Food for Thought: Eating Disorders Awareness
“Listening to the Heart”
Randy Hardmann
The following is a transcript is a presentation given at
I’d like to talk today about listening to the heart and the idea that listening to the heart is crucial in the recovery for anyone suffering with anorexia or bulimia. One of the sad consequences for women who suffer with anorexia and bulimia is that through the course and development of the eating disorder, they often lose touch with what is most powerful within themselves. They become numb or lose contact with their sense of heart.
It has struck me repeatedly in my observations of artwork created in the early weeks of a patient’s treatment in which they outline and then trace their body and then fill in their body with images and drawings and paintings, that the majority of their artistic self-expressions show a broken heart. These are hearts with holes in them, hearts bound in chains, imprisoned in bars, torn apart, covered in black, darkened, pierced, broken off, hearts damaged, very small or nearly invisible. These artistic expressions communicate that within the painful experiences and consequences of anorexia and bulimia these women have often lost the ability to connect with their hearts in a positive way.
What is the impact of a broken heart? As an eating disorder worsens, the ability to even recognize the impressions and intuitions of the heart are lost in the internal conflict, negative thoughts and turmoil these clients experience within themselves. The consequences of this inner confusion is that they do not trust themselves, others, and they do not trust themselves to have valid impressions, desires or intuitions that would help them correct the negative choices and decisions that they are making. In addition to the avoidance of their emotions, the need to be in absolute control of their environment becomes a substitute for listening to the heart. The heart just feels too far away and the impressions feel too vague to trust.
In listening to clients who I work with who are in the depths of despair and the inner conflict associated with depression, anorexia and bulimia, it becomes apparent that they associate anything to do with their heart as emotionally painful; therefore their sense of themselves is painful. When most of us think about the heart we think of it in positive terms and in positive ways. But for those who suffer with eating disorders, the heart is always filled with pain and failure. Therefore, they lose the ability to recognize the heartfelt desires in their lives because they are either trying to control and monitor everything through their mind or they have numbed or detached themselves from anything emotional. Any emotional pain can be interpreted to mean that the very core of who they are—their hearts—are damaged, bad and unacceptable.
The negative and symbolic connection between emotional pain and who they are is one of the reasons they have come to believe that their hearts are damaged or broken. Before I give an invitation to listen to the heart—because that is the emphasis of this message—I invite those who struggle, those who suffer with eating disorders, to come back to their hearts, to listen to their hearts again because it is crucial in their recovery. We need to just take a moment to talk about some of the issues that get in the way of listening to the heart.
There are many things that get in the way. Let me just mention two. Often those who suffer with anorexia and bulimia, especially as it progresses, have a deep sense of self-hatred and self-contempt. And that self-contempt is palpable and intense. Deep feelings of personal unworthiness and shame impact their recovery. Many of these women believe that God and everyone else view them as unworthy, unacceptable and flawed. They often try to compensate for these feelings of personal unworthiness through perfectionism and a relentless pursuit of impossibly high standards. Their failure to meet these perfect expectations only confirms their belief that they are unworthy of heartfelt connections or spiritual experiences. They decide that they have disappointed everyone and are unworthy of kindness and love.
Another issue is that of dishonesty and deception. I have worked with lots of women who have struggle severely with bulimia and this is often a part of that illness. An issue that impacts recovery is dishonesty and deception. A common coping strategy includes covering up, secrecy and blatant deception and lying. Many feel a great deal of shame and remorse about their deception and lying compounded by the feelings of guilt from too many failed promises to give up their eating disorder. Many have lied over and over again to themselves and to the people who love them in order to protect their eating disorder. All of this leads to the incorporation of this false pursuit, to pursue the eating disorder instead of the truth, to pursue the eating instead of their heart.
As you read some of the ten commandments of the church of anorexia, you can appreciate why in anorexia these wonderful women lose their hearts. I’ll just share a few. Being thin is more important than being healthy. Though shalt not eat without feeling guilty. Thou shalt not eat fattening foods without punishing oneself afterwards. What the scale says is the most important thing. You can never be too thin. Being thin and not eating are signs of true willpower and success. So in the obsession of the eating disorder and the addiction of the eating disorder they lose their hearts. And I will never minimize the power and the negativity of an addiction when it comes to anorexia and bulimia. It is painful. It is difficult to overcome. But, I want to give an invitation to once again to trust the heart, to listen to the heart as a pathway of change.
