A mature woman, decades after eating disorder recovery, may live a life fraught with relationship, career and self-esteem difficulties. You are no longer starving, binging or purging, but you still suffer from painful issues in your life, particularly self-doubt.

If you went through effective psychotherapy you found your way to ending your eating disorder behaviors. As a mature woman today, maybe you rarely think of those starving, binging, food obsessed days and nights. Yet underlying psychic structures of the eating disorder can still be present, ready to spring into action when you are threatened by more than you can bear or allow yourself to see or know. 

It takes many steps and blunders before we reach the first step to deep healing and real recovery.

We can be in pain because we’ve lost a person or an object dear to us. We can be frightened or humiliated because our longed-for plans and expectations have crashed around us. We cry, blame others and blame ourselves. We rail at the injustice around us.

But mostly we are bewildered and thrashing blindly. Hopefully we are not reaching for food, drugs, alcohol, dangerous relationships, and risk taking to escape our bewilderment.

Eventually, our bewilderment is so thorough that we feel forced to ask for help. Even then we ask for help to get our world in order, to stop pain and to regain or recreate what we have lost.

Through the course of my forty years as a psychotherapist I hear this question from my adult eating disorder patients. Whether they are in their thirties, forties, fifties or sixties, they ask, “Aren’t I too old to resolve this eating disorder? Isn’t it too late for me to change my life?

I’m increasingly grateful for my age. My words of encouragement will not give them a believable response. But my existence as an older woman living a satisfying life does reach them. My presence gives them hope, even in their denial of hope.

But what are the details that bring about healthy change? It’s not diet and exercise. It’s not medication. It’s not a physical makeover or an affair.

Guarantee? My informed consent form that clients sign before working with me states that no guarantee comes with psychotherapy. Yet psychotherapists and clients strive together for healing and recovery. Five phases for the work create the strongest possibility for success.

Despite the lack of a guarantee, clients have hope and willingness to work as do psychotherapists. The client puts energy and commitment into her work because she wants health, freedom and happiness. The psychotherapist puts energy into the work because she’s seen healing and recovery in others and has a growing framework of what makes recovery possible.

When the psychotherapist sees the commitment of the client energy the psychotherapist’s commitment and energy for the client’s wellbeing grows and vice versa. Therapy is a partnership on the healing journey.