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The following is part of a series called Untold Stories of Resilience: Stories of recovery from sexual assault and eating disorders, a photojournalism project by Deryne Keretic.
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Q: Tell me about the first time you were aware of your body’s shape, size, or appearance.
Jenn: I remember the first time. I was really young. I’d say the first time I was really conscious was maybe when I was ten years old. That’s when I started to develop breasts. I can’t pinpoint it to one specific moment but I do remember developing breasts that year and then I also got my period. I was being more conscious of my body and around then. I also noticed that I was much bigger than my peers. I had a lot of issues in terms of being able to buy clothes that were more fashionable. I was more socially conscious of how other people dressed and what that was by comparison.
Q: What about more recently (maybe within the last year) – when was the last time you remember being aware of your body’s shape, size, composition?
Jenn: Weight and body shape is definitely something that’s, if not always on my mind, something I think about often. Personally, in the last year-and-a-half, I’ve decided that I want to get weight loss surgery because I really just want to lose a massive amount of weight. I’ve tried so many different ways of losing weight and I have lost weight but I’ve gained it back. In the past year, I’ve been able to maintain a weight loss of 40 lbs but I definitely want to lose a significant amount more so I’ve decided to pursue weight loss surgery in the new year.
Q: Tell me about a time you were proud of your body.
Jenn: Well, I just did a 5K run this past October. It was my first 5K. It was a really challenging run. I wasn’t really as physically fit as I would have liked but I remember that there were moments when I pushed myself and did more than I thought I could. I was able to finish the race in less than an hour, which was huge for me. Doing that was definitely one of my goals so I was really proud of that experience.
Q: How has your relationship with your body been impacted by surviving your trauma?
Jenn: The trauma that I experienced has impacted my body in so many different ways. I’m a survivor of child sexual abuse, so one of the ways my abuser groomed me was through food. He would give me food as a way to groom me and make me trust him as a very young child. By the time I was 14, I weighed about 300 lbs – not only due to the emotional eating I was doing, but also because I used food as a way to cope with the trauma I experienced. Always being massively overweight up until this day – I think that’s why I’ve decided to get weight loss surgery. I really feel that my abuse has contributed to my size. I’ve been in recovery in terms of my process of recovery for more than 13 years but I still don’t feel like I’m comfortable in my body. I carry a lot of trauma in my body and I carry a lot of weight that no longer serves me. The choice of getting weight loss surgery has given me the option of letting go of a lot of that trauma and letting go of a lot of the weight that I gained in the process of surviving. Even just making that type of decision has impacted the recovery of my trauma. Being someone who struggles with an eating disorder definitely is something that has stemmed from my trauma.
Q: What do you wish the public knew about sexual violence and eating disorders?
Jenn: I think that some people don’t understand the relationship between the two in terms of coping. I can really only speak of myself but people don’t always know how isolating and horrific being abused and assaulted and violated and all the different terms that can describe sexual assault is – how much of an impact it takes on somebody’s life and how isolating the experience can be. There is a huge connection between eating disorders and my abuse because food was there in times when I felt alone before I started abusing drugs. Food was the way I dealt with life. The trauma that I experienced left me immobile sometimes. Emotionally there were things that I couldn’t deal with. Any time I felt overwhelmed and I would eat something, it would help me cope with it in that moment even though it was an unhealthy behavior. It was something I learned I needed to survive. So I don’t really think people understand the connection between the survival part of experiencing trauma and how food plays a part in that. Sometimes when I’ve talked to people who don’t have an eating disorder or don’t understand addiction or don’t really understand recovering from traumatic experiences, they think that it’s as easy as not overeating or stopping yourself. In times when you don’t know how to deal with your emotions, I don’t think people really understand the relationship between trauma and addiction. A lot of people think you can just stop, but at 2am when I’m re-experiencing a trauma or having a trigger and I can’t function because I’m hysterically crying and my body is having a physiological response and the only thing in that moment I can think of to self-soothe myself is by eating, there’s no way that I can just not do it.
Q: What would you like to communicate to someone who might be experiencing something similar? Do you have any advice?
Jenn: My advice is that recovery is a process. There is no right or wrong way to recover and everybody has a different way of coping with life. There are resources that can support you. I do really feel that there have been resources in my life that helped me and if I didn’t have them I would be dead right now. I used drugs for a really long time to cope with my trauma, I acted out sexually for a really long time to cope with my trauma, I used food for a really long time to cope with my trauma. I found whether it’s through friends or recovery programs, 12-step recovery programs, books, mental health counseling, etc. there’s a wide range of different resources out there that I have tapped into that have saved my life. I would advise anyone to understand that it’s a process. What I’ve done might not work for somebody, but maybe it’s a yoga program or exercise or some other type of resource that could work for them.
Q: Is there anything else you want to share? There’s room to share your story or any other aspects you want to discuss.
