Category: mental health | Spiritual Abuse Blogs

Still learning to love myself: Through eating disorder recovery

Editorial Note: The following is reprinted with permission from Eleanor Skelton’s blog. It was originally published on March 26, 2022.

Content note: discussion of eating disorders

One year ago, I’d just started a new job, and the first paycheck wouldn’t come for a whole month.

I experienced food insecurity and unstable housing both in college and afterwards. The fear of not making it was so loud in my mind, and a little thought said: “Just don’t eat until you get paid.”

In that moment, I thought it made sense. As if I only deserve food if I do enough—if I work hard enough, if I earn enough money to justify allowing myself to eat.

I now realize this isn’t normal.

Last year, I was diagnosed with atypical anorexia or OSFED, which is just as serious as regular anorexia, but describes an eating disorder that is difficult to categorize according to diagnostic criteria.

Because I’m autistic, it’s hard to remember that I have a body that has needs, so I get busy with work or school and sometimes I honestly forget to eat. But other times it’s been intentional.

I hadn’t been eating enough food on a regular basis for nearly a decade. After a few weeks of trying to live on coffee and little else, I could barely climb stairs. Nerve pain shot down my neck into my arms while driving to work.

I realized if I didn’t stop, if I didn’t get help, it would eventually kill me.

Some of you have known me back when I was stuck in other self-sabotaging patterns like self-harm and unhealthy relationships. Eating disorders are quieter, harder to notice.

Almost nobody sees if you miss a meal.

Learning how to eat again wasn’t easy. It’s hard to find words for how difficult the first few months were—the stomach pain, bloating and falling asleep from exhaustion after meals because my body was struggling to process food.

My nutritionist, therapists and care team keep telling me that I deserve food even if nothing else is going right—even if I make mistakes. They tell me that my body still needs fuel consistently to do what I need.

Most of my friends know that I grew up in high-control communities (read: fundamentalist, Quiverfull, isolationist homeschooling) which left me feeling that I had no choice about what happened in my life and pushed me to wholly identify with a specific religious ideal—to be a living martyr.

And you had to hate your body. The more you hated yourself, your own flesh, the more spiritual you were.

Those born female were under intense pressure to be hypermodest, but also don’t commit the sin of gluttony. Enjoying anything too much—even food—was idolatry because what if you started to like it more than God. Dress like a 90s denim toned-down version of your pioneer farmer great-grandmother. Be just attractive enough to court and marry to repopulate the earth by birthing good little mini-Christians, but don’t be too pretty or someone else might sin just by noticing you.

I was told my flesh was a sin. They told me to “buffet my body” like the Apostle Paul. If only I could suffer enough, hurt enough, finally punish myself enough, maybe I’d become more perfect.

This was the sanctification I was taught. Starving myself seemed holy.

Now I know this is a deeply unhealthy form of Christianity, but this is what I experienced. All these years later, I’m still learning what Love should be.

I’m still learning that I don’t have to seek out painful experiences to become more perfect. I’m unlearning all the ways that I made myself feel less worthy.

And here, I have to give credit to several supportive friends and mentors who always gently remind me of my value. If not for all of you, I would not have survived.

Yes, my recovery comes from the determination I am finding to wake up every day and choose to eat… and live. But I am so grateful for those who remind me when I forget.

“Coming apart at the seams
And no one around me knows
Who I am, what I’m on
Who I’ve hurt and where they’ve gone
I know that I’ve done some wrong
But I’m trying to make it right…
I know that I love you
but I’m still learning to love myself.”

– “Still Learning,” Halsey

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I’m not the little matchstick girl anymore

Editorial Note: The following is reprinted with permission from Eleanor Skelton’s blog. It was originally published on January 7, 2017.

Christmas is hard when you don’t feel loved by the people who should love and accept you. Many of us ex-cult and isolated homeschool escapees feel this.

We were taught to be focused on our family and only our family and when we figure out our family is broken, sometimes really broken, well. Some of us don’t have anyone to spend Christmas with.

