Stories of Healing: Katie
Katie came to Rock Recovery after struggling with food and exercise in high school and college. She was scared and skeptical that the group would be able to help her, but she surrendered and gave it a shot. Thankfully, she soon joined Rock Recovery’s Breaking Bread meal support group and found a community she desperately needed in her recovery journey. Today, Katie is living free from her eating disorder and has built a life full of joy. Read her full story of healing below!
“My eating disorder thoughts used to govern my life, but now I recognize them as just thoughts…Rock gave me tools to care for my whole being – physical, spiritual, mental, and emotional. I wouldn’t be this rounded in recovery without Rock.” – Katie, Program Graduate
“Admittedly, my recovery process has been much shorter than most, but almost half my life has been colored by disordered eating.
A close relative of mine first struggled with an eating disorder when I was in middle school, and I often felt her disorder creeping into my thoughts and actions, but for the most part, I was ok. More aware of food than most of my peers, yet still ok.
In my senior year of high school, I had some unidentified gastrointestinal problems and I genuinely felt better when I ate less. Thinking exercise could help too, I incorporated more into my daily routine. However, what started as a desire to physically feel better turned into a psychological fear of food (both in quantity and quality) and an obsessive urge to constantly be in motion. It was in these less-is-more and more-is-more mentalities – the extremes of which only exacerbated the effects of the other – that I entered my first year of college. Which also happened to be in the middle of a global pandemic.
Most of last fall is a blur, but what I do remember is how cold I was, how little emotion I felt, and how isolated I became. I felt both trapped in my lifestyle and proud of my perceived willpower. The eating disorder is not for the lazy individual.
It took so much work to constantly be calculating and worrying about food and exercise, but it didn’t feel like a choice; it felt like that was just how life was supposed to go for me. I don’t even remember ever making a conscious decision to seriously restrict food, and that scared me for a while in my recovery process. If I didn’t even try to get myself into this position, how could I get out? And how could I make sure that I didn’t slip back into old habits when life got hard?
I asked myself these questions after my mother first staged an ED intervention with me in late October 2020. I immediately started meeting with a nutritionist, and after a rocky (no pun intended) first month of working together, she suggested I try group therapy at Rock. While individual work was helping somewhat, she thought that this extra support might be the nudge I needed to fully embrace recovery. Maybe my questions could be answered.
I was skeptical. I was scared. Recovery was already an all-in process, and now I was going to do something else? In all honesty, I didn’t want to do it. It wasn’t until I was sitting on the stairs a few hours later – after yet another day of crying over eating X or doing Y – that my mom looked at me softly, shrugged, and said “but we want you to get better…right?”
I went upstairs, grabbed my laptop, and started filling out the paperwork.
Surrender is a form of strength.
I wasn’t expecting to love the group, but I did. Over the weeks, I started seeing the meal component as less of a challenge and more of a celebration of my progress. I looked forward to our next discussion and to sharing my progress on the goals I had set the week before. I became more compassionate as a human being as my eyes were opened to the struggles of my group members.
Most importantly for me is that through the group, I learned how to process my own eating disorder and how to talk about it in a way that separated it from my own identity. I slowly felt less ashamed of my eating disorder and more empowered to work through different aspects of it alongside other women who truly understood my situation.
One of the hardest parts of early recovery for me was that I was always on the defensive, battling myself while also trying to put on a face for my family that things were going to be ok, and the group gave me exactly what I didn’t know I wanted – support from those who knew the kind of support I needed. I am eternally grateful to the group of women who walked alongside me during the hardest point of my life and for their insight, camaraderie, and friendship.
In addition to group therapy, Rock matched me with a mentor who I have continued to meet with on a weekly basis even nine months after leaving the group. I cannot tell you how priceless the relationship is between the two of us and how much I cherish her support and friendship. Rock has blessed me in my journey to rediscovering the joys of life in more ways than one.
Rediscovering the joys of life is not linear. There are good and bad days. However, I can say with absolute certainty that my bad days now are nowhere near what my bad days used to be. In fact, I often forget that I have/had an eating disorder, and I think the fact that I debate whether to say “I’m in the recovery process of an eating disorder” or that “I’m mostly recovered from an eating disorder” is a beautiful testament to the possibilities of recovery.
I sometimes mourn the sense of identity gained from my eating disorder; I know that I am now living the life I was meant to love. A plentiful life full of many little things.
It’s funny the little things that will stick with you from Rock. For me, one is a quote that Niah shared with us one week: I am grateful to my body for safely and lovingly housing my soul. Tears filled my eyes as I absorbed the words. There are some moments in recovery that will last forever; Rock gave me this one. Maybe it’s not so little after all.”