Ask ED: What’s to blame for your eating disorder?
December 8, 2008 by angelique
Filed under Women's Health
We have another question for readers to answer in our “Ask ED” series.
This one comes from “Emily”:
“what do you blame for the start of your disorder, or the instance that caused the disorder to become greater than yourself?
i’m asking this because i don’t have the answer for myself after five and a half years of dealing with this.”
This is a topic we’ve brought up before. We’ve even wondered if the blame could be placed on someone else, like one’s mother (or maternal figure.)
I struggle with this subject quite a bit.
While I take full responsibility for my decisions, I do believe that had some of the adults in my life taken my rapid weight loss and obvious depression symptoms more seriously, I might have avoided some of the lasting effects of this disease. But that may just be wishful thinking.
What’s your take on this topic?
I struggled with this for years. I thought the ‘key’ to recovery was pin-pointing the exact, one cause that pushed me into my eating disorder.
What I’ve finally learned is that there is no ONE thing responsible for an ed; just as there are inumerable triggers, there are a bevy of reasons my coping skills collapsed and I clung to my ed for safety.
It’s not so much figuring out ‘the cause’ as working towards the solution, and that’s what I’m spending my time doing these days.
you used my question =]
but, i’m just now beginning therapy and i hope to fix myself and figure where it all went wrong. today was my first day, and although i have still been not eating/hardly eating then purging, i have a small sense of hope to beat this demon and become greater than what my disease has made itself.
I would love to blame the whole lot of my disease on my father never being around, realizing he wasn’t going to be around, and being angry/sad/confused with why…but I know that maybe that was something that gave me some feelings of unwantedness “not good enough” thoughts, but that wasn’t all of it. I know a million little remarks and events in my life lead to it. Some of them my own doing. Nothing this big in life has one simple cause. It’s just not that easy…