A TESTIMONY: Healing that came through pain

I had a thick layer of denial covering a part of my past. An area where I refused to go. The weird thing was that it wasn’t something bad. I’ve heard people talk about really awful things in their past being so hidden that they couldn’t remember it, and then it would surface in counseling and reveal what was wrong with them all these years.

I was really fortunate: I didn’t have any physical or sexual abuse in my past. I am convinced that I have my mom to thank for keeping me safe in this area. She told me that she, because of abuse in her childhood, took extra special care that I would not be hurt in this way. I am so grateful to her, because back then parents were not so aware of the possible dangers of leaving your little child with a “friendly relative” or someone you didn’t really know all that well.

But, there was still the million dollar question: Why was I so messed-up?
People don’t just get eating disorders, right? I kept telling myself that to have such an abnormal relationship with food and your body, you had to have had at least something as big as abuse in your background, but I didn’t.

So I tried figuring it out: I prayed about it, I went for counseling, and I researched the subject of eating disorders in detail. I looked for answers in all the obvious places, and some of these discoveries were really helpful and made huge differences. Yet, I knew for sure that I kept missing something and that it must be important, because I kept  falling back, even after great victories.

Actually I must have known all along, but I didn’t want to look there. See, I had a fantasy that my childhood was perfect, mainly because of my Mom. I didn’t want to give up that fantasy by taking a look to see if the relationship between me and her might have hurt me in some way or another.

I was always very close to my Mom and my Grandma, and I’m sure that we always will be.
We had this amazing bond through the years. We could tell from each other’s voices when the other one was hurting, and we would be there for each other in a heartbeat to help heal, cry, laugh, or whatever needed to be done. At least this was true for the part when I was still a child in my mom’s house, they were both married, and our lives were pretty stable.

I have the most amazing memories about my Mom and Grandma. They were like two beacons in my life that everything else revolved around. I once wrote a tribute to them where I describe my childhood and how amazing it was to be sheltered between the two of them. I felt so safe and so loved. I knew that they would do anything for me, and I in turn would do anything not to disappoint them.
And yet, I disappointed them. I was pretty head strong, and I got myself into trouble in my early college years. But they never turned their backs on me, on the contrary, they pulled their resources together, as only strong women can do, and they got me through it. Similar messes followed and they never failed to rescue me.
Yet, I was so ashamed, and I knew I was a disappointing them. I decided to be better. I would make them so proud of me, I would never fail them again. So, my whole life became a quest to make them proud. By the grace of God I got a wonderful husband, had a few kids, made my house beautiful, and decided to be perfect: Perfect figure (through diet pills), perfect hair and clothes, perfect performance ( finished college), and perfect behavior (I would make everyone happy).

Yeah, you know it: Disaster waiting to happen!

I didn’t even realize that I’ve made this decision to be perfect at the time. You never really think about these “decisions”, they just happen and before you know it, you’re swept away in a current that you can’t control.

Thinking back, I thought for sure that my Mom was perfect. She told me about her marriage problems, and back then I thought it was all my Dad, she couldn’t possibly have done anything wrong. I really worshiped her, and in a way I think all girls do, but to me the fairytale went on long into adult hood.

She was a wonderful mom to me: She was always caring, understanding and forgiving. We would talk for hours. We were best friends. She was and still is a beautiful woman and I’ve always admired her. I admired her looks (I didn’t look like her) and I admired her sweetness (I have a side to me that definitely more sour than sweet). 
When ever we had a disagreement when I was a child, I felt so bad about how bad I was. It never occurred to me that she might be having a bad day and I might be right. I always believed that I was the bad one with the temper and the big mouth, and she was the one with the soft disposal and the self control.
Today I know that we just have different personalities, but back then I saw myself as being bad and her as being good. I was not only trying to look different, but I was constantly working at making my personality “better”. Even today, the “perfect girl” wants to constantly “work on me” and “change me”.

Years later when my parents divorced, I still couldn’t see any fault in her. I was always loyal to her, and I would take on anybody who would ever say a word against her. This in itself is weird, because I am very much a people pleaser who avoids conflict. Even after changing a lot in this area, conflict still gives me an uncomfortable knot in the pit of my stomach. I do it because I know it’s healthy, but I don’t like it. Yet, there were two different incidents where I found myself lashing out and hating members of my extended family for saying something bad to or about my Mom. I couldn’t forgive them for years and almost daily grieved for my Mom’s sake about their callous words. In the end some of the rumors, that I refuted at all cost, turned out to be true.

