I remember what it was like to feel so incredibly alone.
The first time I left eating disorder treatment, I was terrified. For the last six months of my life in residential, partial hospitalization, and intensive outpatient treatment, my days had been planned for me. While the rest of the world was isolated in their homes – it was the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic – I had a group of peers and a team of treatment center staff helping me feel connected and supported.
For all the work that goes into titrating folks down from a higher level of care, it’s still a shock that first day you wake up and have nowhere to be. I wasn’t set to start my new job until the following Monday, so I had four days of being alone in my apartment in front of me. I was scared to leave my home and go in public – this was before the first vaccines had been approved for public use – but I was also terrified of the isolation I faced at home. I wasn’t set to meet with my new outpatient therapist or dietician for at least a week, and after six months of daily (or almost daily) group therapy, I didn’t know when I’d be in a therapy group again.
I sat on my bed clutching a coloring page a friend had given me as I left. On it they had written the words each of my peers in my group had gifted me on our last day together during my “launching” — messages to take with me on the next step in my recovery journey. At the time, the words felt aspirational — trust, breath, gentleness, strength, power, deserving. One of my peers offered me the image of “a glowing necklace of safety.” Another had wished me “an identity outside of actions for others.” As I read back those words now, I’m grateful that so many of them feel real and tangible and true, in a way they didn’t back then.
I can’t place the responsibility for my healing on any one thing. There’s a whole team of people who have helped me get to where I am today. They’ve helped me find the stability I needed to feel safe in the world. They’ve helped me build the skills I needed to care for myself and advocate for my needs. They’ve helped me understand that my experiences as a human recovering from trauma and an eating disorder don’t disqualify me from being a therapist. In fact, I now believe that those experiences are what make me so effective with clients. Even though I firmly believe that humans are the experts on their own lives and that my experience recovering from an eating disorder is unique and different from every client I work with, I also know that trust comes from shared experience.
I speak about my recovery publicly because I know that connection is at the root of healing. There’s power in hearing that someone else has experienced what you have experienced. There’s relief in learning that we are not alone.
When I was sitting on my bed the day I discharged from IOP, afraid of the four days of isolation ahead of me, the promise of connection came in the form of an email from the alumni coordinator at the treatment center I’d just left. She shared a schedule of free, virtual support groups with me, including meal and snack groups several days each week. Suddenly my empty Google calendar seemed a little less menacing. I felt the dread ease up.
Don’t get me wrong, it was still unbelievably hard. That first year in recovery was long, and I found myself back in treatment less than a year after I’d discharged. But going back didn’t mean starting over again from scratch. I’d made so much progress, and changed so much. It was the relationships I built with people during that first year that kept me going, even when it felt impossible. Knowing that I would get to see my friends in those Zoom rooms a few times a week made the isolation and fear feel a little less terrifying. It gave me the support I needed to grow and the space I needed to breathe. And, when I decided that I needed to go back to treatment, those were the friends who reminded me that going back wasn’t a sign of failure and that they were proud of me for choosing to take care of myself.
It’s been a few years now since I’ve been in those support groups. As my life changed, and my healing progressed, my support needs also changed. But even though I haven’t returned to those groups, I am so glad that many of the peers I met there are still in my life. Some live in the same city as me, and some live across the country or around the world. Some I speak to almost daily, and some I only see over social media. But whether we are still the closest of friends, or if we are now casual acquaintances, I hold so much gratitude for these humans who were with me in the most painful days of recovery and helped me feel less alone.
I’m here today, in part, because of the connections I made during those early days of healing.
These friends sat with me while I cried, laughed with me until we could barely breathe, stood by me when I felt like recovery was impossible, and celebrated wins with me. When I struggled to believe that I was making progress, they helped me look back and see how far I had come. When I started to think that maybe I was ready to return to being a therapist, they listened to my fears and reminded me of my strengths.
One of my core beliefs about recovery is that healing happens in relationships. So many of us have experienced trauma in our lives, and so often this trauma is linked to abuse or violence we experienced at the hands of other people. Eating disorder behaviors are often attempts to seek safety in the midst of lives that feel profoundly unsafe. By connecting with others and building relationships, we start to gather evidence that it can be safe to trust others. Slowly but surely, we can forge a sense of safety in our lives, so that we no longer need to use food, eating, and exercise to try and feel safe or in control.
Because I see relationships as being at the core of recovery, I am incredibly passionate about creating spaces for folks in recovery to connect to one another. When I decided to return to the mental health field, one of the first things I planned to offer to clients was meal support. I had the benefit of going to a treatment center that offered numerous free support groups to alumni, to help bridge the gap between treatment and “real life.” But so many folks don’t have access to that kind of support. Or if they do have access to it, it isn’t inclusive.
The alumni support groups I attended early on in my recovery were facilitated by a queer therapist, and I was lucky to feel safe enough to show up authentically and talk about my trans and queer identities with the group. I know not everyone has that. Queer and trans people are more likely than straight and cisgender folks to struggle with eating disorders, and yet, so often we are marginalized in treatment settings. That’s why it is so important to me to create space in my groups that is explicitly inclusive of folks with marginalized identities, including folks with LGBTQIA+ identities, people of color, people with disabilities, and neurodivergent folks.
Because of my experience, I now lead an inclusive, anti-oppressive space to find connection and support for eating disorder recovery – if you reach out to me, we can schedule a time to chat and see if my meal support group is a good fit for you. The group is open to adults aged 18 and up, regardless of identity, and currently meets Wednesday evenings from 6-7pm Central Time. Groups are 60-minutes long, and $25 each, with sliding scale spots available. Group is free for all participants the first week of each month. My facilitation style is rooted in a HAES-inclusive, fat-positive, and harm-reduction-focused perspective.