Learning to fly and finding the bigger fear

When I was in treatment we did a lot of motivation building exercises. We talked about why we wanted to recover. We made a lot of lists – lists of all the good things about recovery and all the bad things about being sick, all the things we would be able to do when we were healthy, all the things ED had taken away from us, all the ways our illness hurt our loved ones, all the things ED made us lie about. Lots and lots of lists. We wrote out what a day in our life looked like now and how it would be different in recovery. Then we made action plans targeting each behavior we wanted to change, like really detailed contingency plans of how to access support and work through urges and implement coping strategies.

And I was so good at those lists and plans. Like gold-star, top of the class, teacher’s pet kind of good. And yet I wasn’t recovering. In fact I was getting more and more sick. This disconnect seemed to really mystify the professionals. I said I wanted to get better. I acknowledged that being sick sucked. I knew what I needed to do. So what gives? Was I lying when I wrote pages and pages about how much I wanted to be recovered? Was I just bullshitting my way through treatment? Filling in the blanks in the action plan worksheets all the while counting down the minutes till I would go home and binge and purge and starve?

Well sort of. But it’s a bit more complicated than that in a way that I couldn’t articulate at the time. I was talking to someone recently who was frustrated that their loved one could say all the right things but wasn’t acting in a recovery-oriented way. I used this metaphor to try to explain it to them.

Imagine someone asking you if you wanted to be able to fly. You’d probably say yes right? Imagine them asking you to make a list of all the things that would be totally amazingly life-changing and awesome about being able to fly and all the things that suck about having to walk instead. Actually imagine you can’t even walk – imagine you can only crawl around and then compare that to flying. I bet you can come up with a lot of reasons why you would like to stop crawling and fly instead. Now imagine writing a plan about how you are going to learn to fly. Maybe it looks something like this:

1. find a flying school and sign up for classes.

2. attend flying classes

3. practice flying every day

4. read about how to fly

5. visualize yourself being able to fly

6. remind yourself how awesome life will be when you can fly – write out a list and carry it around with you so you have it when you are tempted to stop trying to fly

7. ask friends and family to support you in learning to fly, to remind you to practice and cheer you on when you make progress and encourage you when it’s hard.

Ok so now you are going to do all of those things right? You are going to devote time and effort everyday to learning to fly. Right? Because it would be SO AWESOME. Because YOU DESERVE TO BE ABLE TO FLY. Right?

Wrong. You aren’t going to do that because you know it’s not going to work. You are never ever going to be able to fly no matter how long your lists are or how detailed your plan is. It’s just not going to happen. And even if maybe it was possible for some people to fly, even if you walked up to the edge of a cliff every day intending to try to fly, you would be absolutely paralyzed by the fear of jumping.

Recovery is a bit like that. Only harder and scarier and more painful. Sure if I could have snapped my fingers or clicked my heels and all of a sudden been RECOVERED I totally would have. But I didn’t believe, not with a single fiber of my being, that it was actually possible or that I was brave enough to try even if it maybe was. So I wrote the lists and I made the plans and it was all a lovely fantasy. But there was absolutely no way in hell I was going to go throw myself off a cliff hour after hour, day after day, in the hopes that eventually I would stop crashing into the ground and be able to fly. I couldn’t understand why everyone thought I should be doing that, thought I should be brave enough to do that.

Here’s what eventually worked for me to get me to jump off that cliff. And it wasn’t some newfound belief that I would be able to fly. It wasn’t finding some motivation that I hadn’t had before or thinking of a new reason that being able to fly would be awesome. It was finding something that was scarier than not jumping off the cliff. It finally became clear to me that life with my eating disorder was so untenable that it was scarier to not try. It was like all of a sudden there was a seething mass of snakes on the cliff behind me (snakes are one of my biggest fears) that I somehow hadn’t noticed before. The fear of that un-paralyzed me and allowed me to jump. It didn’t make jumping not scary, it didn’t make me ready to jump - it just made the alternative worse.

To the sufferers: you are not lying or being manipulative when you say you want to recover, when you commit to not engaging in eating disorder behavior, and then can’t bring yourself to do the damn thing. You are asking yourself to jump off a cliff and it is so immensely understandable that the fear once you get to the edge is paralyzing. It is ok if all the motivations and all the things you are promised are good about recovery don’t convince you to jump. And you can actively look for your snakes, you find and force yourself to look straight into the possibility of the bigger fear. Fight the fear that the eating disorder creates with a fear that comes from deep within your true self.

To caregivers and support people: remember that you are asking your person to face an utterly paralyzing fear. They are not lying or manipulating if they say they want to do the thing, make a plan to do the thing, commit to doing the thing and then can’t follow through. And you can be part of helping them find the bigger fear. You can set boundaries that make recovery the better option. It might take some time for your person to become un-paralyzed and to jump, they might have to stand and let the other fear really take hold for a while.