I was devastated: surely she would never lie to me. And even after I spoke, very timidly to her about it, I kept finding excuses in my mind for her. There must always be some excuse for her behavior, she couldn’t possibly have weaknesses, she had to be perfect.

The truth: She is just human and of course she has weaknesses, just like me.
Today, I know how the enemy can twist these things in the mind of a child, and if we don’t refute these lies later in life with the truth of God, we tend to still live our lives according to those lies. So to follow the trail into our childhood – being led to the place by the pain or anger, spot the lie, and then replace it with the truth – is essential for all of us.

In my years of research, I kept stumbling upon the fact that moms usually play a big part in their daughters’ eating disorders. I refused to go there. I wanted to hold on to the fantasy.

But the Holy Spirit is faithful, and although I didn’t even want to consider the possibility that there might be something there, He kept nudging me. Things happened: I moved far away, in fact, to a different country. I was stripped from my mom’s support and I cried about my mom and my grandma, every day, for at least two years. I never knew how depended I was on them. I especially needed their affirmation and compliments. I needed them to hear from God and tell me what to do. I was terrified to be on my own, although I was now a well grown women with three kids and a husband.

I felt as if I could not stand on my own, which was in part adapting to a new culture, but my dependency on my mom played a big role as well. I told my husband many times that I could not live without my mom or grandma, blaming him for taking me away from them. I always thought that if one of them should die, I would never survive it. I was convinced that I simply could not live without them.

Gradually, after many years of grieving and struggling to find my feet in a different country, I realized that I was going to be okay.
I still missed them, but the realization dawned on me that I might survive without them. I grew finally up: I didn’t feel so afraid anymore.
This made me feel guilty though. I was so happy to be free and to stand on my own. It was as if a weight was lifted from my shoulders, and yet it made me feel so guilty. I felt as if I betrayed them. Especially my mom. Her situation remained difficult and I kept wanting to save her or at least give her money or advice or something. I especially felt guilty for being happy and being safe while she was not.
I felt that I was totally responsible for her. Even when she made her own mistakes, I felt somehow responsible for those. I kept thinking that if I didn’t leave, maybe this wouldn’t have happened to her. I was so afraid of breaking the unhealthy cord between us by telling her how all of this impacted me and that I couldn’t bear much more of it, because I was afraid that she would simply die.

At some point I had to look again at all the things I’ve read. I had to realize that we had a close relationship, but it was too close.
It didn’t seem possible, and I still feel bad for even mentioning such a thing. How can you be too close? I felt like an ungrateful daughter who got too much love and didn’t appreciate it. Yet, I read that people, like my mom, who suffered from some kind of abuse as a child tend to stay in a place where they need someone else to be strong for them, until they find the healing they need to stand alone. I felt it in our relationship, and I didn’t want to be the strong one anymore.

Obviously I also picked up on some of the things my mom modeled. Things such as a low self image and struggles with weight and food that were all stemming from her very hurtful past.

Of course this wasn’t just my Mom. Insecurity and weight struggles came with the culture we grew up in. I remember family reunions that we had once or twice a year. I remember diets, new clothes, and fear of being the fattest one there. We would always afterwards talk about who was fat and who looked great. I know today that this prejudice is so wrong and gives such a crooked message to the heart of a little girl. It tells her that your appearance is everything. If you gain weight, get old, or have a pimple you lose all your value.

My mom is the furthest thing away from a mean person: I always thought and still thinks that she has an amazing capacity to love and understand other people. But this area of valuing appearance became so part of the culture, that we never even thought that we were prejudice against others if we are highly critical of ourselves. In fact it was only recently, having a daughter of my own, that I started to check my own prejudice against people based on their appearance, and I was shocked to find that I still judge people on how they looked on the outside almost every day.

For the first time in my life it dawned on me that the things I just casually say may have a huge impact on her, and probably already caused some damage in my boys’ lives. I realized that I have to drastically change the way I think and especially change the way I speak:

• Every time I say to my daughter that I am such a fat slob, she hears that she better never become fat because she will be a slob and a person she and her mom could not except.

• Every time I tell her that someone looks so great, because they lost a lot of weight and they are just too beautiful for words; she hears that she will only be beautiful and be admired by her mom and others when she is skinny.

