Blake, I don't know if you saw my post in members or not, but this is exactly what I wrote about last week. I was never bulimic. I was anorexic. I just wouldn't eat it in the first place. It's something that just as much an addiction as drugs or sex or anything else. For me it is about control. It was my way of proving I had control over my own body. Maybe I couldn't control anything else on the planet, but I could control what food went into my body. It was a way of me being better than other men. They eat like pigs and get fat, but I can stop and be thinner than any of them. I can keep looking better as they get fat and ugly.
None of it's true. But it's what I believed. I look back at pictures of myself, and I was a walking skeleton. There wasn't anything sexy about being all bones. It's funny how my mind played tricks on me. But it's still a temptation. I go on a diet with my wife, and I can't get off it. I find myself feeling proud of the fact, too, which just proves it doesn't go away.
What helped me was talk therapy and lots of it for years. Looking at my dad, my uncle, and other men, and seeing that it's not about food. And this belief that I have to look a certain way comes from the abuse--like I could have stopped or controlled it if I had looked a certain way. I felt like certain foods were clean and others were dirty/unclean/whatever, like if I ate a certain thing it was like I'd given in and allowed my body to be dirtied. It's a way of trying to reenact the whole ugly abuse and find some way that we could have said No or some way to have undone the damage, to make ourselves clean again.
I also agree that it comes up most when I'm feeling out of control. Too many people demanding too much of me and asking me to be somebody I'm not. The pressure builds and the old thinking kicks in. I go vegetarian or pull something really big out of my diet, start drinking soy milk or some other crazy thing. I can always tell when I start looking at the Boca burgers again. It doesn't matter what I control, just so long as I control something.
My therapist would say something to me like, Could it be that the way to gain control of our lives is to release control of some things? In other words, am I so busy trying to control things over which I have no control that I'm making myself feel like I can't control anything? When I start feeling out of control, I try to let go of something. I can't control other people or make them change, so let it go. I can't control if my stupid boss does stupid things that cost the company money--cost HIM money--so let it go. I can't control the cat and make it stop ripping the furniture, so I get a lizard instead. I can't be perfect, so let the little things slide. That sort of thing.
Take care of yourself. It was also a way of punishing myself for being such a sick guy. I didn't deserve to eat. The fact is, we'd never treat our own children the way we treat ourselves. Blake deserves to survive and to eat.
