Blog

Posted on

…soooo….what ABOUT being “skinny”?

It’s not about being thin. (Except for the new wannarexic.)

(More on “wannarexia,” below.)

Anyway. Just like “it’s not about the food,” it’s also not about the weight.

It’s about calming anxiety. (you can’t stop & eat on the roof of a burning building)
It’s about taking up less space. (Saint Mother Theresa deserves this food more than i do)
It’s about taking up less space. (the smaller the target, the harder to aim.)
It’s about controlling a body that insists upon making you a target for predators. (you can’t grope what isn’t there)
It’s about punishing a body that is deformed. That bleeds. That wheezes, or vomits, exposing your vulnerability when you’re upset.
It’s about expressing “THERE IS SOMETHING WRONG HERE AND I DON’T UNDERSTAND WHAT IT IS BUT WE ALL NEED HELP” in the only way you know how and that will demand help because you’re literally dying.
It’s about not looking pregnant. (pregnant=sex; childbirth=death)
It’s about becoming invisible. (you can’t hurt me if you can’t find me)
It’s about tolerating intense pain. (feeling invisible doesn’t hurt as much when i can blame myself for disappearing)
It’s about seeing an abusive grandparent in the mirror. Each birthday, your memory of her, at your current age, is clearer. (I wasn’t alive when she was 35 or 40. I was too little to remember her at 45. But I do remember her at 50. I remember even better when she was 51. Better at 52.)
And each year your body looks more and more like hers. (why do you know what hers LOOKED like?) (what, EVERYBODY’s grandma didn’t run around in a bikini?!?!)
And each year the mirror makes you sadder and more ashamed.

OK. So what about Wannarexia and Wannarexics?

First. No matter how/why/when you starve, malnourished people are all the same.

(sorry, no, starving doesn’t make special – it makes you like every other starving person)

See: “Minnesota Starvation Experiment” (meaning: see it by googling it)

Wannarexics are only different at the beginning.
(IN GENERAL:)

They’re not embarrassed they starve; they’re proud of it and will draw attention to it.
They’re not desperate to trick you into thinking they eat more; they’ll publicly post their tiny meals on Facebook and Instagram, desperate to get noticed.
They don’t try to hide their shrinking frame with baggy clothes; they highlight it with clingy fabrics & styles that bare their midriffs and thigh gaps and (disappearing) cleavage.
And then they’ll photograph their skinny selves in special poses that look skinnier which you can learn on YouTube.
And they’re far more comfortable displaying their curves in these pics than a “real” anorexic who is trying to annihilate those curves.
They don’t lie about how little they eat; but they will lie about how much.
For them it IS vain and about getting attention and being popular.

They don’t have a mental illness.

But they WILL.

Lack of nutrition, like lack of sleep or oxygen, immediately has a physiological effect on the body. That body includes a brain.
Brain + no oxygen = death.
Brain + no sleep = insanity.
Brain + poor or insufficient nourishment = an insane death.

In November of 2009 a hundred-or-so undergraduate nursing students were taught by the nurse with the PhD in the front of their lecture hall that “all eating disorders start with a diet.”

I wish I’d the courage, then, to say what I will, now:

No. All WANNAREXIA starts with a diet. Eating disorders, like all mental illnesses, all start with as many different reasons as there are the different people who have them.

The nurse with the PhD was talking about her granddaughter.

That nurse was my therapist.

She brought her son (the granddaughter’s dad) to almost every session, though he wasn’t in the room. And everything was filtered through him. Even her undergrad lectures.

…all those misinformed nursing students…

Posted on

Did you know eating disorder clinics suffer zero legal repercussions for advertising care without intention or means to provide it?

(copied and pasted from their website April 2019) (this was true for only 2 of a dozen patients with whom I stayed in contact) (the Ohio Attorney General could help me with false advertising auto services but responded they could do nothing about this; they referred me to the Ohio mental health board)

Monday April 8 2019 I am so fed up with myself that I am desperate for help. Friday night I had coughed up bloody pieces of tissue after making myself throw up, for the second time in as many weeks, and told myself, “Okay, this really has to be IT, and you really have to stop this.” Then. Sunday night, less than 48 hours later, in my night-time zombie-daze, I found myself at the gas station buying candy to satisfy my night-time sweet tooth, feeling like a robot slave to sugar.

The only thing I could do the next morning was research help. I looked and looked and looked, online, going to every website and search engine I could think of (and I’m no slouch in that department) trying to find someone who could tell me what to eat, how much of it to eat, and when, and how often – in other words – a dietitian or a nutritionist who specialized in eating disorders, or a treatment center or clinic who had one that could see me privately.

Nothing.

I live in a black hole of eating disorder treatment – a person had to drive several hours north, south, east, and, or, west, to get to a city that had qualified care for this population. A general hospital nutritionist who helps cardiac and diabetic patients eat more health would not do the trick – most ED patients that I’ve heard or heard of, read, or known, know as much or more about food and nutrition as those clinicians and if their expertise could help we’d have helped ourselves long ago. This person needed to specialize. My old car couldn’t handle long commutes so my singular local option was River Centre Clinic. So there I was on their website. Again.

But. Something New. The Garners had sold the clinic to a new company. His name was still present but clearly he had less power there. And, those same three clinicians that I’d seen for over ten years, now – meaning, combined, they had as much experience treating eating disorders as I had being sick with them. Maybe one of them was “the assistant” mentioned earlier, but his wife hadn’t been there in a long time, which to me seemed less dysfunctional. In fact, I’d considered seeking her out for specialized ED help, but…old car…long commute. At any rate, they had withstood a storm and were still standing. So I filled out the form online again and this time when they called, I talked.

LATER I would learn that this person was highly trained to specifically talk people into coming to treatment. (THEY call them “Admission Specialists” but I call them “Recruiters.” Like for the Army.) LATER. After I was discharged. And no called to check on me for at least 4 weeks. Or even responded to my emails or phone calls. LATER I would realize the manipulative tactic she used saying “just think how your kitties feel when they see you throwing up.”

No, I’m not joking. She actually SAID that. And wanted to schedule me for an assessment but I held out. So she called back the next day. LATER I would realize the discrepancy between how attentive she was prior to admission – compared to how thoroughly cut off you were after discharge.

I agreed to an appointment but still she called me back again the next day to make sure I was showing up for it. My head spun to actually be in their parking lot. My world, even farther tilted, to be on their porch opening their front door. Too lopsided and disoriented to act when I noticed that contrary to my belief David Garner’s wife and mistress had a healthy separation, No, his wife’s Name was right up there on the board with the those same three other long-timers. I look back, now, and think, “Yep. That’s when I should have turned around. It’s just too sick.”

(copied and pasted from their website April 2019) (There were no weekly aftercare groups) (only 2 of the dozen patients with whom I stayed in contact got referrals to specialized ED treatment)

Nor did I turn around when the clinician who was assessing me sped in front of me instead of walking beside me. I accused myself of being judgy, when really it was quite indicative of a problem. It’s only now as I’m typing it that I wonder if it was manipulative when she told me how hard it was to end an assessment wondering if she would ever see the person again or whether or not they would be all right or live or die…I did take pause, though, during my tour of the facility, (after I’d agreed to admission) that she behaved as though she had never been in the adult unit before, exclaiming over a collective patient scrapbook she claimed to have never before seen. LATER, after she received a promotion, and LATER, after this private-between-patients-only scrapbook was prominently laid open for a public open house, I wondered if how excited she seemed was due to how much she knew ahead of time and if so, why I was assigned a therapist who would run out of the building, for good, crying, chased by this person who appeared so delighted to thumb through this artsy scrapbook.

