AtypicallyRecovering

Photo: mine- it was the only footprint in the dry river bed… where did it come from?

There are plenty of articles and videos about the impact of trauma on the development of eating disorders. The attack on self-worth goes deep. For some, ‘disappearing’ is a response to unwanted contact with people. For others, it’s about misplaced shame. When someone is emotionally, sexually, or physically abused, or neglected, there is a major disruption to the foundation of a healthy view of themselves.

I don’t like ‘blame’ for how I view my mom who was one of my primary abusers. She did horrible things, but I think it was more that she was broken than deliberately malicious most of the time. My maternal grandmother also did some sketchy things when I was very young, but I still preferred being there than at home… at least with my grandparents, I wasn’t invisible.

There were traumatic events at the hands of those outside of my family, and one particularly horrific example is with my skating coach. Her husband bludgeoned their six children because he was mad she wanted a divorce. I was 14 at the time, and in another blog I wrote, the comments included many who felt the same way I did… if parents get mad, kids can get killed. I knew the oldest kid from the rink, though not well. My parents also didn’t handle it well, and told me to get over it, it had nothing to do with me. My coach was someone I could just be myself with, and she was very kind to me. I still think about that event every day.

As a young adult, I was raped, beaten, and sodomized for 6 hours before I was able to escape (he finally passed out), and police came. One of them shot the rapist in my bedroom. He didn’t die and I had to testify at the trial. He changed his plea mid-trial and accepted a 60 year sentence. He’s out on parole now for ‘good behavior’ and the stupid Texas law at the time of the crime, but he’s still my bitch until 2048. He planned to dismember me alive with one of my kitchen knives.

There were other less intense sexual assaults… one of the students at the U of IL wanted me to go out with him, and he pinned me to the dorm lobby floor, forcibly kissing me, as if that was some kind of lure. I was as disgusted with him as I was the other students in the lobby who just walked by and did/said nothing. A high school classmate groped me in the hall at school.

Having leukemia was traumatic. The intensity and duration of 20 months of daily chemo of some kind was exhausting, and the stress of the initial weeks when it was possible to die from sneezing and a brain bleed from the increased vascular pressure from a sneeze (or cough, etc) was hard. Being in the hospital for 6 weeks was also difficult, on reverse isolation. I’m fortunate in that the kind of leukemia I had (APL) is curable- not just in remission, and I’m 15 years out from the diagnosis with no sign of it being in my body for the last 15 years (first negative bone marrow test was after 3 weeks of induction chemo).

I didn’t used to think that trauma had anything to do with why I developed an eating disorder because of the way I was groomed for starvation at home, and the ongoing abuse when I was a toddler normalized it for decades- it wasn’t until after the rape that I was taught about types of abuse. Now I can see that the impact of each trauma/abuse did gut any self-worth, and that has a huge impact on who does or doesn’t engage in eating disorder behaviors. Food = staying alive. When being alive becomes too painful, there is an urge not to support its continuation. It’s not a conscious self-harm/suicidal mentality, but that’s what it becomes even if not acknowledged. I have no interest in dying, but I’m also not really living. I hope that changes.