Two years ago, I wrote this in my journal during a shift at the call center where I worked:

12/21/2014

I’m on a quest again. It’s the one I dreamed of last year. Maybe it’s a quest to find Christmas. I just want to go home, to where I began, to my own church, to my pastor.

I want to have Christmas with them. Even if I have to sleep in my car to do it. But I’ll be at [a friend’s] the first night at least. I feel like some kind of hobo again. But maybe that’s the point. Going out on a quest, it’s not meant to be an easy, simple journey.

Why does my whole life feel like going through a dark tunnel right now? I know the light will come, it has before. But it’s like riding a train through the dark. Just like all-night drives on roadtrips through New Mexico.

And you know what? I drove to Texas for Christmas.

Now I live in Texas. And I am learning how to live in a community. How to know other humans. How to be vulnerable with the right people.

My church is very, very different from other churches, and I want to write more about my healing and why I was able to come back to any church at all, but this Christmas was good.

This awesome hippie family from my church with two neurodivergent kids adopted me for Thanksgiving and for Christmas. They’re about my age and nerdy and awesome. We drank wine like heathens and ate all the foods and suddenly I realized I wasn’t alone anymore.

The realization of what a chosen family does for you when your blood family can’t or won’t resonated with me again.

Healing is a process.

It’s this slowly, daily thing that creeps along until one day you look back and go, holy crap, I’m way different than I was a year ago. Heck, I’m not the same person that I was six weeks ago.

I’m healing in therapy when I finally find words for things I’ve never said out loud before. I’m healing when I watch my friends explain and teach their children instead of screaming at them and shutting them down. I’m healing when I watch Netflix shows in the evenings when I get home from work and go, oh, oh, oh, that’s me.

Two years ago, I felt abandoned and alone like the little matchstick girl in the story, you know, the one who freezes to death on New Year’s Eve after no one will buy her matches.

My family had made excuses not to spend Christmas with me for years and I decided that I’d have to make my own. But I felt like I’d been locked out in the cold.

I can’t forget where I came from. Or how I used to feel. And I don’t want to.

But I don’t feel orphaned anymore. I’m home.

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This is a story about the unexpected

Editorial Note: The following is reprinted with permission from Eleanor Skelton’s blog. It was originally published on April 4, 2017.

I know it’s been a long time since I’ve really blogged, but I’m doing so, so much better than I was.

I’ve been back in therapy for six months now.

I’ve been moved out for almost five years. I saw three different counselors in Colorado — a Christian psychologist and two counselors at my college off and on between 2011 and 2015.

My parents wanted me to see the Christian one because they thought he would convince me that moving out was a bad idea. He didn’t. He told me to be responsible and don’t go unless I could survive on my own, but he actually encouraged me to leave.

When I told my new counselor this, while reciting my entire History of Therapy (TM) to him, he laughed and said, “backfire!”

My first counselor taught me that I wasn’t responsible for other people’s emotions, like my dad’s outbursts.

He told me that leaving would involve a risk that I wasn’t ready to take yet. I asked him what that was and he said I needed to ask myself that question.

And he showed me that I wasn’t obligated to believe religious dogma that hurt me.

One day he told me that he wanted me to “stop thinking in terms of shoulds and musts and start thinking about wants and your reasonable heart’s desires.”

I asked him if that was wrong.

I recited that Bible verse that says, “But the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked, who can know it?”

But my counselor said, “The former is living under the law and the latter is where freedom is and where Christ wants you to be.”

I didn’t have the faith to believe him yet, but I wanted to. I was still so scared.

My second counselor was secular. I saw him through my college’s mental health services program. He didn’t really understand the pain of trying so hard not to stop believing when everything you were raised with seems like a lie, but he definitely tried.

But he told me to try new things and he asked me what would happen if I carried less in my backpack going to campus every day.