(copied and pasted from their website April 2019) (“throughout the week” equaled ONCE) (“one or two staff members”?? is almost funny if it wasn’t so sad) (the “many hours” part of “each week with you” was definitely a fluid term, as we’re now describing words whose definition is whatever the heck you want it to be)

In other words.

Don’t believe anything you read online.

And if any small or large part of what you’re told is important to you, get it in writing ahead of time.

Posted on

how not to supervise an APPN

At the same time I sent a letter to “Eve”, I also sent another to her “supervising” physician (so-called “supervising” only in the very loosest sense of the term) I sent each of them a copy of the other’s letter and I doubled everything at both their home and business addresses to be 100% sure they had every possible chance to read it.

Dear Dr. LastName,

I was a patient of Eve LastName2 at your Havilah Avenue practice from mid-October, 2003 – June 2, 2009.  (Prior to that, I saw her for 15 months at two other practices.)  I am writing to ask you to please forgive the remainder of my account, sent to collection at Collection Agency of Cush.  I am asking due to financial strain and because my therapy with her – the majority which transpired in your practice – did not meet the standard of care, in the following ways.

The paginated quotes are from Kathleen Wheeler’s “Psychotherapy for the Advanced Practice Psychiatric Nurse,” in which she outlines the standards: “The term boundaries … refers to the therapist’s ability to set a schedule, and honor times; maintain a professional relationship; and protect the patient from intrusions into privacy and confidentiality. . .Therapists’ violations of the frame, such as … being late for sessions … not following the standard protocol for all patients for any reason, making special allowances for a particular patient, feeling the patient is special, social contact with the patient, and violating confidentiality, are  all breaches of boundaries”  (114)

“set a schedule, and honor times … late for sessions”  Running late is one thing.  It is another thing, entirely, to be late AND inform the patient, to her face, that a drug rep takes precedence, and usher them in right in front of the pt.  The longer I saw Eve, the more often this happened.  How could I complain after all the free samples I’d been given?

“Minimal self-disclosure is part of maintaining a professional relationship . . . [it] should not be used to meet the therapist’s own narcissistic or intimacy needs in that the focus is shifted from the patient.  This can … confuse or burden the patient” (117) Mere months after I began therapy, Eve shared not only her discovery of Cain’s sexual abuse but the details: I knew the who (a teacher at SchoolName,) the when (after the birth of his first daughter,) the where (she came right to their front door) & the why (to bring a present for the new baby.)  I knew of Eve’s thoughts/feelings, how later that night ”Adam had to literally hold [her] back from going after the gun,” as she wanted to kill the woman because “She Stole My Son!!” she said to me, with real tears in her eyes.  I knew how Cain called, once, in the middle of Thanksgiving dinner, from Gerar where he was with a minor league team & how as Eve went to the phone she was thinking “what’d that little shit do, now” & that he said “Mom I think I might have AIDS” & that his fear was from when he & a couple buddies visited prostitutes in Nod.  I knew he had a “freak” accident in the shower when he was young & that Eve did CPR on him while she thanked God for letting her be this boy’s mother for as long as she was allowed.  I knew the abuse caused problems in his marriage.  I knew Eve loved living in Ararat state & was so angry at Adam for buying a home in Eden, without her, that she knocked over a table & broke two candlesticks his sister had given them & cried driving the whole way back to Sidon with both boys in the back seat.  I knew she had what she laughingly called “a little bit of separation anxiety” that was probably from the time as a small child when she & her older sister lived with the maternal grandmother while her parents recuperated from a terrible auto accident, & that this grandmother berated their father, that the father was an alcoholic who died young, in his fifties, & that one Christmas Eve, Adam had to drag him out of a bar. I knew how Eve had to urinate inside her car, the winter of 06/07, into a super-size fast-food drink cup, while stranded in a multi-vehicle blizzard accident on north I-69 going home from Cain’s in Gaza. 

“protect the patient from intrusions into privacy and confidentiality”  On 02/10/2011, while examining my cat at his practice, and in front of a vet tech, Adam LastNameTwo asked me, “So, have you started dating, yet?”  The recording of my final session verifies this as sensitive material from my treatment.  If you ever see him, tell him he owes me ten bucks for ½ my co-pay for the ½ a session I wasted on this.

“not following the standard protocol for all patients for any reason”  She had me guest lecture with her twice, in March and November of 2009.  I did her research for her on “Student Services in Michigan Schools” & “Women & Depression.”

“making special allowances for a particular patient”  Far worse than any “allowances,” I was informed of them, of how “special” I was, from the start.  When she volunteered her home phone (Year One,) she said, “Now, I don’t give this to ALL my patients.”  Her personal email (Aug, 2003): “RARELY have I ever given this to one of my patients, maybe only one or two others…”  Her cell (Jan, 2005): “Now I NEVER give this to my patients, but I want you to call me after…”  

“feeling the patient is special “ June, 2006, explaining she missed my call due to a hospitalization: “You know, Lisa, you kept trying to tell me something was “wrong” with me, that I was “different,” but I just didn’t BELIEVE you – it’s like you know me better than I know myself!”  A few wks prior, I’d refused to come to therapy anymore.  This was seductive.

“social contact with the patient”  Eve had me out to her house, for the first time, less than 3 months after my final  session, and twice more in the months that followed.

ABUSE  The imbalance of power/vulnerability create a ZERO-TOLERANCE for abuse of any kind, to any degree, any where, in the treatment environment.  Adah LastName3 was so randomly aggressive, unprofessional, rude, invasive, hostile – that her abuse put me on eggshells whenever I entered the practice.  I resent the number of resources I wasted on this issue iatrogenic to treatment.  She humiliated me, demanding sensitive information, when I called in the middle of a traumatic flashback, the first I’d ever had the courage to permit.  When I complained about it, Eve was dismissive.  (Quote: “I thought we were done talking about that.”)  I have since re-buried it.  It was about how it “hurt” to put on jeans.  I stopped wearing them, for years.  I wear them all the time, now, & I didn’t “process” a damn thing.  You and Eve failed your ethical obligations to maintain a safe treatment milieu.

IRRESPONSIBLE PRESCRIBING  May 2006 I complained about a medication error (Xanax instead of Ativan) and v blamed your wife, saying, “You know what THAT was ZILLAH.  And I’ve just about HAD it with her.  I’m REALLY just gonna have to stop letting her call in my scrips.”  This is one of the (many) reasons I “quit” that summer.  I was offended because Eve’s writing can be illegible & Zillah said she is half deaf, & Alzaporem/Lorazepam are spelled/sound similar, & Eve was not “the doctor,” & Zillah was not “her nurse.” 

