Audrey’s Story
My name is Audrey Albert King and I am really proud to be here today as a human being that
is in recovery from an eating disorder.
Recently, I connected with a few friends, colleagues and mentors about decisions I was
making professionally. I was eager to share job possibilities, and for the first time that I can
remember taking my time to weigh my options and wasn’t being impulsive. I did not take the first job
that came my way. I thought about what I would be comfortable doing, what my next step should be
developmentally and most importantly whether or not I would be happy in the work environment. If I
had been in my ED, I would not have been able to be with or keep company with any of those
thoughts I just mentioned. I would have had a job by the end of this paragraph just so I wouldn’t
obsess about the situation. So for now, I have a few part time jobs that I love and I am getting a good
feel for what is going to work for me in terms of balancing work, variety, family and self care. Also,
most of my classmates that I graduated with are gainfully employed. The idea that I should be
employed full time by now as well sometimes-reeks havoc in my head, but I have come to understand
that those thoughts don’t have to control me, that I can be in charge of my actions (there is a
difference), and they are definitely not an excuse to employ a behavior. “In charge” is a term coined
by Susan Kleinman, a dance/movement therapist who has worked at The Renfrew Center in Florida
for 30 years. Susan also talks about taking baby steps in moving forward towards recovery, which has
been something that has helped to me to create lasting change. I try to set an attainable goal, sit with
it for a while, or learn how to be with it, and eventually sustain it, make it a part of my every day life,
and move on.
I also just tried to acknowledge that I am having some thoughts, that they exist and are
definitely not comfortable, and then employ my go to strategy, which is to immediately become
curious about why they have showed up at this time (avoidance, am I being triggered, has this
pattern happened before, which for me decreases their power and allows me to move on. Sometimes
I may even use my hand to wave them onward. I also have noticed that all to familiar desire for
instant gratification for example: I did the work and I want my dream job today. But, I now have a
toolbox, and one of my tools is an ability to quiet those voices (sing them to sleep in a way), and use
the belief in myself that I am stronger and can begin to trust that I would know when the right job
came along for me. And I know that when a job doesn’t feel like work, and I feel privileged to show
up, that either I have chosen the right position or the right profession; or maybe both.
I specifically said the word “few” before when I was referring to my circle of friends and
confidants because I can now give voice to, recognize and appreciate what it is to have people in my
life that see me for who I am, hear me the way I need and want to be heard (there is a difference),
support me unconditionally and don’t judge me. They do however offer me other ways of seeing,
which is helpful and appreciated (most of the time). That sounds nice doesn’t it, unconditional
acceptance, something that is sorely needed in the treatment of ED as well. People who need
treatment also need to be treated with respect. It is a 2 way street. Like many illnesses, treatment
and compliance can be tough, but not many people desire to wake up one day and have an eating
disorder. And in treatment there is a lot of engaging with one’ s eating disorder, the “whole” person
sometimes gets left behind. I see this in a similar way where I work with dementia and a patient is
being combative. I understand what is happening in the brain in terms of degeneration. The behavior
that is resulting is from the Dementia, usually elicits more compassion and patience from me. So, the
description of being understood almost sounds like a foreign country, especially to someone whose
image of her used to vacillate between invisible and grotesque for many years. I have memories of
living in New York City at age 21, catching a glimpse of myself in a store window and actually running
home to my apartment thinking that I was physically offending all and any that saw or came into
contact with me. Some people might think that getting an ED at 21 is a bit old or odd, but the truth
of the matter is that EDs occur throughout the lifespan and don’t discriminate. And, the conditions
can be brewing like the perfect storm for a long while before the hurricane of symptoms come. That
scenario is not in the DSM.
This memory was from 1987. I went into recovery almost five years ago. Yes, I had the eating
disorder for approximately twenty-five years although the stars had been aligning most of my life. A
long term relationship (my first love) did not survive a long distance move, my best friend who I have
only recently begun to realize loved me dearly for exactly who I was died of nonhodgkins lymphoma
(actually triple pneumonia from complications of chemotherapy), my grandmother who loved me
with a passion flat lined in the emergency room as I watched the team of doctors try to paddle her
back to life through the emergency room window and looking from my mother to the ER multiple
times wondering how she was going to receive this shock. A few days later we received the news that
a close family friend committed suicide. All of these events occurred within the span of three months.