He asked me to put my backpack beside my chair, instead of between me and him. I’d barricaded myself off without realizing it. Not having something between me and him while talking about deep emotions was unexpectedly vulnerable.

My third counselor was through my college again. She happened to be Christian and had been to seminary, so she could feel my faith wounds.

She told me that my flashbacks and nightmares were part of c-PTSD. We started a type of therapy to help my brain process old memories and not freeze up.

I found her after my first breakup, in the lurch of unexpected heartbreak. When I wanted to stop breathing and not exist.

Last summer, I knew I needed to go back.

I knew I wasn’t done yet. But I didn’t know how to begin again, to recount my whole life story all over again for a stranger who I would come to know but who knew nothing about me.

But then unexpectedly — and aren’t the best things so often like this — one of my pastors was starting graduate school for counseling last fall.

He started meeting with me. He knew parts of my story already, so vulnerability was both harder and easier. But there was really no one else I’d rather tell these things to.

It means so much when someone listens with their heart. They are more than just a counselor, then, they become an anchor.

In December, for the first time in my life, I didn’t want to hurt myself anymore.

I have wanted to hurt myself for as long as I can remember. Even as a tiny human, I believed that I deserved punishment and would invent penalties for myself when “getting in trouble” didn’t seem like enough.

I am learning to trust other people. I am trying not to withdraw so sharply when I am anxious.

I am healing.

And I want to start sharing some of what I’ve learned.

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Outside the Box: Recovering from obsessive guilt

Editorial Note: The following is reprinted with permission from Eleanor Skelton’s blog. It was originally published on March 7, 2016 as part of a series.

Continued from What Is Joy?

“i am still learning that i am allowed to be human out here
inside it was not allowed
those things made a bad thing happen
so i still feel that. any tiny mistake… ” ~ anonymous friend

Obsessive guilt is no longer my religion.

But for many years, it was, and the scars left by it still linger for many of us. This post is for my friends whose wounds are still bleeding. This is for everyone who can’t find the words yet.

I’ve written before about my history of self-harm, prompted by years of being told when I was a small child that I murdered Jesus simply by being born, because of original sin.

Every breath I took, every time I threw a tantrum as a toddler, every time I didn’t obey my parents immediately without question, all these things drove nails into Jesus’ hands. Or so I was told.

This story on Homeschoolers Anonymous is very, very much like how I was raised. It’s like my mom is talking to me all over again.

“You are such a disappointment to God. He is sitting in heaven crying because of your sinfulness. Even if you were the only person who ever lived, Jesus would have had to die because of your sin! Your sin caused Jesus to be tortured and killed. It is just like you were there hammering the nails into him.”

Over and over, I was told that Jesus and the angels were always watching me, that they were disappointed in me when I talked back to my parents. That I made Jesus sad, that I hurt him.

Guilt for Jesus’ pain is why I self-harmed, starting at age 5. And none of the adults in my life then understood why.

We grew up with this mindset, believing that only guilt could dictate ethics. If you didn’t feel bad about yourself, you were prideful. If you weren’t thinking about Jesus’ suffering, you were ungrateful for his sacrifice.

And it’s not just those of us who were homeschooled in Christian fundamentalist households.

One of my Mormon friends told me she obsessively washed her hands when she felt sinful, because it made her feel less dirty. Later she found out it was part of her OCD diagnosis.

I’m also not the only one who thought I had to hurt myself because I caused Jesus pain. I have several friends who also did the same thing, for the same reason. The idea actually goes back to the middle ages and flagellantism, radicals in the Catholic church who beat themselves to mortify the flesh and identify with Christ in his suffering.

I used to dig my fingernails into my hands every time I referred to the divine without capital letters, because I believed I had disrespected the Almighty. Now I no longer believe my God is concerned with misspellings.

Those in the church probably don’t realize that the language they use often gives a very different idea than they are intending to, especially with children who take things literally.

