Adiction De-Mystified

The following is the first few pages of a book I am writing called Addiction De-Mystified  - Enjoy!!

The Healing of Binge Eating, Alcohol and Drug Addiction

How I evolved into my own authentic life, addicted to nothing…

This is the story of my own journey through several addictions. It starts when I was a teenager. A teenager who was craving. Craving food when full. A teenager who was obsessing, obsessing about size, shape and eating habits. During that journey of five years I learned about addiction, I learned about it through experience. Binge eating was my main addiction. I had no control nor ability to stop when physically full when I was on a binge. The rest of the time I was simply in a love/hate relationship with food, and constantly desiring my body to be slimmer. I can see now it was in a subconscious attempt to be accepted, to be loved, to be heard, to be appreciated. Of course all that was not going to happen just as the result of my being slimmer. The appreciation, protection and nurturing I would have liked, was not going to come from my family, nor from the school system either. Glimmers of it came through friends but not enough to really heal what was going on. And finding out, what was really going on, would unravel itself in a lifetime of healing. That lifetime of healing really started at the age of nineteen, when, on my lunch hour, I browsed the local bookstore in search of the latest diet that would be my answer, but somewhere in my consciousness already was dawning the stark realisation that dieting was not the answer. If it was, the last five years would not have escalated into the negative cycle of starving, binge eating and bulimia. Something was telling me that my eating habits were severely dysfunctional and that my attempts at dieting had only served to fuel the flames of that dysfunction. So miraculously out of that darkness, in an ordinary lunch hour, the light of a book touched me, and it was to change my life forever. That book was Fat Is A Feminist Issue by Susie Orbach.

In it I learned that, yes, what I suspected was true – Dieting was not the answer that would heal my problem. Giving up dieting was to be my first step. Then it taught me more, it gave me the missing information that would heal my problem. It taught me that I had unresolved emotional issues. It taught me what an emotional issue was. It taught me how we suppress our unresolved emotional issues through the act of eating when full. It taught me that eating when full is a way to cope with the emotional stuff that we are either not aware of, or simply want to numb ourselves to. It taught me that we all have unresolved emotional issues. It taught me that when we stop eating when full 100% of the time that our unresolved emotional issues surface. That means we feel the pain, fear, anger and boredom or stress that we previously avoided by eating when full. It taught me that the act of suppressing emotional issues is the act of addiction, in other words, I was addicted to eating food when full because that food when full enabled me to stay clear of my difficult emotional stuff. It taught me how we are conditioned to eat when full by well-meaning parents. It taught me that I could learn to give myself a positive outlook on life. It taught me I could break free from the madness of eating when full and the resultant weight gain forever. It taught me to resolve that previously unresolved emotional stuff. It taught me how to avoid binge eating by being aware of the underlying emotional issue that was surfacing and be able to meet it, and feel the uncomfortable feeling, and ask myself – Given the fact I feel this way, what would I like to do now?

Thus, it taught me how to tap into my own intuitive guidance and inner knowing on how to resolve my emotional issues. It gave me freedom. It gave me my road map out of addiction to food when full.

My life grew richer as a result. My life grew in awareness and understanding, and that awareness and understanding led me to leave home and move in with my boyfriend, and then, after six months, to emigrate to London, where I lived and worked and experienced the new. But addiction is a sly and insidious creature that snuck up on me when a difficulty struck. I did not know how to deal with the pain in my heart. London can be a cold and lonely place sometimes and my boyfriend turned out to be a lover of drink and pot. When I lived with him I was a non-smoker, but constantly inhaling secondary smoke was hard. Also his moods were erratic, his behaviour was difficult. He behaved like a demanding, overbearing idiot at times. And it frightened me.

What behaviour had been brought on by indulging in pot behind my back and what was his own way of wounded relating (which in hindsight was narcissistic) I did not know. Again, I did not have the tools to cope with this new and strange situation, simply getting on with my own life and after about two years working in catering, I decided to better myself and take some evening classes and then a full time Art Class. The fact that he punched me the day before my interview at art school was bewildering to me. Now I realise it was the behaviour of a control freak. I did not have the emotional capacity to leave. I kept wishing and hoping he’d change (a sure sign of co-dependency). Three years later he still had not changed but somehow, I managed to leave. I rented a room in a shared house in North London. And a friend gave me the book ‘Women Who Love Too Much’ by Robin Norwood. Again, a book was to change my life.

In it I learned how we can be addicted to another person. Your focus on the other person serves as a distraction from your own pain and unresolved issues. You crave the other like a drug. Even though they mis treat you, you crave being with them and the idea of not being with them is unthinkable. The other may be married or an addict, or abusive to you physically or emotionally. Overbearing, critical, needy and selfish. They may be nice some of the time but often ignore you, your wants and needs, in subtle or overt ways. They could be manipulative, subtly aggressive, or in unspoken ways suggesting your course of action, choice of clothes, friends or work for example.

I was overjoyed to have the information and healing tools I had been praying for. I joined a self-help support group for other co-dependent women, and, as a recovered compulsive eater I started researching  setting up my own workshops for eating disorder recovery. I approached the Womens’ Therapy Centre in North London, and started to sit in on a nine-month support group for compulsive eating women with a view to set up my own support groups the following year. Which I did.