I had just moved to NYC, didn’t know many people and this brief time was the stressor or catalyst
that fully cemented the ED I had only been dabbling with here and there. I returned to New York City
and my life devoid of all feeling and out of control. I remember this as being the first time that I knew
that I would never be understood, or be able to communicate the intensity of my feelings to anyone.
Liz, my friend that died was the keeper of my ED. A sense of being completely alone in the world
wrapped itself around me like a shadow. This was an incredibly scary time for me. I was alone,
extremely ill, grieving multiple loses, barely able to speak to anyone or communicate what I was
feeling inside. I had never felt physical pain in my body before without being hurt. I began to feel
contagious and want to erase myself.
Looking back, the physical losses I had sustained had also been metaphor for all the
loss/losses that I had already endured. I believe that the first real loss started with the loss of myself,
the failure to build a self, or more likely the ability to sustain what self I had built with everyone. My
actions and choices were met with disappointment or a non-verbal shaking of the head no, which
later on made me wonder why I was ever asked or included in any decision-making. Many of these
choices were related to food. I remember going out to lunch and being told that I could order
anything I wanted on the menu. Sometimes my choices were met with disapproval or I would be
given the suggestion to alter my order in certain ways, and I would. I felt like I could never really trust
myself around food. I would want something, but think I shouldn’t have it without even knowing why.
This feeling carried into other decisions as well. I remember this feeling being very present at a very
young age. This feeling caused me to second guess myself and sometimes be a little rebellious. I
remember walking to the “corner store” with friends, buying food, each one of us making a choice,
sitting on the field of the junior high school, sharing it, eating it all and taking non-stop. Even though
this was great fun and felt normal, I was conflicted. Interesting that my rebelliousness was in the form
of eating, unbridled, unconscious, free eating, or so I thought. I even had a reoccurring bad dream
about going to the “corner store.”
As a mother I was always paranoid about what foods to keep in the house. Some of my friends
kept nothing with sugar in the house, others, no junk food, and once my daughter came home upset
that her friend’s mother got angry when her daughter took a second serving of pasta at dinner. I
made the decision to have everything available in moderate amounts. Sometimes the girls went for
fruit, other times they baked, or just grabbed what they felt like eating. I just asked they put their
food in a container and not eat out of a bag or box so there wasn’t this bottomless container of food.
When my daughters came home with their friends from school, out would come every and all snack
foods we had. It was then that I realized they were just doing the same thing I did in the field by the
junior high school, being a teenager.
The other thing that I will briefly mention was that it was I important for me to communicate
to my girls to be comfortable with their bodies. So, no matter how I was feeling about my body,
which was mostly lousy, I always kept my bedroom door open while getting ready in the morning,
and if the door was open they could wander in whether I was clothed or not. I was determined to be
a naked confident role model.
Backing up a bit, when my brother was born, I was given dancing lessons out of a desire to
find something for me to do when he was born. No one could have predicted that I would fall in love
with the world of dance, live and breathe it, and never stop. When I was moving the world was fine,
when I was still the world was confusing. I was part of something, had great freedom, and could start
to make choices around how I wanted to move my body. This was thrilling. Soon I was practically
living at the studio. If I recall correctly I was up to 6 days a week including rehearsals and teaching.
Nope, nothing obsessive, avoiding, or numbing about that behavior. However, at the same time the
comparison of bodies were inevitable. I matured early, and felt even more awkward. Unknowingly at
the time my mother was probably not too happy about my home away from home and my affection
for my dance teacher. I believe I was doing much more than taking dance classes, I was seeking
approval, love, and any other need, unmet or met. This became an early pattern for me.
I spent fifteen years at that studio. Going to college was a devastating transition for me, an
overwhelming loss that my family or anyone else could not have predicted or fathomed. Thinking
back, it felt like Velcro being pulled apart and it was the first time I heard my body scream. To this day
I have no idea of how I ended up in Colorado for college. I believe the intent was to be as far away as
possible from my dance studio. I was thrown; I was 17, a jazz / tap dancer in a modern dance
program in the Midwest. I presented as rebellious, put on academic suspension because I skipped
ballet. The teacher hit my bottom, told me I had no turn out and didn’t have the body for ballet. I felt
inadequate and isolated. It was an all too familiar feeling. This is the first memory I have of feeling
invisible and breaking from the inside out. Eventually I gravitated towards a professor that I became
fond of, and then fell in love with modern dance. I also fell madly in love with the man of my dreams.
I was in love, therefor I felt lovable. But, there is another side to this coin, and that is (for me) when
someone doesn’t love you, you are not lovable.