A recent Relevant magazine article explains it like this (link removed as the article is no longer available):

“If you tell a 10-year-old that he should be washed in blood, he’s probably going to imagine something closer to the opening scene of Blade than a loving Jesus who wants him to be happy forever. I pictured Jesus standing next to a giant bathtub that He was bleeding into while trying to make me dive into it like a Steven Curtis Chapman song in ’99.”

When we talk about the crucifixion as penal substitution and say that we also have to take up our cross, when we tell young children to prepare for martydom or teenagers to stand up for Jesus like Cassie Bernall at Columbine, some of us take these ideas far more seriously than we probably intended.

We hate ourselves, we struggle with feeling unworthy, and we believe that we are undeserving of love. I have friends who can’t convince themselves to take medicine until their pain becomes unbearable because they believe they deserve suffering.

My friend Ash shared this song with me last year, and I cried because it is me. For so long, I couldn’t accept love because I thought I wasn’t worthy.

Before you came the days just passed
But now I so cannot reach seconds
Within me thousand suns rise
And I’m praying for them to never disappear
Tell me what have I done to deserve something this beautiful.

Tell me why I deserve you
Tell me why I deserve you
Tell me why I deserve you
Why is it me you love? – Lafee, Tell Me Why / Wer Bin Ich, Nightcore remix

It’s a process, we can’t just instantly rewire our brains. We don’t magically become healthier.

I’m still wrestling with my own theology, struggling to imagine that my God is pure light and love, a radical idea from a Graham Cooke video I watched years ago:

“You are the beloved. It is your job to be loved outrageously. It is why I chose you. That is why I set My love upon you; that you would live as one who is outrageously loved; that you would receive a radical love, so radical it will blow all your paradigms of what you think love is. I know I will love you outrageously all the days of your life because I don’t know how to be any different. This is who I am, and this is who I will always be. This is the “I am” that I promised you. I am He that loves you outrageously. And you may love Me back with the love that I give you.

“You may love Me back outrageously with the outrageous love that I bestow upon you. And know this, you can only love Me as much as you love yourself. So My love comes this evening to set you free from yourself. To set you free from how you see yourself. To set you free from the smallness of your own thinking about yourself. My love comes to set you free from rejection and from shame and from low self-esteem and from despair and from abuse because when I look at you, I see something that I love. I see someone that I can love outrageously.

[….]

“There is no fear where I am present because My love casts out fear.

“Beloved, you are My beloved. You are My beloved. And in my love, I want you to feel good about yourself.”

Unraveling all the gnarly threads woven through our souls takes months, years.

It’s like recovering from addiction or learning to drive a car. We’re learning how to love and be loved. Remembering that we are all made of stardust.

So when you meet a former box-dweller, please be gentle and patient with us. We’re still recovering. It takes time.

I hope you guys enjoyed this series and a glimpse into the souls of these lovely guest writers.

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Outside the Box: What is Joy?

Editorial Note: The following is reprinted with permission from Eleanor Skelton’s blog. It was originally published on March 5, 2016 as part of a series.

Continued from We Are Less Fragile

Another anonymous post from a creative soul friend.

Dear ****,

I’m not writing this for you, cause I know you’ll never read it.

I’m not writing this for you either, or you or you or you. I’m writing this for You, and I’m writing this for me.

Did you know I was at a point in high school, yellow light and kneeled prayers on my bed, please help me to be well I can’t handle this the rest of my life I’ve only been living this for four months!, and how did I still get the kind of grades I got that semester?

My freshman roommate from the start was a foreign creature but do you know the kind of embarrassment I felt when she asked me why it is I wash my hands so often!, she doesn’t know how it feels to hate yourself in the black and green of the mirror and wash your hands at midnight because of all the things you did wrong that day, hate your face in the morning fluorescent because of the way the lighting picks out the red on your cheeks when everyone else’s face is clear, stare quaking at your feet pointed toes in the library and unable to raise your head to the sky lit and clouded sky because your mind is turning turning please please help me can I know this is right which choice do I take cause something like a class schedule can obviously completely make or ruin your entire life!