NEGLIGENCE  Because I had a “nurse-psychotherapist w/ prescriptive authority” I saw no need to discuss psych meds issues with my GP until after v retired.  At that point, one of the first things my physician did was order a battery of tests to rule out physiological causes for depression, and discovered an endocrine imbalance.  With that under control, I’ve only needed ONE psychotropic (the SAME one) for the past few YEARS. Eve once had me on SIX, in one 8-wk period! Dr. LastName, you are a physician.  Why did you not see to it that these tests were run, immediately?  Did you not know Eve was a novice?!  That she had not had prescriptive authority since one week after I started treatment?  I knew this.  Why didn’t YOU?  Think of the money I spent & the YEARS my brain was wasted by unnecessary drugs.  Eve had me on Deplin, Wellbutrin (potentially Fatal for bulimics,) Xanax, either Lamictal or Risperdone, a High BP med for anxiety, Abilify, Seroquel, Effexor, Zoloft, Trazadone, Ativan…The last 6 (3 of them sedating) in just April/May of 2006, therefore: what I had on hand the summer I refused to see her.  Eve knew my history and that my depression had turned suicidal, yet never brought me in for pink-slip assessment.  (She admitted later that she was so over-booked, it hadn’t even occurred to her.)(?!)  For the next 2 months I rarely left home more than 20 hrs/wk.  I left only to go to BG once/wk, stopped for gas & grocery, and tried & failed to get to my part-time job. (I had a lot of sick time that summer.) I didn’t go to church or to therapy or brush my teeth.  I lost weight, threw up a lot, didn’t bother to clean my toilet, slept in a nest on my living room floor with the air cranked to HI and the TV on the religious channel.  I lived alone.  Not even a pet.

“It is important for the APPN to self-reflect and to examine her own feelings about the patient’s termination to ensure that the patient’s best interests are in the foreground”(395) I transcribed the end of my final session from the recording, noting exactly what I heard to the best of my ability. These are Eve’s last words to me as my therapist:

“Lisa, you know, this is your last session, but this isn’t gonna be the end of our discussing this stuff with each other … Well, I guess we’ll have to email each other; I guess I’ll just have to call you; I guess we’ll just have to stay in contact … You know, Lisa, you – you sound like you think you’re never gonna see me again, like you think you’re never gonna hear from me again.  You know, I’m planning to do a lot of writing! And I will now have the time to do that; I won’t have every minute of every day taken up by something else … Now. I’m gonna start writing here in the next few weeks. And I was thinking, you know, I’ll work on some stuff, and then send it to you, and you can edit it, or whatever, and email it back to me … we’ll have to get together … probably not at ABC, though; I’m planning on spending as little time there as possible … Now what I need from you is the author’s instructions from The Journal of Name Changed … Good. And also that article on equine therapy, do you … Oh; was it any good? … Could you send me that … yeah, well I think I’d like to get into that … So. I’ll be sending you stuff…

That’s how my therapy was “terminated,” Dr. LastName.  What really happened: “I can’t, I have a meeting with the Dean/my mom’s here/I have another meeting with the Dean/my mom’s still here/I think I have a meeting with the Dean/my kids are here/I might have a meeting with the Dean/my kids are still here/(my favorite:)I don’t know if I have a meeting with the Dean or not, but just in case/(and most frequent:) No one can understand how busy I am!!”

”not good practice … to allow a large outstanding bill to accumulate”(119)  I had a “large outstanding bill” from the day I entered your practice until now, because the first year I was there, I paid no fee, and Eve continued to treat me, while I was being charged Her Full Billable Hour.  A total of $5,005.00.  I had insurance when I arrived (I later lost it) but your staff could not “figure out” what my co-pay was, and I eventually stopped asking.  (I was working on self-care and assertiveness.)  By the time I could pay it, I had accumulated even more debt.  And when I paid it, I basically signed over my divorce settlement to you and Eve.  I gave the two of you my house.  (I only got $7K.  I paid my attorney, bought some groceries, and gave you two, the rest: a check for 5 grand.)  I was a year-round full-time student working only part-time, and this was the summer I lived in a homeless shelter.  Think of the homes you and Eve own. 

I could tell you of more violations. Like: the colleague gossip story about Naamah LastName4, followed by Eve saying, “and if you repeat any of that I’ll deny it!”  And more about Eve, her family, their pain, & about Adah. And anecdotes to go with each violation in this letter.  I have about 100 recordings of full sessions, around 1,000 emails between her personal & XY/ABC addresses, and maybe a dozen journals, which back up, allude to, or prove, the content in this letter.  I’ve known for over 6 years that I have a viable malpractice suit sitting in my lap, the resources to file it, and the evidence to win.  I spent around $11,000 at your practice and left with a whole new set of problems. The very least you could do is to forgive my account.  Please respond with the self-addressed stamped envelope that you have released me from the remainder of my debt.  If you need to speak with me in order to clear it, I would be willing to meet with you, IF the rumor is true that you fired Adah.  My cell is in your records.  My desk is (555)555-5555.

Guess.

What.

The next thing you know, SHE is a dean: one of the umpteen gazillion six-figure-earning-higher-education-administrators-who-don’t-even-regularly-teach-a-class but are contributing to student loan debt and the cost of higher education by having lots of meetings accomplishing nothing. In this particular case, she was the dean of a department that had no signage, no building, no website, no product, no income, no employees – the dean of a department that, in fact, existed only in her job title. She was once on a sub-committee that was, I kid you not, called “The Committee on Committees.” I desperately hope that was a joke and am burdened by the thought that it was probably legit.

B U T:

I received my objets d’art at work, through campus mail, about a week later (which didn’t cost her a dime).

It literally took eleven-and-a-half years for me to feel, know, and believe that she

F I N A L L Y

heard me.

Posted on

terminating therapy: definitely how not to do it

DISCLAIMER: For Anyone Who Has Never Been In Any Kind Of Counseling or Therapy: THE FOLLOWING LETTERS ARE NOT NORMAL AND WERE WRITTEN UNDER EXTRAORDINARY CIRCUMSTANCES. IT IS 100% THE CLINICIAN’S JOB TO TERMINATE APPROPRIATELY, WHENEVER POSSIBLE, WITH THEIR PATIENTS OR CLIENTS, WHO SHOULD NEVER HAVE TO WRITE LETTERS LIKE THESE. PLEASE DO NOT ABSORB THE FOLLOWING AS INSTRUCTIVE, BUT, INSTEAD, AS CAUTIONARY.

You are about to read my own termination from a therapist who did not know how to do it. (She actually said that. To me. In session.) It was the product of over 3 years of therapy (with a therapist who possessed intact boundaries), writing, praying, talking, learning, contemplating and journaling. To protect the guilty as well as the innocent these are not real names. Instead I am swapping them in, in chronological order by gender and place, from the oldest printed book using movable type in the West.

First, the letter I sent to my former “retired” therapist (though she told me she was retiring, it was no difficulty to learn, or leap to believe, that she continued to practice, and, yes, is still practicing to this day:

Dear Eve,

I withdraw all previous permissions I have given you to acknowledge me in public, to use any of my writing for any purpose, to contact me, or to discuss (aloud or in print) me, my therapy, or our history with any person, including your family or mine.  This means you may not talk about me with Adam, who brought up issues from my treatment room into vet appointments.  This is the most important thing you need to read.  These are my boundaries.  I will enforce them. For instance, if I discover you publish anything that I can prove references my case I will take you and the publisher to court.  My proof is 7 years of bills, insurance notices, journals about our work, and 100’s of session recordings & emails.  We were going to write a case study together; I saved everything.  In fact, by the time you read this I’ll have a copyright to all the emails, both to/from your personal AND University addresses.  All I have to do is save a backup to a flash-drive & mail it to myself.  Addressed to me & stamped/dated by an arm of the US Federal Government, it is what is considered “a poor man’s copyright.” It’s legal, will take less than 10 min. & cost less than a buck.  My therapy is mine, alone, to tell.

