Anorexia Discovered

Anonymous

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Hopefully, the below article will help someone connect their acting “out” or “in” with what is going on and why. I am attempting to deal with my anorexia and finally realizing that the dynamic underlying all my choices regarding my treatment of all the women to whom I have been attracted, has been my decision to not allow any personal, intimate nourishment into my life from any of them. This was because if they attracted me, I didn’t trust them. And in those efforts to protect myself, I have starved myself. 

Four and a half years ago, I had been attending AA meetings almost daily for the preceding five years, with never a relapse and I considered myself “sober”. I then became deeply involved with a professional dominatrix, specializing in BDSM. It lasted for approximately 2 1⁄2 years. Initially it was “great” and as I acted out with her, I felt that I had finally found a satisfying relationship. She became my higher power. I endured a lot of physical pain in her dungeon, but I realize only now that the intensity of the pain I was willing to suffer in BDSM was an indication of how much I wanted to feel “something”. I just didn’t know what it was. 

I did trust that my mistress - if only because of the symbiotic nature of our relationship – I knew that she had a substantial investment in not injuring me and in being discrete; this, so as not to kill the “Golden Goose.”Because I realized that I could never have a healthy relationship with a woman if I was involved with a professional mistress, I stopped for six months to find a “normal” relationship. But eventually I returned to her because ours had been the closest relationship I had ever had with a woman to whom I was attracted and I was convinced that it was the closest thing to intimacy I ever would experience. It lasted for an additional (and final) six months. 

And I cannot think of a better example of (SLAA Characteristic #9) “...attaching myself to someone who was emotionally unavailable” than purchasing the services a professional dominatrix/mistress for whom the “love relationship” was simply a financial transaction. 

Until I was approximately 10 years old, I experienced as safe, trustworthy and stable a relationship with my parents as I could imagine. Then, one night after “lights out” I was in my bed secretly reading a book under the covers with a flashlight. Out of the blue, my mother burst into my room, ripped off the blanket and started beat me with a leather belt, screaming hysterically that I had “defied” her. 

I never mentioned this (single) beating to my father because I felt I had deserved to be punished for having broken a rule. In fact, I never mentioned it to anyone until 20 years later when it came up in therapy. At my therapist’s suggestion, I confronted my mother with what had occurred. It turns out that it had little, if anything, to do with me. At that time she had been acting out because of her own problems. 

But after that experience I never again fully trusted on an intimate level her or any other woman to whom I was attracted. Although, I am Intellectually clear that my mother’s actions that night were completely irrational, until I spent the last few years working on myself in SLAA, whenever I met a woman who attracted me, in the back of my mind, I “knew” that she would “out of nowhere”, turn into a monster. And it didn’t matter that in reality, she might be a kind and loving person. That “self-fulfilling prophecy” has, over my life-time, played out with every woman to whom I was attracted. 

Now, having attended SLAA meetings for the last 3 years, I have heard the stories of some of the participants who were sexually molested and how traumatic that breach of trust by someone in authority was to them. For a time I downplayed my own trauma because I had never suffered what I considered that more serious trauma. But I have learned that what I, a trusting 10 year old boy, had experienced was just as traumatic TO ME as what they had experienced. And I can no longer minimize the impact of that breach of trust I experienced because of how clearly it has played out in my life in the way I have perceived women. 

One of the other characteristics of SLAA I only recently identified with was ( #12): We assign magical qualities to others. We idealize and pursue them, then blame them for not fulfilling our fantasies and expectations.” Initially, I didn’t resonate with the above because I had decided in AA to stop “playing victim” and I tried to no longer blame other people for my mistakes. Although I did, indeed, treat my dom/mistress as “magical” - she and the sexual stimulation she offered seemed awesome because the feelings were so intense - I never blamed her for not “fulfilling my ... expectations”. I only lately realized that this was because the only “expectations” that I had of any woman to whom I was attracted, was that she would eventually betray me, like I had perceived that my mother had. 

In AA I had done what I considered (at the time) a thorough “4th step. And sex had never surfaced. It was only after I had terminated my relationship with my dom/mistress (because it had become impossible to ignore that I was little more than a “cash cow”), that it occurred to me that I would benefit from doing a 4th Step regarding my sexual activity. And it could be done in only a safe place where it would be appropriate to discuss it – in SLAA, not AA. 

After about 5 years in AA I learned of a support group for personal relationships and intimacy called “Sex & Love Addicts Anonymous”

(SLAA). It sounded so salacious to me that I doubted its validity until I actually attended an SLAA meeting. After about 2 years in SLAA, I stopped “acting out”. But I eventually realized that I had simply morphed into “acting in” (binging and purging, working compulsively, isolating, masturbating, etc.). And it was only after working with a knowledgeable and solid sponsor who understood social and sexual anorexia that it became clear to me that (Characteristic #11) “to avoid feeling vulnerable, I had retreated from all intimate involvement, mistaking sexual and emotional anorexia for recovery.” Now I am attempting to deal with what intimacy is, how I long for it and how to let it in. And I am consciously attempting to allow in the nurture and support available to me from all the people who love me and value me, not just the few I trusted because they are of my blood.