QUESTION: How do you get beyond that fear of change when you have lived with an eating disorder for most of your life?

ANSWER: I suspect you could ask the very next person you see on the street this question, and you would discover that you are hard-pressed to find a single solitary soul who likes change! We human beings seem innately programmed to do two things – survive, and dislike change. For me personally, I like change about as much as I like getting a root canal, going for my annual checkup, or doing taxes.

But I do these things anyway, because they are good for me. They are necessary. In many cases, they are also required. Fear of change is not an adequate excuse to not go to the doctor, not file a tax return, not treat an infected tooth. It is also not an acceptable alternative, given that we all struggle with something, to seeking treatment for an eating disorder, and doing the hard work involved to overcome the things we may do that attempt to circumvent our programmed will to survive.

Recovery really is not an option – Americans, in particular, have created a peculiar society of entitlement, a ‘we can have our cake and eat it too’ mentality, that lulls us into believing that we can actually have every single thing we want, with few if any consequences. This is simply not the case. We can have our eating disorder, for instance, OR the rest of our life and our dreams. We cannot have both.

So, all that to say that you may not get beyond the fear of change when working towards recovery from an eating disorder. Your fear of change (if you are anything like me) may come right along with you as you do the hard work of recovery! But you do it anyway. You work for recovery anyway. You feel the fear and do it anyway. And, most importantly, you do not expect that you will learn to like change before it becomes possible for you to achieve change. You may hate it every step of the way, just like you hate getting a root canal. But you like the results, a healthy, pain-free tooth, and that is adequate compensation for the discomfort you may endure in the midst of the process

And just so you know - I felt fear every step of the way in my own recovery. I also felt parts of myself resisting other parts of myself, and I loathed the inner friction that caused. But I gritted my teeth and endured. Eventually, I learned to ignore, to some extent, my fear of change, because I no longer expected myself to have moved past feeling the fear of change before I could begin the process of change. I let myself off the hook in that way, and ever since that time, my fear of change has ceased to play an important role in the choices I make.

For what it is worth – and you are worth recovering for!

Warmly,

Shannon

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