain ?lucky? people, it applies to everyone. There is no real excuse for treating ourselves in such terrible ways, we are all able and supposed to me happy. 

Happiness is a state of mind and good health begins with a balanced state of mind and a good attitude towards yourself and your life. If you are not able to love, accept and just be happy with whom you are today then how can you ever expect to be happy with anything else in life? Whether you are fat or thin, rich or poor, old or young, real happiness always comes from within and radiates outward, not the other way round. External sources of happiness may bring us some pleasure for a short time, but they are only temporary measures which can only attempt to fill our own inner void and sense of lacking self conviction.

Yours in Light