From Ruin to Recovery – Part Three

Part One | Part Two | Part Three

Part Three

By: Jean Johnson for Body1

Alice Clark’s secrecy about her bulimia lasted far beyond high school and into college, marriage, and motherhood. She explains, “I was good at getting away with it. Even my husband didn’t know after all those years – but he has a poor sense of smell.”

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What’s Behind Bulimia Some studies have indicated that bulimics may be attempting to self-medicate for elevated stress hormones like cortisol and insufficient feel-good neurotransmitters such as serotonin Common characteristics of people suffering from bulimia include suppressed anger, unmet needs, feeling undeserving, and a lack of empowerment. Over the past two decades much of the secrecy shrouding bulimia has been eliminated with celebrity confessions and reports that between 10 and 20 percent of female college students have practiced the behavior at some point in their lives.

Clark laughs gently at the memory, and her eyes crinkle with a goodwill that seems at stark odds with the story she recounts. Indeed, in her hiking shorts, sandals, T-shirt and vest, she looks like she stepped out of the pages of an outdoor clothes catalog. Looks can be deceiving though, and once she’s finished her story, Clark will be off to one of the three Overeaters Anonymous meetings she still attends on a weekly basis.

First though, she talks about the desperation that finally caused her to seek help. “Right,” she said. “I’m a swimmer, and one time was at the pool and one of the people I worked with was there watching one of his kids swim. I’d just finished a huge binge and purge. I was so mad at myself that I wanted to purge/exercise, you know – swim real hard to make sure I didn’t gain any weight. So I saw the guy.”

“‘How are you?’ he said.”

“I answered, ‘Oh, just great. Just great.’

” “Then I walked away and sat on the edge of the pool thinking ‘if only you know what was inside of me.’ Everything must look just great on the outside, but ‘if only you knew.’”

Clark remembers slipping into the cool, blue water for the first of her laps. As she swam the tension eased some, but the exercise was only a mild palliative and her broken heart continued to pulse leaden and frightened and lonely deep in her chest. Her torment knew no relief.

“The shame, you know,” she said, searching my eyes. “And it’s so sad because we’re just going the best we know how, and if no one can show you a healthy way, you just do whatever you can.”

Things finally came to a head when Clark’s first son was two and half years old. “The bulimia was the worst it had ever been. I was throwing up blood and all day long – like 10 to 12 times a day. It’s like you think every ounce of food is going to make you weigh a million pounds. And it was the anger, still, too. The sad thing was that I would just take it out on myself,” Clark said.

“But it was this one day specifically that I knew I had to do something. It was the day I really hit bottom. My son was upstairs calling for me – you know how with a toddler that age they are controlling your entire life. I was downstairs purging and thinking how awful it would be if I passed out and people found out – and what they would think of me. That was the thing that got to me – here I was only concerned about me – not my son,” Clark said, pressing her lips together in a thin line of regret. “It was pretty… awful.

“I knew something was wrong with me. I thought I was either insane or had some eating problem, but I just wasn’t sure what it was. So I went to the library and found a book called ‘My Name is Carolyn.’ It had a picture of a pretty young woman on the front, and it was about her recovery from bulimia and anorexia. I checked it out and read it secretly, hiding it from my husband,” Clark said. “That’s when I first realized I had an eating disorder.”

Once the ball was in motion, a serendipitous series of events conspired to put Clark on the path to Overeaters Anonymous where she eventually found the recovery that has marked the past 16 years of her life.

“First off, I wrote Carolyn, the author of the book, a letter telling her how brave I thought she was for putting her picture on the cover of the book and how I, too, had the problem. Then, wouldn’t you know my brother, who was alcoholic before he died, sent me the ‘Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous’ not because he knew about me but because someone had sent it to him and he didn’t like it. He said, ‘If you want to read this thing, go ahead, but it’s so stupid.’

“Then this one weekend my brother came out to visit, and he had hallucinations and ended up in a locked psyche ward at Oregon Health Sciences University Hospital. The only way he could leave was if he went to a treatment center on the coast: Serenity by the Sea. So I drove him out there and then went back weekly for six weeks to be his family member for these sessions where everyone sits face-to-face in a room with the person and tells them what their drinking is doing to them. There were wives with screaming kids in there. It was really intense,” said Clark. “By going down every week, though, I began to realize that he had alcohol and mine manifested in purging. The real issue was that I was just as sick as he was.

“About the same time I got a letter back from Carolyn – the author of the book. She said ‘you must know that alcoholism and bulimia runs in families where depression is present.’ Also she encouraged me to tell my husband because she said ‘we’re only as sick as our secrets,’ you know that saying. Finally at the very end she said that she went to OA and that’s where she got recovery.”

Continued in Part Four

Last updated: 11-Apr-06