When All Else Fails

I have attended only two Eating Disorders Anonymous meetings in my years of struggle. While I’m certain many people find benefits there, my stumbling block was the very thing that starts any Twelve Step-based program: facing powerlessness over my specific brand of self-destruction.

Though I understood on some level that I had a problem, for many years I maintained a belief that I did, in fact, have the upper hand over said problem. This made recovery nearly impossible: it’s hard to become free if you don’t know you are bound.

It was the middle of October in 2016 and a greying psychiatrist with a perfectly trimmed goatee sat across from me in his office in a treatment facility. He was attempting to get me to speak to him about my self-destructive behaviors, and I was having none of it. I could hear his words telling me that I was sick, but to my mind, I was neither sick nor completely powerless over my behaviors.

“I’m perfectly comfortable with silence,” he said through a tight smile. “I’ve actually sat through entire sessions in silence.”

“So have I,” I responded dryly, and I proceeded to do just that.

In our next session, the psychiatrist came armed with a different approach, saying, “If you are not ready to recover, perhaps it is because you need to hit rock bottom first.”

While I’m sure he meant well, I have never found the idea of “rock bottom” to be a helpful phrase in my life. Even in my worst moments with anorexia, I proved exceptionally skilled at believing I was still in control. I held tightly to an illusion of power and agency even when I lay hooked up to machines in a hospital room. Despite what the psychiatrist said that day, what I did not need was to hit rock bottom behaviorally; what I needed was new vision. I needed to see my true state and despair of my ability to save myself. I needed to see my own powerlessness. As long as I remained delusionally convinced that I was even partially in control of these addictive behaviors, I was never going to seek or accept help of my own volition.

To this day, there is a part of me that resists the idea of powerlessness. It may not be regarding the eating disorder anymore, but seeing my spiritual state as one of bondage to sin is something that I fight. I am slowly learning what so many faithful Christians before me have known: that admitting powerlessness to sin-sickness leads to a desperation about my efforts and a turning of my gaze externally for rescue. Jesus gives me himself in that place, offering the truth of my state and the freeing answer to that state.

In the gospel according to Mark, a few details are presented to the reader that are absent from the two other gospel accounts of the woman with a bleeding disorder. Specifically, Mark’s gospel tells us that though the woman had been to many doctors in her twelve years of suffering, she had only grown worse. Not only had she sought professional help and not been made well, but her suffering had increased at the hands of those who were supposed to heal her. Physicians had failed her, not just by lacking a cure to her disease, but in escalating the misery of her embodied experience.

Unlike me, the woman with the bleeding disorder was fully aware that she was sick. But I wonder sometimes if she, too, had to hit a breaking point in seeing the complete weight of her powerless state. I wonder if she repeated the mantra of “maybe this time will be different” as she knocked on the door of the next physician, knowing against herself that it was a lie, and that she was only inviting more trauma and despair. I wonder if seeking out physicians began to feel less like hope springing eternal and more like a desperate attempt at denying just how powerless she was to make herself well. Perhaps, like me, it took her a little bit longer to accept her total inability to manage her sickness with the resources at her disposal. For either of us to ultimately find healing, new vision would be required. The fresh sight offered to both of our stories of suffering would throw this truth into stark relief: that due to the depth of our sickened states, rescue would have to come from outside our best attempts at managing it.

Up this point, I have been writing about two illnesses that have a strong physical component. But what is hopefully becoming obvious is that I am not primarily speaking about physical health. Instead, I am calling on these two stories to illustrate something more broadly about human bondage to sin. The human story is threaded through both tales. It can be found in the path of my past self, denying our deep sickness and claiming to be fully in control of our behavioral choices. And the human story can also be found in Mark’s recounting of the woman with the bleeding disorder as we find ourselves to be suffering, unwell creatures staring down our inability to find healing, and there being given the true Physician.

When Jesus encounters this woman directly, the text tells us that she first falls at his feet in fear. She is face down in the dirt, afraid, because it is a scary place to truly know your helpless state. But despairing of her efforts brought her to Jesus, who came precisely as a physician for those who are sick. I know from experience that reaching out for the mere garments of Jesus comes only comes when there is no other place to look. That kind of desperation comes when you finally and blessedly realize that the sickness within you is deeper than you can heal on your own.

The woman in Mark’s gospel is initially afraid, but her Maker does not look at her state and shake his head in disgust. He does not leave her in her bondage. Jesus did what he always does with helpless creatures who avail themselves of his mercy: he calls the woman “daughter” and gives her himself, the true answer to every sickness and enslavement.

I don’t know fully what led this woman to the place of outstretched arm, simply hoping to touch the fringes of the garments of Jesus and nothing more. I don’t know at what point she stopped researching physicians far and wide and decided to risk the Messiah. I don’t know when I first spoke the words, “I think I need help,” and actually meant them. But I do know that each Sunday, I hear the pastor pray, “Show us our need for Jesus, and then give him to us.” In this prayer is the continued pattern of my life and yours on this side of eternity — asking God for the gift of clear vision of our sin-sick state, despairing of our ability to fix it, and then meeting the grace of Jesus afresh as he gives himself to us.