Topic : 02/25 Deadly Thin

 

I feel for you, and I'm glad you were able to heal.  I have nothing but compassion for people with this disease.  It's the hardest thing to do to surrender control when you feel like you have none.

The one thing that was hardly touched on is the fact that Aimee is tormented,(you could see it in her eyes and the expression on her face), and that concerns me,especially that she gave a half-hearted yes that she would embrace the help being offered. She has gone from cutting herself to stop the pain as a teenager,to this deadly eating disorder. The only control she has is where she is feeling the pain. That is the control that she must let go of.

 

The message I have for Amiee is , I hope you find a path trough all the thoughts going on inside your head,so you can see a light at the end of the tunnel .

Women who lose weight struggle with this phenomena. For a long time, in many cases years, a woman who loses a great deal of weight will still see the "fat" woman when they look in the mirror. Even if the weight loss is significant, your brain remembers you how you were for so long. So a woman who has gone from 250 pounds to 150 pounds, while she's lost 100 pounds, will still see that 250 pound woman when she looks in the mirror. I'm sure it is the same for ED sufferers.

I was a bit taken back by your comments.  I have a 20 year old daughter who is currently in recovery from an eating disorder, anorexia and bulimia.  This is NOT an affulent disease.  It has cost our family a tremendous amount of money . I am very thankful that my husband and I are employed.  We have more than some and less than others.  We would not be considered to be wealthy. 

 

Do you work for an insurance company?  One our last responses from the insurance company as to why they were not going to pay was because she was "cooperative and motivated".  That's about as lame as saying there are people starving so she shouldn't be throwing up her food. 

 

Drug addiction is looked at differently.  Society would not support the parents that bought their child drugs.  Bulemics don't usually binge on food around the house.  My daughter would buy food out and we would not know about it.  I would find crackers, peanut butter, etc under her bed that she had taken from our pantry. She is not living at home now and I still have a hard time going to the grocery store.  We have never kept more than a week's worth of groceries at a time.  Aimee's mother loves her and is doing what she believes is helping.  As mothers, we are all co-dependent to some degree.  Aimee's mother will have to address those issues too. 

 

God has a plan for Aimee and our daughter.  He promises we will have trials.  He promises never to leave us. I have complete faith that He will use her to help others.  Seeing shows like today are hard as a mother of a child with an eating disorder.  You can not imagine the amount of strength it takes to see your child doing this to themselves and then you seek out every possible treatment.  I am thankful knowing that maybe one girl might have been moved enough to start seeking recovery after seeing todays show. 

 

My prayer for you is that no one in your family has to ever face a trial in their life.  Our daughter and Aimee are fortunate to have families that do care and will go to the end of the earth to fight for a cure.

we all know that anorexia is a mental problem.  i was surprised today that when you went back to the original source....the raper (molester) and her FATHER , that discussion was brushed over.  Since it really started there i would have hoped you would expand on that for the audience and viewers.  I believer there are alot of sufferers started at the same place and didn't get help at the time.  It seems that her father is out of the picture.

Anorexia is all about control. Aimee needs to see that she is not in control of her life, just her eating and that her control for her life she gave to the molester and her FATHER. I hope she will come to understand that as long as she gives in , they win.  She needs to take her control back and win.

 

i have felt inadequate for many years, in a lot of situations.  When i dug deep and went back, I found that my future mother-in-law did that to me at age 14.  I am now 61 and without knowing it , I gave my mother-in-law( to be ) such power and she controlled it all my life.  I can't tell you what it felt like to find out after all these years where this came from.  Now i'm in control.

 

I hope Aimee with help can find that place too

thanks dr. phil

susan

 I am asking all Christians who read this message to pray iin earnest for this girl; she needs serious intercessory prayer.  She apparently believes negative things about herself  as a result of comments made by her dad,  and she is very fragile.

I pray that she will feel worthy enough to accept the treatment offered and get out from under this attack.  I think that many of us, especially women, could have found ourselves in the same or a similar situation with an eating disorder sometime in our life.

Please join me in lifting her up.  

You have missed the Whole point I think. Aimee doesn't really see fat in the mirror. She is trying to look un-attractive so being molested won't be her fault if it happens again. There is more to this young lady than seeing herself as fat.