I want to talk from a perspective as a therapist. It’s very important for people to know that with practice and experience, listening and responding to the heart is a talent that can be developed and learned over time. It doesn’t happen all at once, especially if it has been gone for a long time. It’s important for women with eating disorders to understand that the problem is not with hearts or with not having a heart. They have wonderful hearts, but somehow they feel that they have disappeared from inside of them. Rather, the problem is learning how to listen and trust their own hearts again. To become aware of their own hearts as a source of information and a resource for self-direction is a process of positive self-development. This validating and valuing of their own hearts and heartfelt desires and impressions is a gradual process that takes times but one that is possible for each of them.
Too often my clients will believe what others say or tell but they will not listen to or believe themselves. If they cannot believe themselves or trust what they know inside themselves, then inevitably they will feel a great void or hollowness inside. They will then go through the motions of living but not fully experience or enjoy the clarity, empowerment and goodness available inside of themselves. Often the loss of flexibility and fluidity in adjusting to life, to their relationships, to life’s stresses and events, may have more to do with a distant and disconnected heart than it has to do with the lack of know-how or specific social skills.
You know, the heart is often described as the center of both physical and spiritual well-being. Heart is often spoken of in scriptures as the inner core of being, the deepest seat of desires and emotions and the receptor for spiritual infusions. It’s important to help my clients understand that their heart is more than feelings and it’s more than thoughts. It goes beyond that. It goes to the very core of them. It’s something deep inside. It includes impressions and intuitions; a deep inner sense of knowing or understanding things about themselves and the world around them. It is about their inner desires, their inner motives and the intents of their heart. And what I have learned about the heart is it does not speak in long sentences but rather it conveys more of a sense of knowing or understanding.
So, I try to teach my clients that that heartfelt understandings and impressions and listening to their heart is not just feelings. In fact, often times it’s not feelings at all. It’s knowing and sensing something deep inside themselves that they need to listen to and remember. Another important emphasis in therapy is that the desires and motives of their heart can be the most powerful resource in directing their lives. If they understand what their internal motives are and if they understand the intent behind their words, choices and behaviors, they can develop a powerful self-awareness that can help them make course corrections. Knowing and discovering what the desires of their hearts are can help them clarify not only how they want to live but where they want to go in their lives.
One of the most important things about listening to the heart is to remember that the heart connects to love. One of the most significant consequences for those who have forgotten or who have lost their ability to listen to their hearts is that they have lost their connection to love. To lose their connection to love is to lose the experience in love, intimacy, vulnerability and emotional closeness where they can feel connected with other people in their lives. For many, to lose that connection to love is to lose a spiritual relationship with God. They can feel distant and far removed from God’s influence and love. They can feel alone and lonely and empty even in the presence of people in their lives who genuinely love and care for them.
One of the things that I say to most of my clients with anorexia and bulimia is that in order to get their hearts back they need to let love in and let love out. In sessions we begin to talk about how they refuse love, how they resist love and what they can do to open up their hearts to receive love again from others and we talk about ways to show love for someone else. We also talk about ways to increase the expression of their loving and heartfelt desires, either through word or action. We talk of how they can heart fully respond to someone else’s loving actions towards them. The key to this process is to begin to label love as an expression of the heart and to see experiencing love from others as a gift from their hearts. They can begin to increase their awareness of how much love there really is around them and how much love there really is inside of themselves. One of the things I have done in running groups with women suffering with these illnesses is that sometimes we have had a group that we call an expression of love and we use white tissues as a symbolic or literal expression of their love. And so sometimes as the women go about in this activity they will literally hand other women in the group a tissue as they express from their hearts love, appreciation, tenderness, a genuine feeling of concern, empathy, or compassion.
