Breaking the pattern
By James Cockerill
My childhood was normal in a beautiful way. I was happy, healthy and secure. I had wonderful parents, a great sister and wonderful friends. I was genuinely lucky. Food was simply part of life. I enjoyed it, but I rarely thought about it. It was just another thing to enjoy in an otherwise happy childhood.
That all changed around my 15th birthday. What started out as a falling out with a friend escalated into something quite sinister. For months, I was bullied and threatened and genuinely feared for my life. The people threatening me were legitimately dangerous, and I felt I had no way to escape the situation. The fear was all consuming and I began to live every
day in a state of chronic anxiety.
Before long, the stress began to affect me physically too. I felt too nervous to eat, and when I would have to eat, I would often feel sick. Those feelings would escalate to the point I would not be able to keep food down, which itself became a source of anxiety. Over weeks and months of this pattern playing out, I started to expect it, and food itself became a trigger for anxiety and nausea.
Over years, this pattern of association became a dominant structure in my thinking. I would wake up in the morning and one of my first thoughts would be a moment of dread where I would remember ‘I need to try and eat breakfast soon’… That would instantly trigger an anxiety response. My heart rate would increase, my hands start to tingle, I would tense up, I would start to feel sick – my body wanted to run away from the situation but of course, there was nowhere to run.
I lived mostly on nutritional milkshakes which I found easier to keep down, and would supplement with as much food as I could, but I would often vomit multiple times a day, so it was a constant battle to get enough calories. Sometimes things would get really bad and I would get myself so worked up I would vomit continuously, which on multiple occasions led to me being hospitalized.
Despite all of this, I was able to keep my life together. I graduated university with a degree in Chemistry. I had an active social life, great friends who were able to maintain a sense of humour through it all, and in the time between meals, I was happy. All through this time I was in therapy of one sort or another. I had been to see multiple psychologists, completed multiple CBT courses, tried hypnosis, I had been prescribed all kinds of medications, eastern medicine, western medicine – I tried everything. Nothing seemed to
make much of a difference. My anxiety around food was so extreme that it would cause my body to vomit, and I had no idea how to break the spell, and I hated myself for it. Looking in the mirror could cause me to vomit. It felt so familiar at this point, it was impossible to even imagine an alternative, it all felt so inevitable and out of my control.
By my mid-twenties I had been living with this situation for a decade, and I was starting to realize that this was never going to go away on its own. I needed to keep pushing for change. My doctor prescribed another course of talking therapy, and this time I struck gold.
My new therapist, to whom I will always feel grateful, approached our relationship with an unconditional loving kindness and patience, which in a short time, began to influence how I would approach the relationship with myself. She helped me understand myself from a place of compassion, which was remarkably healing in of itself. Crucially she introduced me to mindfulness meditation, which had such a dramatic and miraculous impact, its hard to overstate.
She explained mindfulness to me as non-judgemental curiosity:
“Next time you find yourself worried about food, start paying very close attention to the changes in your body. Instead of running away from what appears, or hoping it goes away, welcome it. As you relax and pay closer attention, welcome any sensations arises simply as a pattern of energy. Don’t label anything, don’t react to anything, just stay curious, accept and welcome anything that arises and see what happens”
Trusting this experiment and following that instruction was the greatest decision of my life. To my astonishment, I found the mental posture of accepting’ and ‘curiously welcoming’ my sensations, took their power away. By allowing them to appear, they softened all on their own. All this time I had been fighting with myself, and I wasn’t even aware of it.
To put it another way, she recognized I was stuck in cycle that went something like this:
I worried about food.
That worry produced intense physical sensations.
I interpreted those sensations as proof that something was wrong.
That interpretation created even more anxiety, which intensified the sensations even
further.
Every episode reinforced the belief that food was dangerous
Mindfulness allowed me to break that cycle at Step 3, before it started to escalate. The changes to my physiology no longer meant I was going to vomit. They no longer had to mean anything! They were simply sensations – patterns of energy – I could choose to escalate by trying to run from them, or simply relax and watch them pass by like weather in the mind. Within a few weeks of practicing mindfulness several times a day, I was no longer vomiting. Within a few months, my anxiety around food had almost entirely disappeared.
Today, I’m 38 years old and I’m delighted to share that I now have a joyful, peaceful relationship with food. I look forward to eating, and sharing meals with people I care about. Food has become what it always had the promise to be, nourishment, connection, fun even!
Mindfulness has become one of the defining practices of my life. Since recovering, I’ve developed a habit that has continued to reward my mental health. I’ve spent time in India on silent meditation retreat, and have enjoyed deepening my understanding of the practice that changed everything for me.
Looking back, I no longer see my eating disorder simply as something to overcome. It was one of the hardest experiences of my life, but it ultimately led me towards a way of understanding myself that I may never otherwise have discovered.
If you’re reading this while you’re still struggling, I won’t pretend the journey is easy. I also won’t tell you that your path has to look like mine.
What I will say is this.
I once believed recovery was impossible because I couldn;’ imagine seeing the world any differently. It felt inevitable. But I was so wrong.
Change became possible the moment I stopped fighting my own experience and started meeting it with curiosity, patience and kindness. I hope, with all my heart, that one day you’ll discover your own version of that moment.
