Tag: Toledo Center for Eating Disorders

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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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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.)

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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.