I remember a few years ago in one of these groups we had a college-age woman who, as many do with eating disorders, felt that she was the exception of love, that somehow love was okay for others but wasn’t okay for her. She felt she was undeserving of it; she hadn’t merited it and so she resisted it and refused it even though in that group there were many women who loved and cared for her. So, in this occasion we had her sit in the middle of the circle in a chair and we had the other women come, one at a time, and with tissues in hand kneel down before her and hand her a tissue with each expression of how they felt for her and of their love for her and what good thoughts and feelings they had about her. And what I noticed over time is that those other women could hardly wait to come. In fact, sometimes they came running with their tissues of love. And when it was over, here sat this woman with her arms full of white tissues, her lap piled clear to her face full of tissues, and there were tears running down her face. She could see the love and couldn’t deny it, it was there and real and she talked about letting love in again. I know that was a turning point in her recovery.
I want to emphasize that love is much more than approval. Approval may be expressed in love, but love is much broader and much grander than approval. What happens with eating disorders, often women make approval love and their whole lives become a pursuit of approval in hopes that somehow that will make them feel whole and loved. Eating disorders make approval and love the same thing, but you cannot find your hearts without separating approval and from love. Love connects to the heart. Sister Ardeth Kapp said, “Love is the greatest force in the world and when it is blocked, pain results. We can kill the love so that it stops hurting, but then of course part of us dies too. Or, we can ask God to open up another route for that love to travel.”
Love is a change agent, approval is not. Love has greater influence in changing lives than approval ever will. Sometimes women with eating disorders use approval as love when in fact it usually makes them feel very unlovable. Often this pursuit of approval gets in the way of giving love to other people. Approval is about trying to get love from some external validation, where acceptance is about giving and receiving love.
One other important thing that anyone who desires to overcome an eating disorder must know is that there is a need to be willing to face their pain. They cannot feel love inside again until they are willing to face, experience, and express the pain and heart emotions that so long they have avoided and kept hidden from themselves. Sometimes we say that eating disorders is the addiction of avoidance. Avoiding anything inside, anything internal, it’s the avoidance of any kind of emotion or emotional pain. Sometimes my client’s expression of emotion is they will say “well I’m fat or I feel fat.” And I will say in response that fat is not a feeling and it’s an easy way and an easy place to hide from their feelings. If they want to feel joy again, if they want their hearts to come alive again, they need to be willing to face their pain.
Dr. Rachel Naomi Remin, M.D., has written a couple of wonderful books. She is a physician who works with chronically ill and terminally ill patients and teaches physicians and how to listen to them. In her book, “Kitchen Table Wisdom: Stories that Heal” she said, “Many of the people who come to talk about their cancer have ended up telling me that they have in some fundamental way felt alone all their lives. They have felt loved and valued by others for what they can do, but not for who they are and they have loved and valued themselves in the same way. They have had relationships, lived among families, had neighbors, worked with others, and yet have felt that they have never really known the people around them or been known by them. Their cancer has made them aware of this for the very first time for often it was discovered completely by surprise.”
“One woman told me that she found her way to the great simplicity of living with an open heart by crawling along on her knees in the dark during her bone-marrow transplant. She felt a terrible anger, envy and resentment. She had drowned in self-pity and experienced vulnerability and a sense of isolation so profound it had no words. She had never before allowed herself to go to that depth of the feeling and she felt overwhelmed by it. It had been frightening and painful but in the end it had burned away the habits of thought and belief that had separated her from other people and left her with an unshakable sense of belonging and connection. In the midst of her suffering and helplessness, she had one day simply known that all suffering was like her suffering and all joy was like her joy. From this has come an enduring inner change, a kindness that is almost involuntary.”
“Sharing many experiences of this sort with people has made me wonder about the nature of the heart. Perhaps the heart is not just a sort of a valentine. More than a way of loving, the heart may be a way of experiencing life, the capacity to know a fundamental connection to others and to see them whole. As with this woman, the opening of the heart seems to go far beyond love to an experience of belonging which heals our most profound wounds. When people look at others in this way, the connection they experience makes it a simpler thing to forgive, to have compassion, to serve and to love. This patient told me when I was able to connect honestly to myself I found that I was connected to everyone else too. Perhaps the healing of the world rests just on this sort of shift. The heart which can see these connections may be far more powerful a source of healing than the mind.”