Do you know about the times that I sat huddled in the corner of my room by the closet door at night all alone, knowing I was worthless and horrifically flawed because he talked to the blond one and not to me, cause from the moment I first heard his voice and saw his eyebrows he has held sway on a piece of my heart and you know that he holds it still.

(and yeah you know I still love him but there’s something different about you, something different, don’t worry).

I told my sixth roommate that my thoughts are a pressure cooker, that they spin and spin and spin the pressure clamps down harder, I can’t get out because I don’t know how I got in and she asked me how it doesn’t drive me crazy. This one was a nice boy but I couldn’t get out because all of a sudden he couldn’t compare to A— L—! Too many times I’ve loved a broken human being cause this wasn’t the first time but not the last either.

(and answer—it does.)

I don’t want to tell you about the times that I laid in my bed and I laid on the couch and there was sun behind the window but my ceiling was blue shadow, hearing a daybird sing in the first-summer twilight and listening to A Comet Appears and Pink Floyd’s The Wall way too many times until I couldn’t be anything but a tortured artist, cause the myth of the tortured artist is a persuasive one, you know.

I don’t wanna talk about that last dark semester, too many lonely nights with the light of my iPod at 2am in that strange dusty back room, my roommate was a perfect child with a secret and I never knew her in the six months that she slept five feet from me, ducking her head in the hallway and cripplingly polite as she was, she went to bed at 10pm and stood up at the first chime of her alarm in the morning and I sat and wrote in the dark and listened to her sleep. There was a quiet storm raging in the rest of my apartment and I knew from the first day and especially at the last that I could see the lights on the mountains and that everyone else couldn’t.

That was a semester of black and gold, under fire from heaven, on my knees by my bed but unable to think about anything but my next assignments. I was doing everything right but the formula for me wasn’t working, I was losing everything that’s so important to me and I tried to read thy words but instead I would bite my knuckles and my hands and wish I could cut myself open like a fish—!

My brother let me cry on his chest for three awful hours in between the trees and the streetlights. I could see the yellow light from the doors opening and shutting like matchbooks in the parking lot and I wished someone would hear me out there because my entire being was crying out and I just couldn’t believe that nobody could see it!

I was trapped by two boys that were like anchors on my feet. But when I went with you to the salt flats like I had dreamed every day for half a year, looked to the sky and asked what a terrible world what a beautiful world, walked in the pink and spun poetry from the air, and then when I came back those kind of anchors ceased to have any kind of relevance to my being—!

I’ve been writing like a fiend since the eleventh day of last December. I’m sounding the river of my being, in time and place like a rapid bioassessment and searchable by a magnifying glass. I’ve said a thousand times that my existence is not sustainable, that I am burning inside like a swamp gas, and I only write stories that are true.

I don’t wanna say this but there is something about you that fills me up with gold.

I don’t need all that anger and those blessed twenty-one pilots expressing my broken relationship with my God. You’re such a help to me above and below, you’re so kind and special and so quiet but your soul is so so good, you showed me that you don’t have to be boring to be good, you let me soften my heart and fill my being back up with light. I’ve laughed to the sky a hundred times since the start of September, I tell myself that no one who gets this little sleep should be allowed to be this happy.

Some days I have the bones of a bird but I can’t tell you about all the mornings that I wake up with a sandbag in my chest. I can’t explain why but I’m doing better than I have been in years and years and years, I would never take away anything that has ever happened to me because everything in the world is beautiful.

And you know I had a moment in the green and the blue while I was walking under that bridge in Iceland, an insane trust in God that has been more solid and enduring than any trust I’ve had in Him before, despite the sunlight on the walls in that window-filled room and despite naps in the park and a firestorm in my brain just last weekend, there have been hands on my head and a peace in my heart as I’m kneeling on my deep blue sheets every single night, but now I think I get that You love me as I am, because for the longest time it’s been I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry, but you know that right now it’s just thank you thank you thank you.

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