• Every time I tell her that she should not eat something because she will get fat; she hears that food should be feared, hated and avoided if possible.

• Every time I tell her that she can not wear something because she is too fat; she hears that certain clothes and privileges are just for the skinny. If you are overweight you have to settle for other, less attractive an fashionable stuff.

Now of course all these things are deeply imbedded in our culture, and our mothers were victims themselves of a culture that values appearance above everthing else. My mom gave me lots of compliments. She always tried to make me feel better when I came home, shattered by the mean words of other kids. I was a freckled, chubby kid. The sad part, which is the story of so many: I was never fat. I was of medium built, and just your average teenage girl, with some zits. Nothing spectacular, but also not too bad.

If I accepted myself earlier on, I could have had a normal relaxed life where I could look great if I dressed up for a special occasion and just be normal and myself on a dressing-down day. Instead, I tried to become as skinny as a wafer and tried “re-making” myself into a stunning beauty.

The other tragic part of this story, which is also the story of so many others: When I finally “succeeded” in beating myself into a different looking person, people couldn’t tell me enough how beautiful I was. This didn’t help. It just confirmed the lie that I believed: The real me wasn’t good enough.

I still wonder why my mom and those close to me never asked me how I suddenly stayed so thin. Everybody were using diet pills back then, but you had to literally abuse it to look the way I did. Also, nobody ever asked me why I never ate, or confronted me about some serious sin in my life. Everybody kept on telling me how amazing I looked, and the pressure was on for me to keep up the charade. I would cry so many nights; I didn’t know how I was going to keep this up without killing myself. My mom never confronted me, we never had any conflict about it, our relationship stayed perfect.
Part of the reason was probably that, when I was in the midst of a full blown eating disorder, her life was turned upside down too. I didn’t agree with things that she was doing, but I never said anything, I never confronted her, I just pretended that I agreed and believed everything, and our relationship stayed perfect.

It was the hardest thing I had to do:  Give up the fantasy. We really didn’t have the perfect relationship. We were in fact enabling each other. Her opinion meant more to me than anybody’s in this world, something which is true for most women, and yet she didn’t tell me that I was on the verge of throwing away my whole life and my health. The same went for me, I was never honest with  her and yet she needed honesty from me more than anything else.

Finally I knew that if I don’t let go of the fantasy, I will keep on binging every time I spoke to her on the phone. I will keep on trying to get everything perfect every time I knew that she was coming over and then I will binge again the moment she leaves, wishing that I could have told her how I really felt. And then the guilt will come, and I will promise myself to be better next time, more perfect, more understanding and not so selfish.

How does one let go of a fantasy?
There’s only one way to do it: Face the facts.

I had to face the facts that:

• We were both flawed, like everybody else.

• We both had problems with food and our bodies.

• We both needed help and we couldn’t help each other. We closed our relationship in and kept people out through the years and it became unhealthy.

I was so afraid of losing her and I know she felt the same, and in the end the only way we could keep our relationship was to lose it. We had to find a new way of relating, a path of truth, without pretensions and especially without  illusions on my side.

I remember crying a lot though this process. It was so hard to just find where my mom ends and I begin, and then to separate was easily the hardest thing I ever had to do. I couldn’t just do it. I would take one step forward and ten back. It was a slow process, and I still deal with some of it.
At one point, due to circumstances that I’m sure God orchestrated, my Mom and I were in a situation where we could no longer keep up our pretensions. We were both hurt, angry, and depleted of the ability to give each other the undivided, unconditional love that made our relationship so “perfect” in the past.

I lost the “perfect” mom in those months, and she lost the “perfect” daughter.

Years of unsaid things came out: We hurt each other, we felt bad, we said sorry and we hurt some more. It was then that I knew, there was no turning back.
My eating disorder flared up like an out of control fire cracker and I couldn’t deny it anymore: This fantasy of being the perfect daughter and having the perfect mom was part of my problem.

Of course my relationship with my mom was never the sole reason that I had to find comfort in food. This disorder is an intricate weave of different things.
But this was one of the big layers of the onion that I had to peel to get to a place of freedom.

I had to grieve and forgive. I never realized how angry I was at my mom. I never realized how many things I held against her. When I found the courage to finally bring the matter before God, sobs of pain and anger tore out of me.