Another thing that I talk about with those I work with as they try to listen again to their hearts is what speaks to the heart. A suggestion I often give them is that I encourage them to look for and become aware of the experience that the clients know have spoken to their hearts before they were numb, disconnected and lost in the eating disorder. Sometimes we generate a “before list” of what kinds of things spoke to their hearts, impressed their souls or touched them deeply in a positive way. One of the things I communicate with my clients is that if they are going to begin to listen to their hearts again, they have to know what they are looking for. We want their life experiences to begin to speak to their hearts again. I have learned over the years that those experiences that speak to a person’s heart are often the simple but profound expressions of what is best in all of us and in life.
Gentleness speaks to the heart. Tenderness and warmth speak to the heart. Compassion and understanding in the face of difficulty speaks to the heart. Kindness, especially unmerited kindness, speaks to the heart. Beauty and wonder speak to the heart. Patriotism speaks to the heart. Generosity, especially the kind with no strings attached, speaks to the heart. Genuineness and honest laughter, love and God speak to the heart. Courage and light speak to the heart. The key is to help clients give up some of their self-focus and some of their self-wrongness and to help them begin to look for those things that speak to their own hearts.
Fear doesn’t speak to the heart. In fear we run from our hearts and try to do it all in our minds. And so I encourage those I work with to look beyond themselves and beyond their fears and to find what speaks to their hearts and to look for it again because they have blinded their eyes to it. Life speaks to the heart. Sometimes with eating disorders they are so afraid to feel the pain and the sorrow and the joy that they have become willing to go through life—through the motions of life—without being alive. Life speaks to the heart.
Just a few weeks ago in a group that my colleague, Dr. Michael Bair, and I were doing we had a group of women who are struggling with bulimia and anorexia. We put a tree in the middle of this large room, a live tree, and we put it in the center, and we told them that this tree represents life. And we had them then back up to the very farthest part away from that tree and to look inside their hearts and to decide where they were in relation to life, how willing they were to recover from their eating disorders and to live their lives fully and happily again. And then we had them move and position themselves either as close to or as far away from that tree as they felt that was accurate for them.
Now there were several that came running to the tree and surrounded closely and they talked about how they don’t want to lose life again to the eating disorder, how wonderful it is to have it back. And there were others who positioned themselves much farther away from the tree that represented life and their reasons as they expressed them is that they felt unworthy of it, they were afraid, or they didn’t want to give up their eating disorder. One woman in particular wouldn’t move from the spot she had chosen. So, we took all of the other women and had them surround the tree and one by one these women invited that other person to come to the tree and they did it with heartfelt and short invitations of love, encouragement, appreciation, support. And every one of them gave her an invitation to come and she would not. And then they all held their arms out and invited to come again to the tree that represented life and she would not.
When we asked her why she would not come to the tree she said it was because she didn’t believe what they said. She was afraid to let go of the control and the comfort of the eating disorder; somehow it felt safer and better than life. And then we did one last thing in that group. We had them all go back as far away from that tree as they could and turn their backs to the tree to face the wall. We then asked them to share what they noticed inside as they were facing away towards the wall, which honestly is a very good description of anorexia and bulimia. And almost all of them said I feel lonely or empty or sad or alone and one said I feel bored.
And then we had them turn and come back to the thee and stand around that tree arm in arm, encircled, and we played a song and some of the words to that song, a John Denver song, said “we are standing all together, face to face, arm and arm, we are standing on the threshold of a dream.” Remember these women are standing together around this tree that represents life. “No more hunger, no more killing, no more wasting life away, it’s simply an idea, I know its time has come. I want to live, I want to grow, I want to share what I can give, I want to be, I want to live.” After they shared with each other some very personal things, they embraced. Life speaks to the heart.
Another thing that speaks to the heart is positive expectations. I went to a conference once where the person presenting asked the question, “What is the word in your heart?” And then he went on to say that if the word in someone’s heart is “yes” then that person’s expectancy will be optimistic, trusting, open, positive and receptive. If the word in their heart is “no” then that person’s expectancy will be full of skepticism, pessimism, doubt, mistrust and negativity. With this focus on their own hearts, we try to nurture a shift towards hearts that are filled with “yes” about themselves and about life—that there is a “yes” inside of them, a “yes” for who they are, a “yes” for them instead of a “no.”