Jenn: I want to share that sometimes I don’t really feel like I can identify with my body. Sometimes I feel like I’m trapped inside of my body, which is a really hard thing to explain. Being massively overweight when I was growing up – not only was I groomed with food and encouraged to eat really badly, but we were ordering out mostly because that was easier to afford than groceries. I wasn’t being encouraged to go to the gym or workout and I just felt trapped. I feel really trapped in my body so I look forward to losing weight. I feel like the process of losing weight will help me actually see myself, which is interesting to talk about because I can see myself in the mirror but I don’t identify with my body now. I feel very disconnected from my body. Because I feel disconnected, there’s a lack of self-care sometimes. If I lost weight and I recognized myself more maybe I would take better care of my body, which doesn’t make much sense I also feel like that might play a part in terms of society’s view of obesity and discrimination that I experienced and the media’s way of telling me to hate my body so I don’t know how much of that is social culture and how much of that is trauma and my experience.
Q: It’s difficult to disentangle what we think of ourselves and what we’re told to think of ourselves. Did you grow up in New York?
Jenn: Yes, I grew up in the Bronx. My abuse started when I was eight and lasted until I was 14. I think a lot of the abuse I experienced was due to poverty. I grew up with my mom and my brother and we didn’t really have a lot of money with a single parent so we were living in poverty. When my mom met my abuser we heavily depended on him financially. In the beginning it wasn’t something that came out right away. After a few months of him living with us is really when he started to assert his control in terms of not only being emotionally and physically violent to my mom, but then he started molesting me and eventually raping me. I also think a lot of the psychological abuse we experienced as a family unit had to do with poverty. My eating disorder really took off because I would use food as a way to cope. I would overeat to feel high but I also was struggling to be a teenager and trying to lose weight so that’s when some of the restrictive behavior and aspects of bulimia came in. It’s all tied together and tied to money. I really just wanted to fit in with my peers and like I said earlier; I couldn’t fit into clothes or didn’t have money to buy trendy clothes and I felt like I was always the biggest person in my class. When I graduated from junior high school at 14 I was 300 lbs, which is just not an acceptable weight for a child. I was a child. When I graduated highschool I was still around the same weight, so it was still child obesity. The resources we had in terms of eating badly tied into poverty and socioeconomic status.
Q: When did you begin to heal your thoughts around what happened to you?
Jenn: A lot of my healing didn’t happen until I stopped using drugs. When I turned 18, I moved out of my house and moved away to school. I was heavily using drugs and acting out sexually, although I did start doing yoga and I’ve been in therapy since I came out and said my abuse. Because I was in my addictions, I couldn’t really focus on recovery. All I cared about was getting high so I don’t really know if a lot of my healing didn’t happen until I was 22 because that’s when I actually was sober for the first time. I was able to feel and try not to use things even though I still wanted to use things to take the pain away. That was the first time I was able to be sober and be in a right mind set.
Q: How did that come about? Did someone ask you to seek help?
Jenn: No, I just recognized that I was completely addicted to my drug of choice. I tried to get clean and I couldn’t and nothing is worse than trying to do something and not being able to. For years I thought: “Oh, I can just quit when I want”, until I actually tried and I couldn’t. I struggled for over a year to get clean and then I wound up going to Narcotics Anonymous. I used the 12 steps to get clean and I’ve been clean since, so it’s been almost five years now. I feel like a lot of my recovery has happened within the last five years because I am not using drugs anymore. It was difficult – being 22 and trying to quit while all my peers are using drugs and everybody’s drinking. Even to this day, I don’t drink because alcohol is a drug. I’m a drug addict so I can’t drink successfully. Living around other people who drink isn’t great but it goes back to that idea of: “Oh, you can just stop. Why can’t you just have one?” It doesn’t work like that for me. I can’t just have one and that’s why I don’t have any at all.
Q: Is there anything else you want to bring up?
Jenn: I really feel that if we didn’t live in poverty, things would have been different. When I came out and told my family he did have to leave the house immediately, but it impacted our lives because we could no longer stay in the three bedroom apartment. We could no longer afford to live there so we actually had to move to a two bedroom. He had to leave but it impacted us to the point where we had to move and we struggled. When I became conscious of my abuse around 12, I knew that if I was to say something we would go back to poverty. If I was to say something we would have to leave and then we wouldn’t be able to live the way we were living. I remembered that before he came there were times where we didn’t have dinner and there were times when we didn’t have enough food to eat. I knew unconsciously and even consciously that we would go back to that. I also knew that people wouldn’t really believe me and that wasn’t something I couldn’t cope with. I knew that we would go back to poverty and eventually we did. It was really hard for my mom to afford the two bedroom and put food on the table.
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This post was originally published on the author’s Tumblr and is republished here with her permission.
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Photo credit: Deryne Keretic
