My office is in a garden in Los Angeles. My garden is my co-therapist. I should talk about this more.

Emily, a graduate student at a respected university, wrote to me asking whether I had written anything about my experiences in using gardening as a therapeutic tool. I'll start now.

Gardens as part of eating disorder healing

Gardens, as I'm sure you appreciate, are ever changing. So are you.  In gardens you see moments of surprising beauty and life, the life cycle of plants, birth, maturation, illnesses, recovery, death, seeding.

PTC wrote this comment on my blog:

Everyone always says the ED is a coping mechanism, but I don’t feel like there’s anything that I can’t cope with or that I haven’t been able to cope with. I don’t really know what I’m trying to say. I guess what I’m trying to say is that I don’t feel like I restrict, workout, weigh myself to deal with something, I feel like it’s just something that I do. Again, I’m not explaining myself too well here so I’ll just stop writing.

When you live with an eating disorder, you block knowledge and self awareness you don’t know you have. When you think you are not explaining yourself well what is happening is that you can’t articulate some kind of knowing. Your conscious mind doesn’t have access to your unconscious mind.

(Response to Am I a Binge Eater? Part I)

Good for you for writing. The first steps toward reaching out for help are the toughest. You are changing a pattern and taking what feels like a risk just by writing your fears to a person who has information about your concerns.

Why ask the question?

You, like so many people, don't recognize for a long time that you suffer from an eating disorder.

Women who are binge eaters are often terrified and feel that they need to hide their feelings and efforts to heal from everyone. This is a paraphrase and summary of what many frightened women who binge eat write to me. Can you identify?

Reaching Out

"I have read and reread your blog for hours. I’ve been doing this for months. I feel absurd in trying to reach out to you.