Step One: Freedom Groups

 Let the stories begin! I’m so excited to share with you these intimate pieces of my heart.

Let’s start with context.

I developed my eating disorder my freshmen year of high school at age 14. I had no idea what I was getting myself into when I started my first restriction diet; it snowballed so fast I barely remember how I went from eating intuitively to neck-deep in anorexia.

Fast forward to my senior year. After three and a half years of restriction. Three and a half years of wanting to starve myself into nothingness. Three and a half years of weight loss and compulsive exercise and depression and anxiety and self-harm. Three and a half years later, on January 22, 2009, after reading an entry in an online forum, I finally admitted to myself that I had an eating disorder. My journal from that day ends with the words, “Wow. Apparently, I have an eating disorder.”

I suppose that was the first step toward recovery, although it would be months before I even had hope that recovery could be my reality. The day before graduation was the first day that I wanted…I mean really wanted…to put my eating disorder behind me.

 Whew. Context complete. Now to the really juicy stuff. How did I go from wanting to recover to actually doing it?

 

Step one: Freedom Groups

 During my sophomore year of college, my church started their own version of Celebrate Recovery called Freedom Groups. I still remember the day I showed up there. What I was wearing. How I was feeling. My perfect plan for joining the group and talking about my problems in the vaguest of terms so that nobody would actually know what I was struggling with. And I still remember the first break-out session where I heard another warrior share her story and how that somehow gave me the strength to share mine.

Oh, what a powerful moment. Oh, how God used that moment to break chains. Oh, the light that pierced the dark. Oh, how amazing it felt to confess my deepest, darkest secrets to near-strangers and find that they loved me more because of them.

I found so much healing in Freedom Groups, and not even because of the curriculum. Sure, the steps were powerful, but it was the sessions with the other women that changed my life. That was the year I learned that it was okay to say I’m not okay. To let down my guard enough to let others in.

I’m not entirely convinced that anything changed in my eating disorder through Freedom Groups. I was at a healthy weight by then and didn’t think I needed to recover because I believed the lies that 1. Being at a healthy weight meant I was recovered, and 2. There’s no such thing as FULLY recovered. It wasn’t going to get any better than this. But maybe my time in Freedom Groups wasn’t about recovering from my eating disorder. Maybe it was more about becoming the person who would be ready to recover when the time finally came.