I didn't know what soul ties were when I was 18 years old and in my freshman year of college. I didn't understand how controlled I was by the various unhealthy soul ties I had formed with, mainly, authority figures throughout my life. (Bill Sudduth has an excellent explanation of what soul ties are and how to sever them in his book So Free for a more detailed description.). The control that I had sought to have over my own life ended up controlling me. That is the irony of eating disorders- your mind tells you how to control your world by the way you eat, and yet, every time you change the way you eat to comply with "the rules," you become more controlled. It always leads to greater bondage, when the way that the enemy presents it sounds so enticing; he reprograms your mind to think you are going to make yourself free. All that really happens is that you end up living in an invisible prison. I'll give a couple examples of what that looked like in my life.

The first thing that comes to mind is vegetarianism. In a previous post, I stated that my choice to eliminate meat from my diet was something I had to defend and prove could be done in a healthy way before my parents allowed me to make that choice. If I had known at the time that it would lead to about 9 years of a self-made food prison, I hope I would have had the clarity to choose differently. I know now that for me, the choice to "become" a vegetarian was an extremely unhealthy decision. Even when the topic came up in therapy, I couldn't accept or even conceive that the vegetarianism was linked to the anorexia. Remember, I was fine, after all. Everything was fine. F-I-N-E. (I read somewhere that "fine" is the real 4-letter F word for anyone struggling with mental/emotional wounds. So true.)

When I returned to visit my former dietician in 2013, she still remembered how tightly I had gripped to vegetarianism, refusing to budge on that topic. I will probably go into what led up to me finally rejecting vegetarianism in more detail in a future post, but I will sum it up here by saying that I feel so much freedom now in being able to order a bacon cheeseburger off of a menu, and not feeling guilty or ashamed to be eating meat. So free. :)

 

A second example is related to the soul ties I mentioned above.  In my striving to please my authority figures, my mind had become stuck at age 15.  I still desperately wanted to prove to my psychologist and dietician that I could live right, and be successful.  I wasn't a broken toy, beyond repair, left to be thrown out.  (Neither of them had ever made that declaration over me; I had received that declaration as truth when the voices in my head told me that that was how authorities really saw me.). These soul ties and the lie I believed about being unacceptable to my superiors led me down a path of endless striving.  I stated in my last post that I wanted to study psychology and work in the mental health field.  Part of that was trying to minister to others out of my own wounded-ness, and a BIG part of that was trying to follow in the footsteps of my psychologist, to gain her approval.  The good news is, I am free from that heavy burden now too, and it feels amazing.  

So that kind of sums up two of the many circumstances in my life where I had sought to control my daily life to get to my desired outcome, and all that happened was that I became more and more miserable, and more controlled by the voices in my head that were telling me I was unacceptable, lonely, a waste of time, that I was always going to be alone, that I had no friends, I wasn't loveable, I should just kill myself, I didn't deserve nice things, I didn't deserve new clothes, I was ugly, I hated my life, and on and on like a broken record all day, every day. There were times when the voices would be quenched, like during class, during worship, during the time when people would share in Chapel, during work when I was too busy to listen to the tormenting thoughts.  But when I was alone and things were quiet, they would take over and just keep going.  They rattled on until I felt so dejected that I had once again caved to the lies of the enemy.