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Group Therapy Was Anything But Helpful
[Listen to an audio version of this blog here.]
I sat on a brown folding chair at a wide square table in a dingy one story building that a local Eating Disorder Anonymous (EDA) group rented out once a week for their meetings. I had gone through outpatient, seen two different therapists. Read books about recovery. Made many small steps forward and just a few less steps back. Many of my early therapy sessions run together in my brain. The crying, the waffling, the not wanting to change but wanting to get better. Writing notes to people that I never sent: my parents, my grandparents, my coaches, my teammates, my boyfriend. Digging up my past to try to find the root cause of my behaviors, learning about intuitive eating, learning to believe that I am enough. But the EDA meetings I went to were few and far between. I didn’t much like group therapy, but I also longed for community and thought I might find it there.
I was gainfully employed by this time, and when the meeting leader passed a basket around at the beginning of the meeting, I watched people plop change into it. A few one-dollar bills. When the basket came to me, the only bill I could dig up was a five, so I dropped it in. The collection basket helped pay for the meeting space, helped us all be able to gather each week, sit in a circle, and share our unique pains. When I dropped the five in…