ForewordExcerpt From Life Without Ed
by Thom Rutledge, author of Embracing Fear
The first night I met Jenni Schaefer she ripped a floor pillow to pieces. The cotton stuffing was everywhere, the fabric all over the group therapy room, and Jenni looked quite relieved.
She was talking about her eating disorder and everything it had stolen from her. “What are you feeling right now?” I asked Jenni.
“Mad,” she answered simply.
“Describe what mad feels like,” I said.
As Jenni searched for the right words, I noticed something more important than words. As she spoke her hands clenched and unclenched like she was squeezing something in the air.
“What do you feel in your hands?” I asked. “There seems to be a lot of energy there.”
Jenni paused as her concentration shifted to her hands that were now two tight fists. “Angry, very angry,” she said.
“What do your hands want to do?”
“Rip something up,” Jenni answered so quickly that she surprised even herself. A few minutes, later a perfectly good floor pillow had given its life so that Jenni might begin her journey to recovery.
Jenni dove headfirst into the work of recovery from her eating disorder. My clients don’t usually do something as courageous on their first night in group therapy as destroying part of the office décor. But that first night, Jenni was ready; Jenni was determined.
Determination does not guarantee an excellent recovery. The road ahead of Jenni was not particularly smooth. She would stumble and fall on her face — and on her butt — many times along the way. But I could always see her determination. Jenni lost sight of it from time to time, but I never did. This young woman was committed to staying on the recovery path and not looking back. My work with Jenni has always been enjoyable. She made my job so much easier because she worked so hard. She was constantly taking notes during her sessions, but somehow her note taking never distracted from the work. Although she described her notebook as her own personalized self-help book, the idea of writing a book about eating disorder recovery did not occur to her for some time. She was in Nashville to pursue her dream of performing and songwriting after all.
Now I know that those therapy notes have paid off — not just for Jenni, but for you too.
You hold in your hands an extremely practical book. If you are struggling with an eating disorder, Life Without Ed can show you the way out. If you love someone with an eating disorder, Life Without Ed can help you make sense of what has previously been beyond comprehension. And if you are a mental health professional, Life Without Ed can take you inside the mind of a person with an eating disorder and teach you more than any research paper ever could about how to treat this insidious illness.
Life Without Ed is like no other book about eating disorder recovery. It has two important features that are missing from most books on the subject. First, it is simultaneously hopeful and realistic. Because having an eating disorder is such a frustrating experience (major understatement), these two elements do not coexist easily. Jenni shares her experiences in ways that acknowledge the nuts-and-bolts difficulties of recovery, while remaining the beam of hope that tells readers by her example, “If I can do this, so can you.” And for those of you currently thinking that other people can recover from eating disorders but you can’t, I am here to tell you that Jenni Schaefer absolutely believed the very same thing not so very long ago.
Beyond practical, realistic, and hopeful, Life Without Ed has another very important element that has only been hinted at in other eating disorder books: humor.
In our all-or-none, black-or-white culture, humor about eating disorders has either not existed or it has been tasteless and abusive, implying that this is a condition brought on by extreme vanity and that those who have eating disorders are shallow and vacant of real values. Nothing could be further from the truth. The people with eating disorders whom I have treated are some of the most intelligent, competent, creative, and hilarious people I have ever known. And they are anything but shallow in their reflections about themselves and the world around them.
Toward establishing a middle ground with humor on this subject, Jenni’s lessons and stories contain humor that neither minimize the struggle — hers, yours, or anyone else’s — nor ridicules or condemns. The humor of Life Without Ed comes from Jenni’s perspective from having been there — in the trenches. And that’s what humor in personal growth work is anyway: perspective that is born of experience. So I invite you to meet a remarkable young woman who will share with you secrets that many of you have thought — at least until now — were only your secrets.
I encourage you to take advantage of the short sections in Life Without Ed. Read a little from here and there throughout the book, in no particular order. Identify with what Jenni has to say to you, try some of the exercises, make some notes in a journal of your own. But try not to put too much pressure on yourself. Take Life Without Ed a little at a time. Don’t binge on it. Chew slowly and digest it in your own time frame. And certainly don’t starve yourself of its wisdom.
Don’t add this book to your list of compulsions. Read it, reread it, rest, and come back to it. When you are feeling particularly courageous, talk to a friend about what you are learning about yourself.
Enjoy. Grow. And be kind to yourself along the way.
Click here to read a three (3) part article that Thom gives to new participants of his eating disorder recovery groups to introduce his basic philosophy and methodology for working with eating disordered clients.