I’m doing this because your deficiency of boundaries made our relationship so sick that I am amputating it, like I did my grandma & Ex.  There’s something wrong with a therapist who tells a pt they “should write a book together someday,” gifts her home phone # saying “Now I don’t give this to all my pts,” & shares details about her father’s alcoholism, her son’s AIDS scare, & her discovery of his childhood sexual abuse – and all this (&more) within the first year of treatment. There’s something wrong with a therapist who initiates discussion about this book for 7 years & ends treatment telling the pt they’ll begin writing it soon (I taped you) instead of terminating appropriately.  Or a therapist who volunteers her personal email saying “RARELY do I give this to a pt” & her cell # saying “Now I never give this to my pts but I want you to call me after that trial…”  Or who gives a pt a few photos of her granddaughters & has the pt lecture with her.  Or out to her farm, where the childless pt plays with her toddler grandson, holds his tiny hand while they all stroll, & picks him up when he lifts his little arms to her because the big dogs have overwhelmed him.  Or who provides treatment for a year for “no fee,” while allowing the pt to incur a year’s worth of debt for each full billable hour.  Or who enters the waiting room, already over 10 min late, only to usher in a drug rep right in front of the pt, saying, “I’ll just be a few more minutes,” – not just once, but so often that she doesn’t need to speak:  she merely needs to smile at the pt while holding up her index finger (gesturing, “just a moment,”) & pat the pt on the head (like a puppy) as she escorts the rep inside.

As you said, you were accountable to Dr. LastName, not me. I am also sending him a letter. I enclosed a copy for you.

I am doing much better now, under ethical care.  My psych meds are under the authority of a physician who knows how to diagnose and medicate.  My therapist’s staff has never been abusive, nor would it be tolerated.  I toughened up.  I reclaimed, without guilt, the independent, introverted, introspective nature that makes me “me.”  I am discriminating about who I allow in my life; yet, I have plenty of good friends.  I have a peaceful, quiet, cozy life, as stress-free as possible:  Goal Accomplished.  I will never again ingest a medication that has not been prescribed by a real “doctor” who graduated from an accredited school of Medicine, and am vocal about my Strong opinion that NURSES have NO business prescribing psychotropics.  The Most Profound and Durable lesson I took from therapy with you is the one you repeated most often: “Lisa.  I want you to be able to take what you’ve learned, here in the treatment room, and be able to apply it out in the real world.”  I have done that!  What you taught me was: to NEVER let anyone know me so well, see me so vulnerable, take so many emotional risks, and, for God’s sake, to never, EVER trust anyone so much.  What I learned from you was that trust/risk/openness/etc. are all very bad ideas. 

Expect an empty box in campus mail. It’s for the shadow box & thank you book I made, if you would be so kind as to return them. They include photos of me, and that feels violating. I lost so much to you that I cannot get back – time, energy, money, trust – but I CAN get my extraordinary art back. If you’ve destroyed the items, please return the box empty, to inform me. I included pre-addressed packing materials, so no writing is necessary. (Writing anything would be “contacting” me, & violating my boundaries.) Although it took longer without you, I have finally terminated with you.

Posted on

How not to recover from 35 years of eating disorders

It took all my energy

(literally: ALL of it)

to confront my therapist: “I’m only staying in treatment with you because it would be easier to fix my issues with you, with you, instead of with another therapist, that I would also have to pay.”

LESSON #6: if you ever find yourself even considering saying this to your therapist or counselor or advisor, I don’t care how mentally ill or guilty or non-compliant or unmotivated or however else they “make” you feel, I beg of you, from the bottom of my heart: J U S T. LEAVE. T h e y S U C K. Therapists are educated and trained to notice and address issues as they (inevitably) arise. Did they think this lesson didn’t apply to them? That “I’m so competent my clients and I won’t have any issues” ??!!??!!?!? You are paying them to do this. Issues are inevitable parts of all relationships and it’s their job to deal with them honestly. Do YOU get to keep YOUR job if you, just, don’t DO it?!

You’ll find this story in another section of this blog but it bears mention, here, because it was the day I purposefully quit working on recovery because it was the day I lost all hope it was possible. Instead I resigned myself to trying to just “manage” my eating disorders alone. That session was the product of over a year of journaling and prayer and careful consideration and it consumed all the assertiveness resources I possessed, or I would have confronted her again, a month later, and fired her, because she never brought the subject up again.

Instead, I kept paying her for two more years until she”retired” – when she literally took me to a new therapist, and I do mean literally. As in, she was in the room, actually there, in the office, telling the new one I was over my eating disorder (in her eyes, apparently, merely “the worried well” to the very end, no matter how often I threw up or how little I ate.) It took 4 years of almost perfect therapy with this almost perfect therapist who had almost perfect boundaries and who listened almost perfectly with an almost perfect blend of compassion and firmness for me to realize and barely even begin to process the truth of what had transpired in that former therapist’s office.

So. Back to June 2007, after that session I called out my therapist: I purposefully quit even trying to recover. Eleven years later, December 2018: I quit trying to even manage my eating disorders and purposefully embraced them again, not caring how much/often I starved/fasted/binged/vomited/restricted … everything but laxatives. In the 11 years between, I wrote a lot of letters letting people know who I really was and what I really needed and what I really believed and obviously lost a few people. My beloved step-mom died. My dear pastor died. So did the car I’d driven for 19 years. I moved. Alone. I set boundaries and let go of a few more people. I got bullied past the point of a new PTSD diagnosis at my full-time job and plain old picked-on at my part-time job. I filed a lawsuit. I drank too much. Way too much. (Until I went to Racing for Recovery, an amazingly innovative and holistic treatment center for substance abuse, where I regained my self-respect, or at least enough to risk spine surgery:) after a bone graft, laminectomy, and fusion, I was out of work for three months and in and out of physical therapy for the next 2 years. And I gained weight. A LOT. More, than ever, in my life. I’d never, ever, for so long, been so sedentary or so restricted in movement or practiced so much patience, but it wasn’t enough patience to cope with the weight gain. I ran too soon and too fast and too far and it was too much for my knee. The following year it was my tushie. The injuries slowed me even more which led to even more weight gain and more discomfort. And I shouldn’t say “discomfort.” It’s worse than that. Instead of growing used to my own skin, my intolerance for the body I live in grows incrementally more disabling at an ever-increasingly rapid rate.

Enter Anorexia Effort Umpteen-Billion-&- something, binge/purge subtype. That was December 2018. It worked. It also led to me being treated at 2am in the the ER with a ham sandwich that the nurse brought to me to eat while he scrounged for supplies to deal with the wound on my forehead where my scalp was showing from slamming my face into the metal corner of the elevator frame from falling down from getting dizzy from not eating anything that day but 2 packets of chocolate covered espresso beans.

(Apparently, my body was a little tired of how I’d been “feeding” it the past 35 years.)

Shortly after, I started a temporary part-time job and was too busy with it in the early months of 2019 to starve or vomit too much because of how much it debilitated me. But. As soon as the job was over, in mid-March, I plunged down the rabbit hole and straight into the toilet.

Come on! It’s ridiculous!

One must have some sense of jocularity when observing the ridiculous.

So there I was on a Friday night, April 5th, 2019, to be exact, coughing up blood for the second time in the past two weeks.

Now, that was new. I’d vomited blood, before. Many times, actually. Not copious amounts, but enough to get my attention. But coughing it up? Like my esophagus was disintegrating? An earlier esophageal scope had found “tears” – as in, “torn.” But … disintegrating?

