| Written by Diana, on 03-12-2006 09:53 |
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From my post in the HBO Community: I've watched this documentary several times, taped it, I'm so grateful that it was made. I related so much with Brittany in this documentary because my mother dieted so much when I young, my sister was a stick, and I spent high school overweight to the point of obesity my senior year. On top of underlying trauma, I have always felt like if I wasn't thin I was completely worthless and disgusting. I wish Brittany had done the Subject Interview like the others. The way the documentary ended and the way her mother treated food, I think she needed to stay most out of everyone...
I have had an eating disorder since I was about 14, I'm almost 25 now, and I have been struggling for someone to understand, REALLY understand for 10 years. From 14 to 18 I binged, thousands of calories a day. From 18 to the present I have restricted to the point of having to leave college, I've been hospitalized twice, I was in partial for six months at which point my insurance decided I had to be transferred to an eating disorder "partial" program, The Bella Vita at BHC Alhambra in California. That only lasted 8 1/2 days because the other patients, one specifically, decided (on my 3rd day there, and then again on my 7th) that if I didn't tell her what my "trauma" was, I would have to leave. It was a horrible situation because she and the others hadn't shared anything so private with me and they had been able to get to know each other for 4-6 weeks. I have never spoken the word to anyone and they wanted me to tell them. On top of it, the therapists didn't even try to keep her from attacking me and in the 8 1/2 days I was there, I didn't once get to see a nutritionist. It scares me to ever be in treatment again, especially one where I can't go home at the end of the day, or leave of my own free will. Everything in treatment is so competitive, even down to who's life is worse.
A few months before that place I had decided I really wanted to get better, things were so bad, but my insurance wouldn't cover the place I wanted to go to (my therapist would have been able to visit me there) and even if I found a place where they would cover half, my parent's wouldn't cover the rest. I read in an MSNBC article that families take out a second mortgage, are willing to sell their homes, will practically do anything to get their daughters treatment. I have had a therapist since 2000 who has told my mother flat out that I have an eating disorder yet my parents have never believed me, even when underweight and pale and weak. They have so much money but they'd rather spend it on expensive cars, fancier clothes, better toys, than help me get treatment. They've always believed that they can throw money at "it", what ever IT is, and it will go away. I relate so much to Alisa's statement "If it takes dying to get there, so be it." All I want now is to be thin, for someone to take me seriously, to stop trying to make me be someone I'm not, to stop asking me to just "grin and bare it." At work my mother tells me I have to ACT HAPPY, like there's actually any happiness left in me.
How do you get help when you don't have the support of your family??? How do you overcome that barrier? I feel like I have to literally be dying in order to get help beyond a therapist. I know at this point that I will live with this the rest of my life, I don't believe that we ever fully recover, but I would at least like to learn how to want more for myself.
Thanks to Lauren Greenfield for trying to understand and to the patients at Renfrew for giving the rest of us a [very public] voice. That's more than most people will ever do.
In response to an earlier post, I think it's _mostly_ true that it isn't about the weight. That said, the small part of many of us just looking for acceptance or to "make weight" in the case of gymnasts and dancers, have reason to disagree. For someone today to say that weight has nothing to do with it is probably not being completely realistic. We have all just lost sight of what "acceptance" means and we go too far. Hence the term body dysmorphic disorder, we see ourselves as "fat" and unacceptable. We do not see how thin we are. If we did, then maybe it really would be about anything but weight.
It is definitely different for everyone, a different combination of cause and effect. Comparing ourselves to each other only leads to competition, more weight loss to be "seen" or heard. It would be so much easier to find support if we could all stop comparing ourselves to each other. But such is the nature of the illness I suppose.
[Sorry for rambling.]
Last update: 03-12-2006 22:53
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