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Anorexia: Black or White No Grey Areas
The person suffering from anorexia very often as part of there illness will have distorted thoughts about themselves and place far too much importance on there appearance. For example "being thinner I would be so much happier" or "I would get grossly overweight if I ate all the things I wanted to".
Perhaps at some time or other in our lives we have also had the same thoughts, briefly. But our thoughts were just that, brief thoughts and then we realised that this wasn't true. This is where the anorexic differs; the anorexic will have thoughts such as these and truly believe them.
These thoughts have now become so deep seated they have become second nature; the ability to rationalise has long since left. Therefore help is needed to make the anorexic sufferer understand that not everything is black or white, there are indeed grey areas in all aspects of life.
Nothing is as clear cut as its either good or bad, success or failure. Most of us have no trouble accepting this thinking and if we eat whatever we fancy and put on a couple of pounds, so what they can be removed.
For the majority of people this is acceptable and of no great consequence, but to the anorexic it is far from trivial and if they were to eat what they fancied and put on those same couple of pounds they would see themselves as a complete failure.
Therefore one of the first steps to recovery for the anorexic is gaining help in changing there way of thinking, learning that areas of Grey are perfectly acceptable.
Anorexics often over generalise there thinking too for example they will take an event and turn it into a hard and fast rule, for example the person that has suffered at the hands of a male abuser will rationalise that all men will abuse her.
Many suffering from an eating disorder such as anorexia will always downplay any positive thinking and exaggerate on the bad thoughts.
Anorexia can also cause the sufferer to have trouble with emotional reasoning many suffering from eating disorders feel guilty about there behaviour so since they feel guilty they rationalize that they must be guilty.
The word "should" has deep meaning to the person suffering anorexia torturing them selves with endless "I should" for example "I should be able to control my thoughts", " I should be able to stop this" the word almost becomes an obsession to them.
This is where psychotherapy can play an important role in the recovery process, once the sufferer is able to distinguish between rational and irrational thoughts the first and perhaps the most important step has been taken on the road to recovery.
Copyright Clipp.org
Further Reading
http://www.anorexiasurvivalguide.com/
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