I remember saying all this at my assessment at River Centre five days later, and how angry and irritated I felt, not for being asked, not at myself for being honest, but angry at myself that this was my truth, angry that I was such an embarrassing human. And I remember her response, her brow furrowed with concern, the compassion in her voice

(don’t worry, she got over it)

saying, “You know – you’re really very sick”

and how completely taken aback I was to hear that. I fell for that like the sucker I apparently am and five days later wrote them a big fat check worth half a month’s salary.

Sucker.

Wait!! What happened!! How did I end up in the clinic?! Yep. That’s EXACTLY how I felt.

Posted on

Outstanding ways to ensure shrewd potential clients doubt your competence:

Around the time I moved into my very first place of my own a 3rd exposé appeared in our local paper about the founder of the only eating disorder treatment center in a 200 mile radius. It noted more boundary violations, some that I did not register at the time because I was ignorant of being a similar victim, and was, like Garner’s prey, grateful to be violated.

For instance, one anorexic victim (excuse me – cough!clientcough!) named “Jan” was quoted praising him for taking her calls “at all hours” – that’s another very important lesson that I’ll get into under “the therapist” section. For now, just know you should FLEE, and QUICKLY!, from ANY mental health professional who allows this. Your therapist should ABSOLUTELY have some method of contact between sessions but they should ABSOLUTELY have very clear and fair boundaries that allow them to care for themselves and you in a professional, ethical manner. You can be as grateful as you want to be for being mistreated but the only impact that will have upon the inevitable consequences you will suffer is to make them even more difficult to move beyond.

We also learned about his (boring) board game (that I later discovered multiple copies discarded and abandoned around his clinic. (Interesting graduate-level study tool? MAYBE. Fun “game”?!? NOT!) Also, this was where we learned both his and his mistress’ name were both on the deed of the condo he helped her buy. In this third newspaper article one of his supporters defended his right to his (quote) “lifestyle.” We learned that shortly before the first article came out, he defiantly refused the Ohio State Board’s demand he relinquish his license, which led them to file no less than 15 ethics violations. We learned so many good clinicians had quit their jobs, there, because of the environment.

Well, “Duh,” I thought. This guy and his clinic actually kind of made my unstable life appear relatively calm via comparison, a thought that rendered any notion of getting treatment there a ridiculously moot idea. If you read only one of these articles about the man that founded this clinic and trained the people that still work there, today, and developed the treatment protocols that it is only just recently in 2020 barely began to stop following, then read this one from late December of 2004, the most thorough of them all:

https://www.toledoblade.com/frontpage/2004/12/26/Sylvania-psychologist-battles-to-salvage-controversial-career/stories/feed/feed/index.rss

These 3 articles were all written by the same Pulitzer Prize winning investigative journalist, and 7 months after this one he wrote his fourth and last, when the Ohio Board finally succeeded in suspending David Garner’s license – this is the first one Garner “declined” to comment:

https://www.toledoblade.com/news/state/2005/07/22/Psychologist-accepts-temporary-suspension/stories/200507220062

Around this time, therapy had turned into the most stressful thing in my life. And I thought this was normal: a logical byproduct of making a voluntary effort to engage oneself in an intense process of change to be a better human and grow and recover.

Lesson Number Five: Therapy is NOT supposed to be “the most stressful thing” in your life. After years of rehabilitative therapy for my therapy, from an ethical clinician who has boundaries, I can tell you with assurance that this lesson is viable. In late spring of 2007 I finally gave up on recovery. Not only did I lack the support I needed to do so, this therapist was clearly not able to help me. And after 5 years of trying to recover I clearly did not have the kind of support system needed to do so, nor was I able to cultivate one on my own. I told her I was only staying so that I would not have to terminate with so many issues between us, saying it would be easier to resolve them directly with her than take them to another provider. She agreed. However, after that difficult session I lost my nerve to confront her over and over again. And she never brought it up. And because it was a sick relationship under the care of a woman I suspect was the borderline she accused me of being, I stupidly stayed 2 more years, until she (supposedly) “retired.” (…yeah right…)

What happened in that office is a different part of my story, but it made checking River Centre’s website a regular part of my life, still watching for indications they were dealing with their scandal in a healthy way. But the same names remained: The two Garners. The same unique last name. A 4th name I had seen for quite awhile. I hoped and watched and waited especially for David Garner’s name to disappear. The same for any female who left, hoping it could be his wife or the “assistant” with whom he had an affair. No luck. The wife continued to work together with the husband and his mistress at the same clinic they opened together, reparenting young eating disorder victims, one big incestual happy family.

How could anyone get help at that place? Now that his secret was out, how could these therapists continue to help providing new victims for this predator to exploit? How could the scorned wife continue to work with him and his girl-on-the-side?

In 2008 the last article about Garner and his clinic came out in the city paper. It was written by a different journalist. They finally took his license away for good.

Like most predators, I correctly guessed he was a re-offender incapable of rehabilitation.

He did it again.

And this time, it was another, eating disordered, vulnerable, young, malleable

patient.

https://www.toledoblade.com/local/2008/10/22/Sylvania-psychologist-cedes-license-in-sex-charge/stories/200810220060

Posted on

10 unparalleled reasons your abandonment issues, which are only with therapists, are uniquely iatrogenic to therapy:

  1. She knows your other therapist failed to outlive your treatment because they were working together when her brain tumor was diagnosed
  2. In the summer of 2002, a few months into treatment, you admit this impacts your ability to “engage” and she assures you “I wouldn’t start this with you if I wasn’t going to finish it”
  3. But then in December she says she might be retiring
  4. And then in March she says she’s 99% positive she IS retiring
  5. But then she doesn’t (though she doesn’t tell you – in April, she’s just still “there”)
  6. And then in June she suddenly moves to a different practice
  7. Which, she promises, in July, is moving to a different location
  8. Which, in August, when you show up there, is only a sign by a locked door with no one there
  9. After you drove from an hour away
  10. And it’s not the first time you drove an hour to a session that she didn’t show up for

(Lots of lessons, today. Lesson Number Two: If your therapist seems like she might be flightier than YOU, Go With Your GUT. She probably IS.)

SO! And that was just the therapy part of my 2003! I left out the part when I was pink-slipped into a psychiatric ward for half a month for being suicidal, or the part a few months later when my ex-husband’s “anger management counselor” pulled me aside to tell me privately that she was seriously worried he would rape me, or how she failed to express concern about why I failed to express concern (because he already had raped me though I wasn’t yet able to correctly define it) or the part when we had to have a special meeting with the city police, where I worked, because of his behavior there,

blah

blah

blaaaaaah……

Therefore whether or not I would, could, needed, wanted, deserved, was sick enough, (blah blah again) to go to the nearest eating disorder clinic was not something I had time or energy or resources to contemplate because I was busy just surviving. Despite the fact that I was vomiting profusely and often and somewhere in there my kidney function had been compromised and I had to quit one of my part-time jobs that I loved best. When that newspaper article came out in December of 2003, I gave it as much time as it took you to read that last blog post. And in the year that followed before the next article came out in December of 2004 was no better. My gem of an ex had the sheriff kick ME out of the house, I packed up my stuff and moved 5 times, transferred schools, changed my program of study, relocated to the nearby city, and spent the summer in a women’s shelter for victims of domestic violence. All while having no insurance and a therapist charging me for each full billable hour down to 15-minute increments which I was STUPID enough to be GRATEFUL for her willingness to let me accrue a bill.