Something I never expected was my anger toward her for being sick so often when I was a child. How can you be angry for someone for being sick?! I don’t know. I just know that as a little girl I didn’t understand as I do today, I just felt abandoned by my mom and I felt a responsibility towards her that was far too heavy for little shoulders to carry. And ever since those early years, I never let go of that false responsibility. I always felt that I couldn’t tell her when I was angry or scared, for fear that it would make her die. This kept happening when I was an adult. I felt abandoned and betrayed by her at times, but I couldn’t tell her, because I was sure that anger from me might just push her over the edge.

What made this even worse was the fact that I know, especially now that I have a little girl of my own, that none of this was what she intended. How could she have prevented her illness? And for crying out loud, her biggest “crime” was that she loved me too much! 
She never intended to hurt me or make me feel insecure. On the contrary, she wanted to shelter me from pain and give me everything I ever needed.
And she succeeded at so much of that, more than I can ever begin to say. She gave me the biggest gift: she modeled loving God and loving people all her life.

Yet inside me, regardless of her good intentions, I carried unresolved pain, unforgiveness and anger towards her.

When I finally let the Holy Spirit take me there, to those hidden feelings of unforgivenss and pain, my healing came. It was not an easy process, because I had to change my dysfunctional way of relating to my mom and others.

I didn’t want to let go of the perfect Mother-daughter image that we had.
The fact was that God gave us something special, but Satan made me exalt it to a place where it never aught to have been. For me, God and my mom was almost on equal footage.

The second thing that fueled my denial for years, was of course, fear. I was terrified of what would happen if I opened the box. I was terrified of loosing the “good daughter” that I so carefully created and nurtured all these years.
And more than anything I was terrified to lose my mom’s acceptance and love.

In the end I didn’t lose my wonderful mom’s love and she didn’t lose mine. But for me to be okay with food, my body, and my person I had to first forgive her for things I never even admitted to myself before. I also had to learn to be honest, and say when I could not be the perfect daughter, when I felt used and when I needed to stop giving and receive some.

And more than anything, I had to learn to shut down the voice of the “perfect daughter” inside me. Satan used “her” to rule me for so many years. I always thought that I was seriously crazy. I was always so hard on myself.
Today I thank the Lord that he helped me to see that it is not even my own thoughts.

I have the Holy Spirit in me and my heart is clean before God. I can speak the truth in love. Yet, every time I speak from my heart, the enemy uses this voice of the “perfect daughter” to condemn me.
Thoughts such as “How can you say that? You must have hurt someone with that remark. Are you sure you said absolutely everything perfect? You are responsible for your mom, and if something happens to her, you will never forgive yourself. If you were a better daughter, nobody would be unhappy. You just make everybody unhappy. A good daughter doesn’t get tired, depressed, unhappy and especially not angry. A good daughter never talks back to her mother”

This perfect daughter I created was just part of the whole perfect person package. So my mom played only a part in this, my own competitive nature took over from then and in the end I was ruled by this obsession. But regardless of what caused it, I had to let it go.

Just like silencing the voice of Satan, the media and the world, I had to silence the voice of the “perfect person” in me with the truth of God’s Word.
All my life, I believed the lie that to talk back to your parents (basically disagreeing or engaging in any kind of conflict with them) was to dishonor them.
The truth: The Bible say we must honor our father and mother, but it also say we should speak the truth in love.
Not honoring our parents is when we argue and disagree for the sake of pride and to promote our own cause, regardless of who we hurt. But if we engage in conflict to keep a relationship clean and to move towards reconciliation, we do it because we love the other person and care about the relationship.
This is the right behavior, for the right reason, and will have the right results.

Today I am so grateful to God. I still know that my Mom and I have a very special relationship, but I don’t exalt it as something to be worshiped and kept perfect at all cost anymore.
Instead I’ve let go of the expectations I put on both me and my Mom. I’ve given us some room to make mistakes and be ourselves.
And even in this area I’m not perfect: I go back an forth between trying to please her and saying what I need. But that is okay, because I’m not trying to be perfect anymore.

And my mom, you would ask, how is she doing in all of this?
I am so glad to say that she met me half way. It was incredibly painful for her as well.
She had to stand in this place, where I will for sure also stand one day with my children: The painful place where we find that our best efforts and our genuine love can still hurt our children. And she gave me courage for that day, because my amazing mom didn’t break under the load. And she didn’t hate me or reject me.

I couldn’t walk the old road anymore, and she didn’t insist that I do. In fact, these days, she wonders off with me on my road and check out some of the new views.

I love you so much Mamma

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