Tag: eating disorders treatment

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.