The articulation of the Well and the discovery of my Strength were two of the biggest revelations for me during my healing process

In my opinion, one of the most important things to know going into the healing process is how much it's going to hurt. And it's going to hurt. It may be one of the hardest things you will ever face. I know for me that it is the single most difficult thing I have ever encountered.

When I was in therapy for my eating disorder years ago no one told me how bad it was going to get, not by half, maybe no one actually knew. If a therapist has not been afflicted with an eating disorder, maybe they don't know just how bad it gets for us. If they have been afflicted maybe they just don't remember. That's why I wanted to write this during my healing process so that I could capture all the pain and grief and share it with others. Maybe someone else would benefit from my struggle and be better prepared than I was. If you are prepared it makes all the difference in the world.

When I started my healing journey this time I knew it was going to be different, I don't know how, I just did. I was expecting it to be very difficult, I was more prepared for the pain than I had been all the other times I had tried, unsuccessfully, to heal.

In actuality, I had no idea how hard it was really going to be…

I came up with the name of the Well when I was asked what it felt like to be healing from something like bulimia. I said that it was as if I was at the bottom of a well looking up at my only escape, the hole at the top and someone was up there placing the lid over my only escape and I was watching the light slowly form a half moon and then disappear completely. It's blindingly hopeless.

I have spent most of my life stuffing, hiding and repressing my true feeling while replacing them with food, with the lack of food or with the food followed by the throwing up. All the years of repression and avoidance have created a byproduct that I call condensed emotion pain, or affectionately, "sludge."

Buried in this sludge at the bottom of the well is my heart, my soul, my passion, drive, motivation, dedication and will. Don't get me wrong, I love, I have meaningful relationships, I work hard at my job and excel in life, but when it comes right down to it, there is always something missing, something a little off, something not quite right and that's because there is a thin sludgy-film on everything I have experienced. It has been experienced through the mask of bulimia and food addiction.

In order to heal completely and finally be able to leave the well I had to descend to the bottom of the well and sort out the thick, dank sludge before I could come back up again. It is only at the bottom of the well that I was actually able to deal with what I call the seeds or the core issues that kept me trapped in a hurtful cycle.

In the therapies that I have been through I was unaware of the well, let alone the sludge at the bottom, so I was never able to go down as low as I needed to go to truly clear the pains and causes; therefore I was never able to break free of the captivity of my eating disorder.

What would happen to me was this: I would go to therapy to heal. I didn't know how hard it was going to truly be. It started getting difficult and I was not prepared for pain. The harder it got and the more my triggers were activated, the harder it was to cope because I had not yet developed the coping skills necessary to deal with all the pain I was discovering. I would then stuff the issues down even further than they were when I started therapy (the sweeping under the rug, or as I call it, the stuffing into the well, theory). I would descend partially into the well and deal with my problems but never get to the bottom of it all.

I dealt with things well enough for the time being and was able, mostly through behavior modification, to leave therapy. Once I was out on my own and no longer had my therapist to guide me and without the proper coping skills (behavior modification can only go so far) I would revert back to my old ways of coping. I became one of the over 90% of women who revert back to their old habits after leaving therapy.

I was facing my issues and not only was I unprepared, but I also didn't have the coping skills t…well…cope. I think you need to develop the coping skills before you even think about dealing with the bottom of the well, and that's what I did this time.

Once I had practiced some coping skills like feeling and writing and all the other things I had been working on, then I was able to face the real issues head on because I was ready.

Realizing the depth of the well and knowing the well became more painful the lower I descended and the development of my newly honed coping skills allowed me to finally face it all. Without this knowledge it's almost like fighting an opponent while blindfolded. If you don't know what to expect, then you can't fight. If you know what's coming next, you have an advantage.

Bulimia is a false sense of control. Whenever I felt my life was out of control, which was most of the time, I knew I was in control of what I ate, didn't eat or ate and then threw up. I'd always known that it was a false sense of control but I didn't realize until a year into my healing that not only was my eating disorder a false sense of control, but so was the strength associated with it, or what I call now, my false wall of strength.

My false wall of strength was the wall that I showed everyone, the façade that made everyone, including myself, my friends, my boyfriends, ex-husband, mother believe that I had it all together, or at least had it mostly together. In fact, before the event that woke me up occurred, I had never truly realized just how deep, how destructive or how profound my struggle was.

I had built a wall of strength to show to the world so that no one would see inside; I bought into it at the same time. After a while I forgot that it was created as a coping mechanism and began to believe it was the only strength I was capable of, I had been using it to lean on and had stopped looking for my real strength inside. It was another way of surrendering to the eating disorder and losing myself.

Once I realized my false strength was hiding my real strength that was buried deep in the Well, I basically had a meltdown. I lost it completely. The full realization that I was a compulsive-overeater-bulimic and it was destroying my life and my relationship set in and I had to find myself or lose myself completely.

It was a scene from a movie. I screamed, I sobbed, I threw the contents of the refrigerator onto the floor. My boyfriend had to restrain me from destroying the house. It wasn't pretty. But once I calmed down, once I began to shed the false strength, my real strength began to emerge. I didn't let myself down like I was afraid I was going to…I was okay. I may have had to deal with smashed plums on my light grey carpet in the living room…but I was okay.

Since then I have been growing stronger and stronger each day and the healing process has been easier. Not easier in the sense that it is actually an easier process now, but easier in the sense that I am actually facing things full on for the first time in 17 years, possibly the first time in my life.

I'm not saying I wasn't strong before, I was in my own way, but I was so dependent upon the food, the lack of food, the thought of food, the bulimia, the thought of bulimia and the rest for my strength that I never uncovered the true strength I needed to break this. It was almost as if at that moment in life where you develop strength to cope I found food and from then on the food kept me from developing the strength and the false strength kept me dependant on the food.

It's almost as if you are learning to walk. When I was learning to walk emotionally, I skipped the part where you learn to crawl, I just grabbed a pair of leg braces, threw on a really pretty long skirt to hide them and off I went.

Everyone was always so impressed by how quickly I learned to walk and how tall I always seemed to stand that no one ever looked closer to see that my leg braces were cutting into my legs and I was bleeding.

I was so proud of myself for my ability to walk the way I had chosen and so scared that someone might find out I didn't know how to crawl on my own, let alone walk without help, I never dared change anything.

That night, I took off the braces and started to crawl for the first time. Slowly I will start to walk. With my true strength and my own legs this time.