(Which is why, when my divorce settlement came through, I. LITERALLY. Gave. Her. My. HOUSE. I paid my lawyer, bought a few groceries, and gave her All. The. Rest.- my freaking HOUSE.) (This is Lesson Number Three: A therapist who allows you to rack up a bill for over a year is VIOLATING YOUR BOUNDARIES. RUN. Run Away FAST.)

https://www.toledoblade.com/news/state/2004/12/04/State-levies-new-charges-against-embattled-Sylvania-psychologist/stories/200412040062

Don’t want to read the article? Allow me to enlighten you. Remember the Ohio State Board of Psychology wanted to revoke David Garner’s license for having a sexual affair with a colleague that he was supposed to be supervising. This inspired him to send a letter to his own patients and their families soliciting them to support him with the following exact words: “I do believe that those who will be personally affected by decisions made by the board should also have a voice.” Then, he, himself, sent the board the inch-thick stack of letters they wrote for him. If you think, as I do, that sounds like he blatantly used his position of power to exploit them, you’d be right on target with the State Board who accused him of just that. Personally, I wonder why he didn’t change careers and run for public office, because even though he wrote those words with his own “pen,” he denied the charges, indicating his ability to create his own reality is on par with any skilled politician.

I did mention the article to my therapist. And we actually had a discussion about GARNER’s awful lack of boundaries. (Right?!?) (cue Alanis Morissette.) But in December of 2004 I was preparing for my divorce trial while failing Russian History (I thought the Romanov dynasty would be “fun”) while living with an aunt and uncle and grown-up cousin and trying to get better “for” them. (Which, by the way, Does Not Work.) (That’s Lesson Number Four: You cannot get better for other people. It can be a temporary motivating factor, but It Is NOT sustainable.)

In mid-2005 I got my very first apartment – the first time I ever lived alone. The day I got the keys, I picked up some burgers, fries and a shake, and promptly inaugurated my new bathroom by vomiting, again, profusely, and often. On day three, I ran into my therapist’s office unannounced and blurted out, “Does this mean I can’t do it?!? Or that I’m doing it?!?” She said I was fine. And asked me if I wanted to take home the stuffed puppy her grand-daughter had her bring in for me at my previous session, which I had turned down, not wanting to be more involved with them or their father or her outside life than I already was. But this time I took it. I slept with it every night, Every Single Night, for the next thirteen years.

Two years ago I gave it to my cats and replaced it with a stuffed monkey from the zoo, named Emerson. My (current) therapist said she thought that sounded “significant.”

It was.

Posted on

The River Centre Clinic story takes a back seat for the next 18 years. Time to fast-forward.

The main story, at this point, is individual therapy. The DSM IV-TR came out in 2000, and there was no doubt I met the criteria for for a slam-dunk diagnosis. On top of that, I had been sick at that point for 17 years
(the fancy clinical adjective: “entrenched”)
AND on top of THAT, my environment (a.k.a.: my marriage) was not supportive. Thus I automatically assumed that under her care it would only be a matter of time before she admitted me to the nearest treatment center for eating disorders: River Centre Clinic.

Ten-Mile Creek ran fast and swollen my first month, there. The ducks were constant company.

Now, allow me, if you would be so kind, to digress into a history lesson. For I think it’s possible that one day in the future, the factual origins of social media could blur into Myth and Legend.
Once upon a time, long, long ago, before Buzzfeed and Huffington Post, there were these things called newspapers. They were actually printed on real paper, and they were printed all over the globe and in every language, and (along with TV and radio) that is how we learned about the world around us. In general, we could reasonably trust most of what we read because they were only supposed to print stuff that they could prove was true. This concept was called: “Journalistic Integrity.” Anything else was just gossip. (And gossip used to be considered “wrong.”) Also, sources of information were allowed to protect their privacy, so they could remain reasonably safe from persecution. This concept was called “anonymity.” Back then, in the olden times of long ago, anonymous sources were often considered the opposite they are, today, and many looked upon them with admiration for their courage to find a way to expose truth.
Okay – you got all that? Because I’m going to discuss newspaper articles that are important to my story.

One day towards the end of 2003 an article came out in the city paper that I paid special attention to because it was about this “River Centre Clinic” place in which I’d already stockpiled some hope. (Our small town had it’s own newspaper but most of the people I knew got the city paper, too, because there was nothing in the other one.) (Hi – that was sarcasm – why would we buy blank paper?) (And we really got it for the coupons.) It got my undivided attention because I was not doing so great. (Big, huge, ginormous Understatement.) And a good eating disorders clinic would have been a very helpful thing.

It was an extra-trustworthy article because it was written by a Pulitzer Prize winning young man who married a local woman who just happened to be one of my friends:
https://www.toledoblade.com/frontpage/2003/12/12/Trouble-revisits-local-psychologist-as-counselor-admits-affair-state-cites-ethics-breaches/stories/200312120022

So. Apparently. This “David Garner” person, who founded the clinic with his wife, liked having sex with his patients. And he treated anorexia. So that means he was drawn to women who had starved away their curves and periods and looked like children. So obviously there could have been a pedophilia theme running in there, as well. And he didn’t JUST abuse his power: when his victim lodged a formal complaint, he LIED about it. For a YEAR. Think about that for a moment: that made her look like a liar. So: not only was she sick, he made her sicker with his abuse, and THEN he slandered her CHARACTER for year (which allowed others to, as well.) I mean – HOW MUCH DAMAGE IS ONE PERSON ALLOWED TO INFLICT UPON ANOTHER PERSON?

Right away I had to wonder about the co-founder of this clinic, his wife, who was also a therapist. WHY would any therapist help supply this guy with fresh victims by setting up an eating disorder clinic with him?!? it’s not like he could hide from her the fact that The Country Of Canada suspended his license.

Wait. It gets better. Shortly after this he became an ex-pat of his homeland and crossed the border south to Michigan. At this point a SECOND Canadian victim came forward.
DUDE. This guys been doing this – and getting away with it – since FREAKING 1979, This is when him homeland stripped him of his license forever, and he moved even farther from Canada, and crossed another border, south, into Ohio, whose licensing board apparently thought that unlike every other repeat offender, this guy was done repeating. But this guy just couldn’t keep his pants zipped at work. He had an affair with an “assistant psychologist,” at the clinic, who was publicly willing to shoulder the blame.

An “assistant” would imply she was early in her career and thus probably young. One might wonder why the older, mentor-type figure would allow the younger person to compromise herself in this way. Unless they had no scruples whatsoever. I couldn’t help but think of how easily a younger woman could have been manipulated by an older man who (the article said) even helped her by a house.

What on earth was the atmosphere like at this clinic run by a husband and wife working together with his mistress? I wondered. Nope. I’m definitely not going there anytime soon. (Which wasn’t a problem with my therapist, who merely called me “the worried well” – but that’s for a different story.) As I continued to work in recovery, wondering if my therapist was right, I continued watching River Centre Clinic’s website, wondering if my therapist was wrong.

Why did I care? Why did I pay attention? Why did I spend brain cells on it?

Simple. It was the closest and only viable treatment facility and I needed full-time care. My therapist was a well-published eating disorders “expert” (quotes deliberate) so I was unable to consciously acknowledge that she was not helping my eating disorder. I literally starved the 24-48 period before most sessions, and on those occasions she rewarded me with compliments on my appearance.

… which is I N S A N E …

So somewhere deep in my fuzzy screwed up brain I knew I needed what this clinic offered but impossible if they cancelled out their help by doing more harm than good. So I watched their website: maybe one of the female staff members name would disappear from the site, indicating the “psychology assistant” went to work somewhere Maureen Garner (her boyfriend’s WIFE) did NOT work. Or maybe David Garner would get fired, or quit for the sake of his clinic. If I saw staff changes that indicated the Clinic was dealing with their drama in a healthy way, then maybe I could get the care I suspected I needed. And had possibly never stopped needing, since I left my hospital program so many years earlier.

