Stockholm Syndrome

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Natural anxiety relief includes deep breathing exercises, regular physical activity, mindfulness meditation, adequate sleep (7-9 hours), limiting caffeine, and maintaining social connections. These techniques activate your body's relaxation response.

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I used to think recovery was something you battled your way through. I believed strength meant resistance and progress meant distance. What I’m learning now is something very different.

Recently, I was talking with someone I love, someone who knows me well and who I speak to honestly. We were talking about where I am now in my relationship to the eating disorder I’ve lived with, on and off, for more than thirty years.

At one point, she asked a question that would have made perfect sense to me at almost any other time in my life.

“Where are you in the fight?”

I paused. Not because I didn’t want to answer, but because I didn’t know how.

For most of my life, that question would have been easy. I could have told her who was winning, healthy me or eating disorder me. For years, I believed anorexia was something to battle, something to outsmart, something to keep at bay. Recovery, in that framework, meant winning or losing.

So instead of answering, I froze. That framework no longer fit. I’m no longer fighting my eating disorder. I’m no longer strategizing how to outsmart her. I’m no longer trying to win.

It would have been simple to say, “I’m winning the fight.” The truth is, my healthy self is stronger than she’s ever been, but you can’t win a fight you’re no longer participating in. So articulating where I am now, in relationship to my eating disorder, wasn’t simple.

For decades, the language of war made sense to me. Anorexia nearly destroyed me. It hollowed out my body and narrowed my world. Calling it a monster gave shape to my fear. It offered a clear enemy and a simple story. There was a healthy me and a sick me, locked in combat, and recovery meant one side finally prevailed.

But what that language never gave me was peace.

Over time, through therapy and through learning to slow down and listen rather than override and conquer, my relationship to my inner world began to shift. I stopped experiencing myself as a battleground and started noticing my inner life as a system. I had a healthy self, yes, but I also had many other parts, each shaped by experience and each trying, in its own way, to keep me safe.

Even the eating disorder. Especially the eating disorder.

This way of seeing things changed everything. Instead of viewing anorexia as an external invader that hijacked me, I began to understand it as a part of me that formed in response to pain, offering control when life felt unmanageable, numbness when feelings overwhelmed me, and certainty when everything else felt unstable.

That realization brought relief. When I understood that the part of me engaging in eating disordered behaviors emerged to protect me, I began to feel a strange kind of appreciation toward her. Yes, she caused damage, but she did so in an effort to help me survive. That shift allowed me to stop seeing anorexia as an enemy. Over time, curiosity replaced fear and criticism.

This came with discomfort, for both me and the people who love me. Was this Stockholm Syndrome? Had I learned to love a captor I should be fighting with everything I had?

After all, nobody describes cancer as a friend. Nobody thanks a broken leg for trying to help. We don’t usually build meaning around things that could kill us if left unchecked. There’s something unsettling about expressing gratitude toward an illness that caused so much harm.

But here’s the distinction that matters to me. Anorexia was never an external enemy that invaded my life. She was, and still is, a part of me.

That doesn’t mean she was the best option. It certainly doesn’t mean she should be in charge. She caused real damage. She shrank my world and stole years I won’t get back.

But unlike cancer, anorexia was never separate from me. And trying to eradicate her entirely only ever left me exhausted, ashamed, and stuck.

For a long time, recovery meant trying to exile her from my life. I set the goal of complete elimination: no urges, no thoughts, no trace. When I failed at that goal, again and again, I concluded that I was broken or weak or not trying hard enough.

What finally changed things wasn’t winning the fight. It was ending it.

Recovery began to look less like domination and more like relationship. Less like force and more like curiosity. Instead of asking how to silence her, I started asking what she was afraid of, what she was protecting, and what she needed that I hadn’t been able to offer myself when she first took on so much power.

I’ve learned that anything I try to destroy inside myself only grows louder, and anything I’m willing to understand loses its need to dominate.

As I learned to listen without obeying, her grip loosened.

Anorexia will always be a part of me. That truth used to terrify me; now it feels grounding. She is not my captor, and I am not her captive. She no longer runs my life or makes my decisions, but I don’t need to pretend she never existed or that she came from nowhere.

Recovery, for me, isn’t about erasure. It’s about integration. It’s about holding the full complexity of my story without flattening it into heroes and villains. It’s about learning to live with all of my parts, even the ones that once caused harm, without letting them drive.

That shift changed the shape of healing. It replaced shame with curiosity and criticism with compassion. It allowed me to stop performing recovery and start inhabiting it.

Maybe that makes some people uncomfortable. I can live with that.

What I know is this: ending the war saved me in ways fighting never did.