I never thought I would be doing a book review on this blog, however it seems to have come to this! As I mentioned in my last post, I attend a recovery support group, and at this group they have a collection of books at the back of the room that you can take away, read and return. In February I decided I wanted to take a book away to read that goes by the name of conquering anorexia written by Clare Lindsay. The book follows Clare's journey with anorexia and her recovery, discovering the reasons behind her behaviours and finding ways to overcome them. I thought this may be a good book for me to read, to help me understand Ana and the difference between her and myself. I also found that it made me look at my past and possibly the reasons for Ana being part of my life.
From reading the book, I found a lot of early behavioural similarities between myself and Clare. I realised that when looking back at my days in primary school that all I wanted, was to be liked and accepted by the people around me. I was a people pleaser, and to me I felt successful when I managed to make someone feel better, or I did what I thought was a good deed. In a sense this carried on through secondary school as well, apart from being the 'people pleaser' never got be out of conflicts and normally put me in the middle of arguments. Due to this personality trait I would always put other people's needs first and neglect my own needs. I'm not saying I was the perfect teenager, I also had days of selfishness too, as does anyone. Again, all of this goes back to wanting people to like me. I still see this in myself now. I find it very hard to remove toxic people from my life, as I know this will end friendships, and cause 'friction' between myself and another person, and for some reason I just can't deal with that.
After reflecting on my childhood with the help of this book, I very quickly realised that my Anorexia is just one symptom of much larger problem. I now just need to identify what that larger problem is, and I'll hopefully do this through my treatment at the ED centre. I need to work on my personal awareness in order to uncover what is going on beneath my eating difficulties.
So now I have two symptoms of a much larger problem: People pleasing and Anorexia. It didn't take me that much longer to realise other symptoms of this much larger problem. For example, I experienced a lot of anxiety from the age of 11 up- often leading to panic attacks. I also lost a lot of confidence. Confidence issues are caused by numerous things but I can identify that the one thing that really knocked my confidence growing up was being compared to other people. This happened quite a lot unfortunately as I was a competitive gymnast so the whole nature of the sport is very competitive, even within your own squad. My younger brother and I were also quite competitive. Although we get on now, we never used to when we were both at secondary school. He used to make remarks at me about how he was superior in numerous different ways, and although at the time I tried to shrug it off and put it down to sibling rivalry, some of the things he used to say have stuck with me even until today, and that well and truly sucks. With loss of confidence comes low self esteem, and this is something I've again, always had. I constantly used to compare myself to others and I still do now sometimes, especially when it came to subject matters such as beauty, body image, and life experiences. On top of this, I used to feel really inferior to my classmates academically as I wasn't the person who could do a tiny bit of revision and get an A or B, I used to have to work my arse off just to get a C. It seemed as though my friends had it easy academically at the time. Ana came into my life and turned into a coping mechanism of subconscious avoidance.
Conquering Anorexia had an amazing list of coping strategies at the back of the book, often revolving around reflection and self awareness. But there was one coping strategy that I found really useful surrounding the subject of saying 'no'. This is something I have struggled with, however since reading the book I have found saying 'no' a lot easier. This has dramatically changed my mental health recently. Below is an example of how the coping technique works.
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