Posted on

20 years ago: easy memory of my first look at River Centre’s website

There were purple borders, a list of names & bios in italics (names in bold) and a tiny photo along the top of what looked like… a bank (?) You know – red brick, white columns? Speaking of banks. My job was duller than tombs, but the boredom gave me energy to do that other big thing that happened in 2000 – I went back to ballet class.

And that brings me to my first lesson. I could easily be the worst feminist in the world, but I at least know this: if you tell your female therapist that your spouse is a good husband because he “let” you go back to ballet, she is supposed to say,

“ExCUSE me, What?! What do you mean, ‘he LET‘ you? You ask PERMISSION to do things like that? I KNOW you’re a Christian, but I’m also POSITIVE that is NOT what ‘honor and OBEY’ is intended to mean!”

Okay, she should definitely not be such a pushy drama queen. But she is MOST DEFINITELY NOT supposed to nod and smile and agree with you. She should definitely “delve deeper” into a remark like that. (Someday I shall pontificate with great snark on how therapy usually has to be either a “journey” or some kind of psychiatric archeological “dig.”)

So: Ballet! I’d avoided the dance studio since graduating high school because it felt like one of my limbs had been ripped off. At that time, no one stayed after high school. I couldn’t go to a single show when it was still so excruciatingly painful not having it in my life. But when my friend’s daughter asked me to go to her dance recital for about the third year in a row, I finally sucked it up for the little girl’s sake and I couldn’t believe how many older people were on stage. I was actually confused. It took the whole show to dawn on me that they must be in classes, and if they could take class, so could I! I didn’t know how I was going to put on a leotard but I did know that nobody else cared what I look like. My eating disorder was no match up against my love of ballet. And oh, how easy it was to feel at home at that barre! And then my lifelong teacher welcomed me with reference to our history. And then, suddenly, I not only felt at home, but also seen and known and understood and I didn’t know I missed all of those feelings until I had them. When we all turned around to do the reverse barre, and in the reflection of the dark windows I could watch all our limbs floating and bending in such perfect synchronicity, my eyes welled up with tears at the beauty of it all. And then with pain at how starkly this moment contrasted with the rest of my life. And then one of the tears overflowed down my cheek. And I don’t cry.

For some reason and in some way that I still don’t understand, this was the point I started daydreaming conversations with Ross, my former therapist who had passed away.

Ballet woke up a part of my soul. One day at the bank, while waiting for a coworker, I leafed through an insurance brochure and found two addresses for my pediatrician from the hospital program. (I looked exclusively to see if anyone from the team still “existed” – something that had become an ingrained habit by then.) With this restored piece of my soul I sent him duplicate letters at both locations for reassurance. Each contained a self-addressed, stamped envelope, to minimize as much as possible any invasion into his time. I also included email addresses and phone numbers to comply with whatever was most convenient for him. I wrote about my struggle getting past Ross’ death over 10 years earlier and asked if he could tell me anything about her, and also about what happened to the team. When my office phone rang, I was so overcome by his kindness and generosity, and by how the sound of his voice validated my memories, that I could not remain in my rigid environment. I excused myself, exited around the church next door where I directed youth choirs, crossed the street to my car, smoked a cigarette, stared a minute or two into the window of an empty building trying to understand why my reflection looked thin, and generally tried to compose myself. He gave me a phone number. I kept it in my wallet for years. I still wear the denim J. Crew pea coat I had on, new, that afternoon. Funny how twenty years steals buttons, huh?

I’m the old fart on the right. The costume: reassigned to a 2′ tree skirt (well it’s got blue lights & organic crap & blue & silver ornaments) (it’s SOOTHING!)

I lived off ballet for a year and at the end of it, tried to bury how angry I was afraid my husband was after he saw the dance show. That fall I was at my work desk when a loan officer quickly popped their head over the half-door of our room and told us they thought there was something on TV we had to see. We stepped out of our room into the breakroom and joined a small group just in time to see the second plane hit. I was confused, at first, my skills at denying reality coming in particularly handy. But when the North tower fell, I know I certainly woke up. And from that moment we all shut up and stayed shut up, the whole (and what had turned into a) large crowded group of us, until my boss announced loudly, “Well, I’m going back to work.” None of the rest of us moved or spoke for the next few hours. She missed the Pentagon.

The next evening I gave up trying to control my bulimic behavior. That included exercising away my severely restricted calories – which I had utilized from the start – and self-induced vomiting, which I reintroduced into my life in 1999, after a long hiatus. But I decided why bother? A foreign religious zealout could aim a jet at any one of our heads at any moment, so WHAT? if one woman barfs too much on purpose? The impossibility of shoving aside the horrific starkness of reality loosened the outer layers of my denial. The summer before I forced myself to quit vomiting, cold-turkey, and existed the hot months basically on Hawaiian pizzas (after he left for work) and strawberry cheesecake flurries (one that I ate during the day and one I hid in the freezer for apres pizza.) I hated the bank for how money-oriented every single little thing was (duh!) and tried to learned a lesson from jumping into one job just to get away from another. I started stalking the classifieds with weekly dedication for a job to open at the public library simply because that was where I wanted to work.

It paid off. My (ex)husband didn’t like that it would be part-time. I didn’t like that he didn’t like it. But the more my sanity disintegrated the more I valued it.

Posted on

River Centre Clinic was not a place I would ever be sick enough to need treatment a second time.

But the thought of it’s existence brought me comfort, because I assumed that at least part of my old treatment team had to be there. Where else would those specialists have gone when their hospital program closed? And maybe I could talk to them, someday. I had never stopped keeping an eye out for them whenever I drove an hour to the city to shop at the malls. I mean, therapists, nurses and doctors went to malls, too – right? I badly needed verification they existed, because although I cherished my memories of treatment there, those memories didn’t feel like mine. They felt like something I read about, and that was a source of great pain and confusion to feel like this thing that was so important to me had nothing to do with reality.

Reality. A good transition word to refocus. For, as I said, “De Nile ain’t just a river in Egypt,” it was my Way Of Life. I was in denial about my health, my job, my marriage, my education…almost everything. Thus, I had no insight about my misery. I simply assumed the things I had heard were true:
“You’re not happy with anything!”
“No matter how/what/when/where, ___ it’s never enough for you! You’ll never be happy!”
“You know what, you’re spoiled! You’re just like your father/mother/grandmother! you have to have everything go your way or all you do is…”
What was my way? I had a “way”?…I never figured that one out. I just figured (is that past tense?) it was all true and I was a dyed-in-the-wool malcontent with no hope of hope. I had long since accepted that as fact. I only wished acceptance made it less painful.

So there I was driving home from the factory one summer morning. I remember about where I was, north of town, and how when I glanced out the passenger window I noticed the mist rising off a field that was backed by a treeline, and how I thought, “Wow, today’s gonna be a scorcher” And that moment it hit me:” I don’t have to stay here. I can leave!” Immediately: a flash of joy, of relief, of shock, then shame settled in for, by “leave,” I meant leaving the living. (I’m still too ashamed to use the “s” word.) This was not a new thought; desensitization to the idea settled in beside the shame. For the time being though, the shock lingered and I was able to use it to began making attempts to change. Something. Anything.

