As we know, an eating disorder can often be accompanied with other disorders. Today, we tell a story of a woman struggling with addiction in addition to her eating disorder.  “I’m 25 days clean!,” Brenda proudly proclaims. “But I notice I am getting so irritable. Yesterday I was Miss Road Rage on the way home from work. And I almost wanted to slug somebody when I saw the office coffee pot was empty this morning. What’s going on?!” Any unhealthy habit or addiction represents a good habit never learned, a healthy attitude or coping strategy not yet adopted. It represents insufficient self-contr ..read more

One of my clients had had his marriage blow up in his face only months before. His pornography habit had been discovered yet again–after repeated promises of “I’m quitting now”–and his wife was so fed up she had left the house for a week. (It could just as easily been any other bad habit or addiction that had been kept secret.) When he had contacted me, he was desperate to save his marriage and family. Now I asked him, how would you rate things at home these days, as compared to before that phone call asking for help? On a scale of 1-100%, how much of the former warmth, closeness and romantic ..read more

Why is it that as we age we lose so much flexibility?  I don’t just mean physical flexibility; I mean emotional flexibility.  The older we get, the harder it becomes to bend and stretch and forgive.  As teens go through their transitions and time of adolescence, they need to hang on to their ability to forgive, and adults need to rediscover it.  Otherwise, both are left in the black-and-white world of one-strike-and-you’re-out.   The grinding and scraping and grating of adolescence require the healing balm of forgiveness in order to regain relational realignment.  And you’re going to need to g ..read more

Do you ever sit reading your phone, reach for that second cookie and then sit baffled and disappointed when you discover it’s gone? You don’t remember eating it! You were acting on automatic pilot.  Something similar is true with any bad habit or addiction. Whether it is smoking, drinking, sex, drugs or any other, when we give in to compulsions, at some point we are on automatic pilot and in a kind of trance. It can seem like it “just happened,” or as is often said about a questionable romantic liaison, “one thing just led to another.” But on closer inspection, succumbing to a bad habit has a ..read more

What do we do when life feels like it’s piling on top of us? In depression, we bury our optimism, hope, and joy and react with anger, fear, or guilt, allowing overwhelming circumstances to knock us flat. Emotional depression can become an automatic reaction to life’s trials. Reactions are automatic, but responses need not be. Depression does not have to be automatic. Even if we may immediately react negatively, we can learn to intentionally reassert positive emotions. This may not be our first reaction, but our first reaction doesn’t need to be our only response. Albert Einstein once said, “Yo ..read more

When you were growing up, you may have been told over and over, in a variety of ways, that you weren’t good enough, smart enough fast enough, thin enough, or just plain not enough of anything to please your parents.  In order to numb this crushing sense of failure and the guilt that inspired, you began to control your anger by controlling your own body–how it was maturing and what you weighed. By concentrating on food, you learned how to temporarily drive out all painful thoughts.   Anger, fear, guilt, and shame may now be the only emotions you allow yourself to feel.  These may be the only on ..read more

When an emotional imperative becomes a physical compulsion, the desire to find relief can be overwhelming.  In relationship dependency, the brain in the present has been trained to respond to certain conditions by the past.  Because of ingrained dependency traits and past experiences, you have written your own list of what creates pleasure for you and what creates distress.   At first, your mind was in charge, but over the years your body has become highly influential.  You find yourself in the backseat of your own life and responses. You have trained your body how to respond, and now it’s rea ..read more

You understand anorexia and bulimia. But what about “disordered eating”? Yes, it’s an unhealthy relationship with food, but do you recognize the signs in a friend or loved one? Disordered eating may never be diagnosed as a full fledged eating disorder. But to the person who lives with it, they live with ongoing internal struggle and pain. When food ceases to be nutrition and fuel for the body, it warps into something else. Whether it is an eating disorder, or disordered eating, the individual suffers. Do you recognize these common characteristics of someone who lives with disordered eating? E ..read more