  First of all, I think it's quite debatable whether or not this motheris an enabler. Being a mother who wants to feed a child who isliterally starving to death (regardless of what the child does aftershe eats) is a very different scenario from an enabler who overfeeds aperson who is already horribly overfed. This mother feeds her starvingchild in the vain hope that maybe she'll keep down enough of it to notdie, which I think is a pretty normal maternal and human response.Anyone other than a professional or fellow sufferer would feel anoverwhelming urge to feed someone who is starving. I don't know of toomany people who feel an overwhelming urge to feed a morbidly obeseperson, so enabling and overfeeding a person who is dying from obesityis counterintuitive, not a normal response. I don't think this Mom isan enabler. I think she's desperately trying to save her daughter'slife.

I also think that some folks are coming down on Dr. Phil unneccesarily for not handling it differently.  Being confrontational with a patient for whom one wrong word could put her over the edge, or with her mother, could be disastrous inthe venue in which this show is carried out. Once Aimee is medicallystable and out of danger, and in a safe treatment environment, thenit's appropriate to be a little tougher on her and her family about therealities of the situation and the lifestyle in which they live. Dr.Phil's goal in this show was to convince a dangerously fragile personthat her life is worth saving, and that's what he did. It was adelicate intervention aimed at supporting her and her family andgetting her into a safe environment. Right in the very beginning of theshow, Aimee expressed her fear of Dr. Phil and his opinion of her. Hisbeing confrontational terrified her, and he probably had to promise herthat he would not be in order for her to feel safe enough to come onthe show. This is a girl who has been violated to her very core, andthen blamed for it by the very person who should have protected her.She's extremely fearful and needs delicate handling. An anorexic hearseverything that everyone says to them through a filter of self-hatred,and this usually results in them hearing it as blame and insult.

Iknow, I've been there. I'm not just speaking from a high horse here.I've been anorexic, bulimic, and morbidly obese, and have spent 30years of my life dealing with the food issues and emotional wreckagethat all 3 of those disorders brings, and I have enormous compassionand empathy for anyone dealing with any form of food-related disorder.I watched today's show with tears in my eyes, because that so nearlycould have been me sitting there. I've thought all those same thoughsthat Aimee expressed today, as well as the darker ones that she didn't.I wanted to reach through the television and hold her and tell her thatI understand her pain, and that she is worth fighting for. Thesuffering of anorexia and bulimia is unspeakable, and I'm so gratefulthat my life didn't go down as dark a tunnel as hers did. I wasfortunate enough to have not gotten as sick as she did for as long asshe did, and to have had intervention that turned me around. I came soclose to having that life that it terrifies me to remember how close.

Ioffer Aimee and her family my support, but I hope she's not readingthis board, but in a treatment center where she can learn to loveherself. It's a long, hard road to getting there, but it's worth it.

T.Z.

Aimee,

 

I don't have an eating disorder, but you and I have a lot more in common than most people would think.  I have OCD.  I believe you very likely have OCD also, and that many girls with anorexia or bulimia are actually struggling with OCD and not simply nor primarily struggling with the symptoms of anorexia and bulimia.

 

Please listen to me:  I believe you are very smart, very analytical.  I believe you want someone to know more than you do about what you are doing.  I believe you want to believe they are smarter than you are about your situation, and that so far no one has been.  I believe you probably don't trust that someone understands because if they only understand anorexia or bulimia, they still do not understand what is at work within you that is torturing you mercilessly!  I believe you feel enslaved, and that you feel you must keep the control in order to protect and now save yourself - unless someone could come along and understand, FINALLY, enough to be trustworthy to guide you out safely.  I believe you are able to hide in your brain to protect yourself when you can't hide in your home and body, that you know you are able to fool people - and you wish someone was insightful or wise enough or experienced enough to figure that out!  For that is the person worthy of your turning over control, at least the most needy part of the control.  You don't believe anyone anymore, do you?  No one truly understands exactly, so it feels unwise and unsafe to relinquish control.  The problem is, you don't really understand, either, do you?  You know when they are being simplistic or misled by you, and you want them to be smart enough to know better.