I started by moving from nights to second shift (a.k.a. No Life – you work late, so you fall asleep late, so you get up late, so all you really have time to do is get ready for work. Repeat.) By the time the company Christmas party rolled around, though still on the high end of a healthy weight range, I’d lost about two dozen pounds. I met up with my old friend at the shrimp table exactly like the year before, remembering how emaciated she was despite all the “free shrimp” she was so happy about. I still wish I had the burgundy outfit I bought for the event – a huge splurge for me, from the Ann Taylor store. I bought it because the semi-cropped jacket over the zip-up pants made me look deceptively thin.

That year, though, the roles were reversed, and it was my old friend who was staring and whispering, and I who was uncomfortable and irritated. And I remember why! “They don’t know anything about eating disorders! I’m at the high end of a healthy BMI for someone as short as me! I have WAY more experience with this than they do!! I KNOW what I’m doing.”
Another flip-flop: I didn’t socialize that year. I just hung out with my antisocial husband.

My next change was the job, itself. My depression made me desperate; I jumped at the first viable position. It was at a bank, where no one would notice how much weight I’d lost, freeing me to continue to lose more. My new boss, though, seemed food-obsessed, constantly bringing in desserts that most co-workers were more than happy to be pressured into eating. But me? Well…one Ash Wednesday, I amused myself for 3 days in a row by challenging myself to open my wrappers in total silence, so she wouldn’t hear me eating at my desk. I told her I was fasting for religious reasons – and oh! the shameful kick I got watching her freak out exponentially as each day passed.

Two big things happened in 2000. The first big thing was we done got ourselves this new-fangled gadget they was callin a computer, and we bought us a complicated piece o’ furniture as durn big as a shed to put the thing in. And what was one of the first things I did with it?


I looked up this place called The River Centre Clinic.
I read every name, every bio: David Garner. Maureen Garner. (husband and wife? yep)
A unique last name; female.
More that I don’t recall because they didn’t stay.
(But not one name from my old team.
And I’d know because I kept every scrap of paper from that program.
I still haven’t thrown any of it away.)

Posted on

Family-sized Bags of Repurposed Horsefeed Made Me Anorexic

1 Twenty-ish years before the clinic,
a year or two before the Twin Towers fell.

Night shift at the factory. I considered myself recovered at this point (which means nothing. By age thirty, de Nile wasn’t just some river in Egypt but my most profound modus operandi.) I truly never expected to live to see 30; and when I arrived I had no idea what to do, had made no plans. So there I was at the factory. It was depressing and I ate myself silly, never connecting the dots that my binge eating was no different than anorexia or bulimia – it was just a new, unfamiliar band-aid for the same old wound.

But I did find a friend, there. Around my age, from around my area; we had even hung around some of the same people. For the first time there was someone interested in, at the same time I was willing to talk about, my eating disorder and the month I spent in a hospital ward for treatment. I’d never met anyone so comfortable with, nor so eager for, the most mundane details. That did trigger an instinctual alarm, but even if I’d known to listen, the denial I was in regarding my own eating disorder blinded me to what I was seeing in front of my own eyes: the more I talked, the more she shrank.

I doubted my vision until starvation affected the way she spoke, thought, reacted, communicated, behaved, et cetera, et cetera. By that point her friends were comparing notes trying to tease out the truth to give us direction. For instance: the “ice cream” she claimed (to Friend A) to “pig out on” nightly was (according to Friend B’s look in her freezer) actually zero-fat, zero-sugar, zero-nutrition, synthetically flavored air called “frozen whipped topping.” On the outside, as a “recovered” eating disorder survivor, I took on the role of expert; calming, explaining and guiding our circle of friends. On the inside I wrecked. I felt left out. I felt tricked (why had I listened to people telling me starving didn’t work? obviously they were wrong, for here she was right in front of me, with the sticks for arms and legs that I coveted, instead of my own squishy, bloated limbs.) While i paid lip-service to health and common sense, my heart felt like a failure for letting myself grow layers upon layers of padding.. And I misinterpreted all of my own feelings as competitiveness. What I was able to comprehend was that I could not deal with her anorexia in a healthy way.

I had a coping skill. A real one – not one involving my body or what I put in it. (This part usually seems to surprise people, now, knowing only the devolved state I’ve been currently living in.) I wrote my friend a letter, explaining as kindly and respectfully as I could, my fears for myself and her that led me to give her an ultimatum: get treatment or I cannot be friends with you. Though we were never close, again, she did leave for the nearest eating disorders clinic.

When she returned a few months later, complaining they only ate frozen, microwaved food, I literally did NOT understand. “What do MEAN there’s no stoves?” I asked. There’s no such a thing as a kitchen without a stove. She may as well have said they fed her green eggs and ham. There’s no such thing. So she repeated herself: “There’s no stoves. There are two kitchens and neither one has a stove. It’s all microwaved. There’s, like, dozens of microwaves.” What?! No way! I told our friends not to believe her because no eating disorders treatment center would feed malnourished people that way. Even back then in the late 90s, before nutrition science, with all other sciences, practically exploded with progress, we were starting to catch on that mass-produced, preprocessed, chemically-preserved-to-withstand-Armaggedon food was detrimental to our general health. So her claim that a group of clinical experts deliberately fed one of the most malnourished populations like that could not be true. I said it was probably a couple of special “challenge” meals that angered her.

(I

was

WRONG.

SOOO wrong. Though it was 20 more years before I learned HOW wrong I was.)

When she revealed that her clinic was in the same city as my hospital program it made me so excited that it startled and scared me. (Yes, my feelings frighten me.) (I’m Super Fun like that.) In the 10 years since I’d been a patient, there, Managed Care happened, and my old hospital program had dissolved. I automatically assumed that her clinic was where my treatment team had landed because it’s not a big city and there was no other specialized program in a very large tristate area. BUT. That immediate hopeful flash of excitment didn’t just scare me, it confused me, because I wasn’t sick, though I was sure I was pretty messed up to be excited about an eating disorders treatment center.

But you see, about that part where I called myself a “recovered” eating disorder survivor? Well, that whole time I had been doing exactly what my friend had been doing. starving. It just didn’t look like it because I was so overweight. We were in different stages of the same disease; a year before, she had looked like me; a year later, I looked like her. But according to the DSM IV (the most current diagnostic tool at the time):
a) I was too fat to be anorexic because you had to be at least 15% UNDERweight and I was more than 15% OVERweight
b) I didn’t purge at least twice a week for at least 3 months because there was nothing to purge
I didn’t look sick like my friend when I ate, either, because I had been sick for so long my eating habits were even weirder. Instead of inhaling buckets of cool, whipped, artificially flavored air, I would eat an entire bag of cheese puffs. All night long. For eight hours. And I would exercise all of the calories off before my next shift/bag. (And for which I suddenly developed a craving until I saw this video that made me retitle this post: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/a-brief-history-of-the-cheese-curl-junk-foods-happiest-accident

I was not aware of how sick I was or of why I was so desperate to learn where my friend went. I only knew it was imperative I found out and imperative that no one else found out how imperative it was that I found out. Buuuut, not only did I give my friend an ultimatum to enter treatment, then, when she got back, I didn’t believe her. Yeah. She was angry. Also, since I wasn’t sick, it was imperative I didn’t look or sound sick. So, very, very carefully, I tried very hard to inquire as casually as I could, “where, again, did you go, again?”

“River Centre Clinic.” Says she.

“Never heard of it,” says I, very casually shrugging, and shaking my head, trying very hard to feel as cavalier as I was trying to look and sound.

Never forgot it, either.