A guest artist came to do a residency and cast a piece. I got the lead role. The guest artist
became a good friend and mentor. I was choosing graduate schools because unfortunately when I
became serious about school my experience was coming to an end and I needed/wanted more (there
is a distinction). She taught at NYU, which I happened to have applied to. I followed her back with the
plan that my boyfriend would soon follow. It was an exciting and sad transition. I was leaving my
friends again, and my roommate who was from Hawaii, and I was going from Boulder Colorado to
NYC. I am now aware that transition is difficult for me because it holds the association of loss. Just
having that awareness helps somehow and this is something one works on or I worked and continue
to work on therapy.
During my time at NYU I studied LMA (Laban Movement Analysis) with a professor that I
became close with. I then finished graduate school and went to get my certification in LMA. I am sure
the pattern is quite clear by now, and there were more women that I looked up to and mentors along
the way. In actuality, because I had never developed this whole self I was trying to find out who I was
through other women.
Because I really didn’t know myself in any concrete way I never felt like I fit in anywhere. This
was especially painful and true if I wasn’t getting any feedback, (verbal or nonverbal) to guide my
action. If I was at a loss of how to be sometimes my social anxiety skyrocketed. I so desperately
wanted to be that girl who seemed to fit in easily, that didn’t automatically rate herself in terms of
thinness, beauty, and intelligence the moment she walked into an occasion. Not only did this social
anxiety cause me a great deal of distress before leaving my apartment, and made me want to turn
around and go home several times, but this line of thinking could also foreshadow the type of
evening I was to have. To my surprise though, often times when I let my guard down, which meant
physically letting the muscles go in my body that I actually thought were pulling my fat closer to my
bones and hiding it, and allowed myself to get swept up in a conversation I was interested in and
thought I had something to contribute, I did have some fun. That part of the evening did not stick
with me though, I didn’t like to always admit that I had fun because I was determined to stay
miserable, even though I would say that I wanted to be happy. This was dialectic for me, one of many
that I have encountered on my journey. I was living a fear – based and limited life. There was just no
way or room to see that just maybe I was a good person, that maybe I had something to offer, could
possibly experience joy on some infinitesimal level, and was giving up too early.
The physical losses must have also woken up the psychological parts of me that were buried
along with everyone else. My behaviors kicked into gear at high speed and I was the sickest I have
ever been in all my years of my ED. I absolutely was at a loss as how to be with my thoughts so my
unconscious goal was to have none, and to be numb. I really do not know how I survived. Well
actually the ED was my maladaptive coping mechanism and helped me to survive. My image of it now
is like a large roll of bubble wrap insulating me from pain. Eventually, after 4 long years, I began to
call in sick to work and just make it through the last year enough to not get fired and keep my
reputation as a professor. This behavior significantly impacted my self- esteem and increased my
shame and guilt, which I certainly did not need any more of.
My parents were aware of my ED because I knew I was in trouble and needed money for
therapy. I didn’t know who to go to, got a recommendation and was paired up with a psychoanalyst.
She did not speak unless I did and wanted me to keep a food log, which made me feel naked. Talking
about what I put in my body felt like a sacred act. I was terrified of her and consumed with how she
saw my weight, her life, and me. The transference was too much and there was just no way I could
utter a word about this to her.
I actually never got the right kind of help or knew help existed for me. Back then in the late
eighties there was not as much psycho-education around ED. For some reason any therapist I saw
basically wanted to know was how many times a week I had behaviors, and occasionally gave me a
food chart and asked me what I would do differently. I am not shifting responsibility onto these
therapists I chose to see, and maybe I was naïve, but my ED had been going on so long now it actually
seemed normal. There were a few close calls for me with behaviors that could have resulted in
disastrous outcomes, but I was so depressed for it to have even fazed me.
Even though my behaviors were consistent throughout my life, when my girls were both
settled into high school they ramped up in again. I remember walking the dog around the
neighborhood with my husband and telling him that I needed more help. Coincidentally, it happened
that a day later we had a family therapy session, in which it was quite typical for the therapist to ask
one or more of us to leave for a moment. It was my turn. When I came back into the room my girls
had apparently been discussing the fact that I had been so depressed that they were worried that I
would make a decision that would impact them forever. After much reassurance, the therapist then
sent everyone out of the room and told me it was time to tell the girls about my ED. They had known
I had it in college, but thought it had been over a long time ago. The therapist also asked me what I
could do with my time if I weren’t devoting so much of it to my ED.