Clients are able to make long lists of all their disappointed expectations. When we try to spend our lives in our minds, analyzing and trying to work everything from our mind alone, we come up with great expectations. Sometimes these expectations are so specific that we often become disappointed and dissatisfied. So, we try to teach that if you are going to listen to your heart—that “yes” in your heart—that expectation in your heart needs to be broader. It needs to be things like “I want to be trustworthy, I want to be kind, I want to be respectful, I want to listen.” If the word in the heart is yes, then clients can face ambiguity in their lives with a deeper sense of optimism and hope. Hope is like having a big ‘yes’ in their hearts.
I sometimes see clients with this positive expectancy of heart as being on their own side and being for themselves in life. Then along the way when they know that God is a “yes” for their heart as well, that’s powerful. When it’s a “yes” inside we need to stay with it. Prayer can build positive self-expectancy. Most spiritually-minded women who have lost their hearts to eating disorders have stopped praying. So, one of the ways to get that positive expectancy and heart again is to invite them to pray again and especially to pray for themselves and to not pray those painful prayers. I invite them to pray, listen and not prejudge or pre-decide the answers. They must listen to what God has to say in their hearts.
Another important part of listening to the heart is seeking an honest heart. Honesty is telling the truth and being accountable for our choices. It’s not about finding someone to blame. It’s not about finding fault. It’s not about finding someone to judge. We encourage those we work with to choose to be kind and patient with themselves as they assume personal responsibility and learn from their choices along this road to recovery. Part of recovery requires complete honesty and complete accountability. However, the problem for many who suffer with eating disorders is responsibility and honesty as associated with self-contempt and self-rejection and self-criticism. And so as we try to help them, it’s essential for them to face their lives directly and to make changes and corrections without blame. So, they begin to make better choices and see options beyond their eating disorder.
So, we talk a lot about honesty with compassion, honesty with self-kindness. Self-compassion is more effective in self-correction. We can be accountable and kind. A great example is a client I have worked with in the past who taught me a lot about her willingness to seek an honest heart. She is a very wonderful, capable, talented bright woman, who devoted a decade and a half of her life to bulimia. She was a mother, had a profession and still was doing good things but had this secret life that she kept hidden. She came into therapy and said I will do whatever it takes to get better. And I think my response was “are you willing to be honest?” You need to stop lying about the things you have been telling yourself for years. You need to stop lying to yourself and others. You need to start telling the truth about what the real problems are, what the real challenges are, what the real feelings and experiences are, rather than quickly running to the eating disorder as a way to avoid dealing with the truth of your life.
So as part of changing this pattern she went in full bore and was willing to do it. We talked often in session about what is the truth. What is the truth? What have you learned? What are the lies you’re telling yourself? And as she began to discover her honest heart and began to listen to it and to tell the truth and to be accountable for it, she did something that was very painful for her. As these would be uncovered and revealed she would become very negative and hurtful towards herself and feel great shame and self-contempt and get down on herself. I kept saying that we don’t want to do that, as you’re honest we want to do it with kindness because then we will keep going. If you hurt yourself, the honesty is going to stop.
One day as we were talking I realized that she was back to hurting herself. She had become aware of some things that didn’t feel good to her. And I could tell that inside she was damaging her own tender heart and soul and I asked her to stop. I said I can’t witness you hurting yourself anymore. We’re here to help you by telling the truth and I’m not willing to have you come here and use these things that we’re trying to do to help you and then have you use them against you to hurt you. I asked her to stop and I can tell you that she did. She learned that the principle of having an honest heart is to have it with kindness and compassion and she has made tremendous changes and she is moving forward. It’s not easy. Truth is never easy, but truth is simple, powerful, and changes lives. And I’m grateful for her willingness to have an honest heart and to be kind to herself in the process.
