The Very Hungry Katerpillar

Getting help for an ed is never easy. Finding help from family and friends is hard enough.

A shitty therapist helped trigger my eating disorder. I was seeing her for depression and I obviously had a lot of body image issues. Her advice was to become less fat. She suggested I work out more and see a nutritionist. At the time, I was working out 4-5 hours a week and eating a quite healthy vegetarian diet, but this apparently wasn’t enough. (I don’t think she believed that I was taking care of myself; if she did, why suggest a nutritionist? Maybe she thought I was a fucking idiot who considers Oreos health food or sleepwalks to Taco Bell or something.) So I stepped it up. And I became a goddamn bulimic.

Doctors, psychiatrists, therapists, counselors and so on — the people you go to for help — the people who have experience and degrees and letters after their names that supposedly mean that these people are trustworthy and know what the fuck they’re doing — can sometimes say and do incredibly stupid, harmful things that can make your condition even worse. Dealing with bad doctors and therapists means standing up for yourself and talking back or replacing them with someone competent, and when you’re feeling down on yourself so bad that you have an eating disorder, standing up for yourself is one of the hardest things to do. Who are you to defy the almighty LCSW? You’re just a glum idiot nobody. If you knew anything, you wouldn’t be in a therapist’s office, would you now?

So finding a decent therapist who can help you is really hard for anyone with an ed.

It’s even harder when you have an ed and you are still, in fact, a bit of a chunk-monster.

(Here is where I remind readers that a lot of people with eating disorders are normal-sized or even fat. People with bulimia are usually average, sometimes a bit overweight. People with EDNOS can range from underweight to obese. People with binge-eating disorder are, obviously, overweight much of the time.)

Because even when your therapist talks about building self-esteem, accepting yourself, basing your sense of self-worth on your inner qualities and not on your physical appearance, there is always that great big but — sometimes spoken, sometimes unspoken, but always there — trailing after everything they say.

You shouldn’t have an eating disorder, but you are fat. You should not be fat. It is bad to be fat, like you are.

You should accept your body and love it… but you need to modify it and make it smaller. Because you are fat. And your body is not acceptable. Not really.

You should base your self-esteem on something other than a number on a scale… but the number on that scale is not acceptable and must be remedied immediately.

You shouldn’t obsess over your weight so much… but if you lost weight, I would be proud of you and congratulate you. I would like you more. I would have more respect for you.

You are a good person no matter what you weigh… but if you weighed less, I would celebrate, because you would be a much better, more valuable person.

Having an eating disorder is really dangerous… but so is being fat, and if your health is doomed either way, you might as well try to look decent.

You shouldn’t worry about how fat you are… but you are too goddamn fat, and that is bad, and you are bad.

You shouldn’t be ashamed of your body… but your body is shameful.

You shouldn’t care so much about your weight… but you really should care about your weight a hell of a lot.

These big phantom buts butt into your sessions and poison everything. They tack little lingering doubts onto every positive thought you have. Every happy therapy hang in there kitten slogan comes pre-packaged with a rebuttal to nullify any therapeutic benefit they might have.