Well despite my girl’s mixed response to my announcement; one was devastated that I would
hate myself so much to do such things to myself, and the other one was so angry that I worry about
her and her eating. They were both going away for the summer and literally instructed me I to check
into a facility somewhere and finally take care of this problem and that they loved me very much. So,
I did.
The compromises I had to make were going to be tough: the meal plan, no exercising, I had to
get a team which included a nutritionist, PCP, psychopharmacologicst and a therapist. My caseworker
thought I would definitely not show up for treatment the next day. Or then when I did, last very long.
Every meal was torture for me. I ate things that I hadn’t eaten in a quarter of a decade. I ate either
crying or holding a frozen orange. I checked in privately with my caseworker trying to connive every
way possible to not eat certain foods. In fact, at one time I believe I became catatonic or split a
personality just to be able to eat a certain food. It was given to me, I froze and it fell on the floor, I
was still frozen.
Exposures were he hardest part of recovery for me because it felt like I was force feeding
myself and constantly crying at the table like a baby, especially when some people had more food on
their plate, a larger meal plan. I was really surprised and encouraged to continue when I saw that I
was not gaining an ounce, but eating more in treatment.
During a session in treatment with an art therapist, she said to me, Audrey, you have had this
ED for 25 years, you have danced your whole life, have you ever thought of becoming a
Dance/Movement Therapist (DMT)? I had the definite whole Oprah AHA moment and a full church
choir singing in my head. I went to an open house at Lesley University and it was almost impossible to
control my joy, which was a foreign emotion for me.
One of the last things I want to mention is that I had to go out and actually find the life I
wanted that would sustain me in a way that I wouldn’t long for behaviors 24/7. That is a very difficult
thing to do. For me it involved noticing what I noticed I might like to do, and this doesn’t have to be a
life decision, but could be a position in a library if you love books or a painting class, etc. Most have
the ED population that I have met, and over 25 years I have found to be extremely smart. That some
how makes me feel like I am I good company and sad that so much beautiful potential is not being
shared with the world. Also, not everyone that makes suggestions is out to control us. Some might
just see natural talents in us and want to foster them, and we are just maybe too sick to see or even
fathom the idea. Lastly I found that it is important to find someone you trust to confide in even if it
isn’t easy at first. Sometimes this can involve just sitting with you for a while and slowly working on
the relationship. But, I found when a certain therapist made a commitment to me I could begin to
open up just a tiny bit, tiny. And I was given permission to do so, I was never pushed, we worked with
what was there in the moment. When you can trust someone else and they like you for exactly who
you are, you can begin to trust yourself. When you can begin to trust yourself you can hear those
little desires that are asking you too, what would you do with all the time you spend on your ED. They
eventually drown out the other voices. They are still present, but overruled.
Number one reason why I will not return to my ED is that for me it would be like committing
pre-meditated murder. I would have to make a plan, go out and buy all the materials I would need for
the event, sneak it into the house, etc. Psycho-education is a beautiful thing. You actually learn that
some behaviors make you gain weight, won’t ever do that one again. Plus, you can actually learn
what the ED was protecting you from, name them and get to work on specifics instead of being stuck
in this amorphous world of ED. For example: I had to learn to actually be and express my anger
outward to the person I was angry with and not turn it inward and beat myself up or deal with
attachment issues.
What surprised me about recovery were the choices I began to make. For example: my
exercise routine. I kept with the yoga (even power), but could not return to the gym. The whole
environment to me seemed odd all of a sudden. People’s faces looked strained and nobody seemed
to be enjoying him or herself. I remember doing a squat and thinking to myself, if I do one squatter I
think I will be ill (so boring). So I went back to a Nia Class (Somatic based movement class) that I had
been to once and remember liking. I had fun (something that didn’t come all that easy to me), I didn’t
care what I looked like (huge accomplishment), and I felt beautiful, and I felt joy (WOW!!!!),
something rarely ever felt. So I kept going back and found a lovely community of women who were all
attracted to Nia for various reasons. I eventually became certified in the technique and teach it. I love
to help women connect with their bodies in new and different ways, in their own time, in a safe, nonthreatening environment.
I also went back to school at 47, and it was the best decision I have ever made. I say best
because it was my decision, my passion, I had confidence in myself to do the work, and most of all,
there are many and still are small moments of joy throughout the day that I am lucky enough to
witness, that don’t go unnoticed by me, and I am grateful that I have my health to notice them.