From a book entitled “How We Choose to Be Happy” by Rick Foster and Greg Hicks, they said something very important about not telling and telling the truth. “Not telling the truth to ourselves and others is the source of many of our greatest problems. Without truth there can be no real intimacy in our most important relationships. More important, we lose contact with our true selves. Can we in fact know ourselves if we don’t tell the truth to ourselves? It is not always easy to tell the truth to ourselves but when we do we have achieved a feeling of personal integrity. The world seems right and we feel happy. When we make a commitment to tell ourselves the truth we have forged an internal contract. Having the idea that truth is a personal contract is where extremely happy people seem to have a special corner on the word truthfulness. They are adamant about understanding their own truths in any situation. They test their reactions to people and problems. They are searching for what is real in their response to life. In short, they strive for authenticity and accurate personal evaluation, to exist in a state of integrity with themselves.”
And if we are listening to the heart and being honest, then one of the things I ask those I work with is to write down the impressions of their heart, to keep a journal. I often ask clients to write down the following information: first impressions, things that came to them inside, not through their minds but through their hearts; spiritual impressions and inspirations; personal intuitions that have come to them in specific situations; insights or reflections that have come to them in quiet moments. Then I have them take this rather raw list of impressions and compile or rewrite them in one place so that they can return often to review their own impressions, understandings and spiritual senses. These writings of the heart become a very personal reminder of how they want to be and live and help them to know that they can follow their own hearts.
Sometimes clients will need some help in clarifying and sorting out what these messages are, but once they are written down in this journal they become their own personal revelations and reminders. They are their own personal messages and no one else’s. These writings of the heart can become a very personal means to self-impowerment and self-trust. I worked with a 19-year-old woman who had had an eating disorder since she was 14. And one of the things we did as a course of her treatment was that I would assign her solo time when she would go into her room with nothing but her heart and a piece of paper and a pen. She would do this for hours, usually one or two, sometimes three and I would just have her write what came to her.
Over the course of treatment, those things that she wrote down in her own words, those impressions and feelings that came to her, these writings became a personal code of living that she used everyday to comfort and encourage herself in the recovery process. And in those quiet moments, often, she would feel loved, sustained, and lifted up by God and things would come to her. One of the things I tell those I work with is that there are five sources of information. They are all important, but there in an order to them and the highest source is spiritual or spirit. The second is heart, the third is mind and thoughts, the fourth is emotions and feelings, and the fifth are physical sensations. We are trying to have those change their hearts and to change their lives to listen to spirit and listen to their heart and to listen to their feelings less, to put them in the right order.
Another thing I try to help those I work with is to listen to the quiet answers from their heart. I will ask them questions, “what does your heart already know about how you want to handle this situation?” You see, if I ask them what they think, I will get one answer. If I ask them what they feel, they’ll give me another. But if I ask them what they know in their hearts, it’s amazing some of the answers that come to them and they share with me. What does your heart already know that your head has not figured out? President Harold B. Lee said one way to know that the spirit is speaking to us is that we know something in our hearts before we know it in our minds. What are the quiet impressions about how to view, feel or respond to this dilemma in your life? What have you come to since our last discussion about how to handle this, but come from your heart? Before you started thinking about this, what was your sense about what needed to happen? What was your intuition about what would be best for you? What impressions came to you in your prayers? Listening to the heart not only gives people answers but it also gives them choices.
St. Bartholomew said, “If you do not ask yourself what it is you know, you will go on listening to others and change will not come because you will not hear your own truth.” Another important component of listening to the heart is the pursuit of a soft and spiritual heart. Many have cried out unto the Lord in their hearts. Addiction is hard, it’s painful. Obsession is unrelenting. I encourage those I work with to cry out to the Lord in their hearts, to seek for a softer heart, to find their heart with God’s help. One of the things that we sometimes do in these group settings is we will have those patients kneel down before something that represents or symbolizes their eating disorder. And we’ll have them face their eating disorder and we’ll ask them to talk honestly to that eating disorder.
What have you given up to worship the eating disorder? What have you given up to worship anorexia and bulimia? And through many tears and sole-wrenching experience I have heard over and over for many years these things, what they have lost. I have lost the ability to think. I have lost the ability to care and to feel warmth for others. I have lost love of my family. I have lost hope. I have lost faith. I have lost the ability to feel love. I have lost myself. I have lost self-respect. I have lost the ability to do what I love to do. I have lost peace. And then we will ask them to be honest and say what did worshipping the eating disorder give you? And almost always, they will always say misery. It gave me pain. It gave me numbness. It made me feel out of control. It made me feel loss of dignity and isolation and nothing good. So I tell them if you want to have your heart back, go to the greatest heart of all, who is God.
