Letting Go and Letting Yourself Go: Benefiting From Both in Anorexia Recovery

Human minds love shortcuts, and cognitive scripts cut out a lot of detours. A script is a description of a series of actions that can be expected to play out in a given context. The classic (and eating-disorder-relevant) example is the restaurant script: Wait to be seated, get offered water, look at the menu, order, etc. (The anorexic version of this has a lot of gaps!)

Scripts save the speaker and the listener effort. They often smooth out social edges, too: If I say “I got stuck in traffic,” the scripted actions involve me hitting a traffic jam, getting stressed out, trying to find an alternative route, etc., but they start with me setting off on time. I, therefore, expect you to fill in the blanks in my favour, even if the reality is that I left late because I had something to finish and traffic did or didn’t make things worse.

As with all rough time-saving heuristics, there are costs to relying on scripts. The costs are often invisible until we make the counter-effort of rendering the default script explicit to ourselves.

So what happens if we do this with letting oneself go versus letting go? Can we do anything to weaken the damaging effects of the former and strengthen our mental images—however hesitant and fragmentary—of the latter?

In the “she let herself go” case where the rather toxic little script came so easily to me in part 2, the most ED-relevant bit of counter-action to take might be to ask: “Which of its aspects are about weight gain and which are unrelated (or easily dissociable if I try)?”

In mine, all the hair-related bits clearly have nothing intrinsically to do with body weight. Daytime TV-watching might be indirectly related, but a lot of this script would survive perfectly well with a thin (or in-between) rather than fat woman. Yes, there’s a slight shift in feel when I take out this part, but the loss of daily routines is doing a lot more of the cognitive-emotional work for me in this scenario.

Once you’ve identified the precise contours of the version of the “letting oneself go” script that captures you, you can then work out how much of it needs to be a hindrance to what you’re doing in recovery. In this way, you shift the sweet spot of explanatory power and cognitive load closer to caring more about the power and less about the load. You make it work for you rather than only through you.

On the more positive side, you might try making explicit some scenarios that letting go conjures up for you, maybe some directly eating- or movement-related and some not; maybe some mostly about the relaxing of tensed-up negatives and some more intrinsically positive apart from any anorexic “before.”

With this invitation, you may start with little images or feelings but end up generating evocative action sequences that can compete with whatever your version of the TV-on-couch letting-herself-go woman was. And if you’re anything like me, you might well conclude that the “she let herself go” script has nothing much to do with you, whereas the letting-go ideas, even if they’re more fragmentary and harder to find, feel all about you.

The let yourself go examples involve knowledge by exploitation: exploiting what you already know or think you know, inherited from all those clichéd film scenes of female midlife crises). The let go ones are about knowledge by exploration: exploring that which isn’t a hand-me-down, that which you don’t yet fully have but want to work towards.

And then there are other people. A lot of what letting go must mean is letting go of other people’s expectations, or what we assume about them. It’s terribly easy to be terribly lazy here, with the kind of laziness that feels like it must be right because it’s so unpleasant: Because I easily imagine the worst of every single person I know and don’t know, it must all be true.

Anorexia Nervosa Essential Reads

Anorexia Nervosa and Superior Mesenteric Artery Syndrome

Anorexia Nervosa: Addressing the Bugs in the System

A big part of the cognitive laziness here is inherent in the implied “everyone.” Once we force that vagueness away and bring it down to specific individuals we know, or the smaller groups of “people who see me in the supermarket” or similar, and then ask how many of those people’s opinions we care about, the problem probably gets a lot smaller.

You can also simply ask people what their actual opinions are, rather than keep spinning them out of uncharitable paranoia. One former client wrote a movingly direct email to some close friends and family, asking them a few questions about how they perceived her in her semi-recovered state and what they wanted for her as she progressed further in recovery. That kind of daringly honest communication, rejecting the usual effort-saving scripts, cuts through the noise pretty effectively.

In a positive sense, that’s not just about caring less about the supposedly negative views of others; it can also help to remember that other things will change too, if you let the recovery process keep unfolding. As you take better care of yourself, you’ll be making quite different impressions on the people you encounter, known and unknown, in ways that can’t be predicted (or believed in, often) until they happen. So many other aspects of how you hold yourself and interact with the world create stronger impressions than precisely how much body fat you have. This obviously stops holding true at the extremes, but the fact that the anorexic imaginings immediately take us there doesn’t mean reality will.

In another variant of widening our field of view, we can remind ourselves that other people actually exist and have experiences that we know little about. As Carrie Dennett puts it in Cut, “Someone else may be thin, coifed, manicured, stylish, and keep a ‘perfect’ home, and be dying inside.” As Ijeoma Olou says, another person may, meanwhile be having their “fattest year ever” because they chose to care about the things they cannot do if they’re trying every day to stay or get skinny. And then we can bring it back to ourselves, and likely confirm that indeed, not caring for myself in ways that matter is the only truly bad way of letting myself go.

Finally, we might lean into the rebellion. I wrote an article some years ago called “Who Wants to Be Normal?” exploring the value of the concept of normality in recovery and also the disservices it can do us. Jenny Joseph’s 1961 poem “Warning” is a beautiful encapsulation of both letting oneself go and letting go. The combination reclaims the former, we might say now—which, yes, involves getting “more fat” and giving minimal f***s.

The most moving part for me is the final stanza. The speaker concludes that we must all be awfully sensible for now, before we’re old. Then he does the twist: the idea of practising, so people aren’t too shocked. It's a return to caring what people think, but in the impish vein of wanting to prepare them for the future in which they’ll be predictably scandalized. So, by wearing purple with a mismatched red hat or by any other means, we can practise for old age any time.

And so we come back to choosing, and to the weird iterations between needing to decide to let go and needing to let go just enough of deciding and trying so that it can finally happen. The vicious circles that make letting go harder and harder really can be swapped for the kind in which every little action that loosens the grip makes the next possible, and likelier.