 

It's not really about the molestation anymore; it's about the obsessions.  It's about their origin every day, or at least what you believe about them.  It's not so much about what happened when this all started.  What you feel you can't stop thinking, and what you feel you HAVE to do - HAVE to - is what this is about now. 

 

Aimee, you're nearly exhausted.  OCD is absolutely exhausting.  It will consume and then destroy us; it's bottomless and endless and dark.  We become slaves to it.  Yet, we can overcome it.  So far, it seems not overcome often or easily because I believe most doctors - even those who work with it a lot - are having a difficult time comprehending it like those of us who live with it actually experience it.  It's hard even for us to understand.  In its grip, we simply don't seem to have choices.  We HAVE to do what we have to do.

 

I don't want you to lose this battle, and I can see you don't want to lose it, either.  I never came so close to death in my own battle, but I was also exhausted.  I was miserable.  Some days I felt such shame and also guilt, I was disgusted with myself, and felt broken.  But I made the first simple choice that I finally found I had, and it may be the only choice OCD sufferers actually have.  From there, I climbed back out and have been able to live in freedom again, and my control is focused now on keeping the OCD in its place.

 

What did I do?  I ran out of options.  I ran out of tolerance.  I ran out of stamina and courage and belief in my ablility to figure any of it out on my own.  I ran out of everything but hope.  I let a new doctor put me on an OCD medication (Luvox) and I "checked out" for a while.  On Luvox, I was living in a bit of a sedated fog, I felt thick and slow and had some mild side effects.  But I just kept taking it and let go for a while.  I stopped working so hard (still working when tortured by the OCD, but when simply irritated by it) and I let that be o.k.  I just watched.

 

I watched my life happen around me and watched people relate to me, I watched myself responding.  I watched the cause and effect of everything.  For a while, I didn't seem to be "improving"; worse, my life was getting messy and neglected, but I was too doped to do much about it.  I kept watching.  And do you know what I came to see?  I still remember where I was sitting and who was next to me, and it was a specific moment that I had utter awareness of something that I knew was significant.  Now I know it as THE significant insight about my OCD.  I saw that there was nothing really of any connection to me happening in my environment, that I was detached from it all as I had become accustomed to on the medication.... and I STILL had a relentless and high-pressure obsessive thought from within myself, within my head.  I was too doped to do anything about it, which would have stressed me into craziness before the medication, but I just sat there giving up, taunting the OCD with my outrageous, maybe deadly, probably evil neglect this time.  And nothing happened.  Which was everything.  I counted it as a victory, and hung onto it as evidence that I could now argue with myself over the next time OCD challenged me at that level.

 

I could write a book about the insights I've had since then, and I want to every time I come across a young woman like yourself who I know to be tortured.  I wonder if my story could be the handhold you've been reaching for all this time.  So, remember this:  You are absolutely worthy, you really are safe, you can overcome this more easily and quickly than you believe, you don't have to be perfect, you are loved, the OCD thoughts and the compulsions are NOT what you think they are.

 

At every moment, with every challenge, you only have to make a choice right then.  You don't even have to choose well every time (you won't) to get it right for the long run eventually.  With every choice that you choose to trust, to take a risk, and to live, you grow in strength and the OCD (as well as its symptoms of anorexia and bulimia) will wither.  You can do this.  Stop thinking for a while, with a doctor's help and medication if need be, and take a break.  Your thoughts are not coming from where you think they are.  That is the part the doctors don't know how to really understand.  I hope you will trust me.  You have to choose to live and to know that you are not risking something you can't afford t lose.  You're simply not.  Please trust me.

 

You'll stay in my thoughts.  I'm here if you need me.  I'm even here if you don't.  Be well, Aimee.

 Good for you Andrea! I'm very glad to hear that you received the message that your true beauty and worth has nothing to do with how much you weigh or how you look. Keep loving yourself, and spread the word to others as well. Maybe you'll rub off on a few people who aren't so sure of themselves. The battle to end eating disorders, as well as to stop the abuse that overweight people face on a daily basis in our society, will only be won when more people get the message that the value of a human being isn't predicated on how you look or what you weigh.

I know it can be really hard to resist the pressure you face to be a size double-zero. You're a smart girl and you obviously understand that your life means much more than that. Keep it up!

TZ