Let me read a part of a letter of hope that was written by one of these patients. Just a part, she said, “I never thought this moment would arrive when each day was a blessing and I was glad to be alive, too numbed out to even feel a breeze. I felt nothing except my disease. Nine years I sank in that quicksand deep and I waited, wishing it would just engulf me. I sank. It rose to my nose and then to my eyes. When out of nowhere my life flashed and I felt my heart’s true cries. In fact I wanted a life, to be held, and told everything is going to be all right. To feel true love. I wanted to laugh, to cry and to feel the kisses of the sun and the dance in the moonlight. It was at this time that a hand reached to me and said, ‘My child, how I have missed thee.’ The voice was so familiar and then I realized as He lifted me up and my quicksand monster died. No longer a victim, I felt the warm light. No longer blind, my Redeemer gave me sight.”
One time many years ago I sat in the room, it was evening time, with a woman who had been engulfed in her eating disorder for nearly 29 years. She weighed 69 pounds. She was 5’10”. As she sat before me and we were trying to begin talking through things that were going to help her, her thinking wasn’t very clear or very good because of malnutrition. She seemed totally unable to connect with herself in any kind of clarity or insight or understanding. As far as she knew she was just bad. As I looked at her and as we talked, I had my own searching in my heart. And in my heart I prayed “what will help, what will make a difference to help this woman begin her process of recovery?” And then it came. I said, “If the Savior of the World was here tonight, sitting here with us, what would He do?” And this woman who had had a hard time expressing herself, said without hesitation, “He would feed me.” She knew in her heart and I asked her if she was willing to have him feed her? And that was the beginning of the recovery.
I saw her last fall after many years. She is a very different woman. There is light in her eyes and she feels happy. Just a few examples of what the Lord has said in scripture, “Behold the Lord requireth the heart and a willing mind. Open your hearts that you may understand. Trust in the Lord with all thy heart. Love God with all your heart. Let the affections of your heart be placed upon the Lord forever. God knoweth the intents of your heart. My spirit shall be in your hearts. He healeth the broken heart. He changeth their hearts.”
One last thing that needs to happen to listen to a heart is that we need a courageous heart. I tell my clients if you’re going to listen to your heart and follow your heart you’ve got to be brave, you need to be courageous. We’ve got to follow through. We can’t know it and then doubt it. We can’t go two steps forward and then stop ourselves in fear. And so we talk about what they need to do to trust and to act on it. It’s one thing to become aware of the heart, it’s another to listen to the heart, another to trust it and then it’s time to act on the heart. It’s important to have these discussions and to have them have the courage to learn from their experience and make positive corrections and adjustments along the way. It is impossible to make a stand for something very important to them if their hearts are not in it, it will not last. Being courageous is having the words and actions become congruent with the desires and intentions of their hearts. Their congruence between their internal and their external self becomes an acquired and powerful way of being and living. The courageous action feels good to them because it is good. If we are going to listen and follow our heart, we need to be brave.
And in conclusion, a change of heart. It has become a powerful reminder to me as I have observed these women who have suffered so long recover from their eating disorders. As they progress through treatment and recovery, their artistic impressions and expressions about themselves show a significant change of heart. They show a complete and growing heart. Those same earlier pictures where it was broken, towards the end of their treatment it’s a different heart in those pictures. They show a complete and growing heart. Often times the heart is bigger and has a more profound presence in the drawing. The heart is often radiating and growing or glowing with vibrant colors. The heart can be of many colors and there are many and powerful words that are written on their hearts. I have seen artwork where heart was the center of the body and from that center radiating beams of different colors of light through the rest of the body and mind. These new hearts show love, courage, strength and hope. I have seen these changed hearts. I have felt them. It’s possible.
That’s the message of listening to your hearts, to have your hearts back in the recovery from anorexia and bulimia. And this is what I have found. But through it all I have witnessed the loving reach of God and know that if someone with an eating disorder gives their heart and has a willing mind God is there. And if God is there, there is hope. Thank you.