Thumb-Thing Wrong: Recovery Reveals What We Never Learned

As we know, an eating disorder can often be accompanied with other disorders. Today, we tell a story of a woman struggling with addiction in addition to her eating disorder. 

“I’m 25 days clean!,” Brenda proudly proclaims. “But I notice I am getting so irritable. Yesterday I was Miss Road Rage on the way home from work. And I almost wanted to slug somebody when I saw the office coffee pot was empty this morning. What’s going on?!”

Any unhealthy habit or addiction represents a good habit never learned, a healthy attitude or coping strategy not yet adopted. It represents insufficient self-control, some kind of delayed maturation, some missing skills.

When a child continues to suck their thumb after a certain age, we see it as immature. We expect them to learn to soothe themselves in a more grown up way, and the longer they indulge in it, the longer they don’t learn anything better.

Development on Hold

So it is with any compulsive behavior or addiction. Once we adopt these as coping mechanisms for unwanted feelings or situations, we don’t learn healthier ways. Some aspect of maturation stops at that point. That means that when we try to stop our habit, we have to restart the learning process from where we left off.

In other words, if we are 30 years old and we started our habit at age 15, then there is some part of us stuck at age 15 still. There are certain basic things we have never learned, a certain growth that has never taken place.

That’s why, without our habit, we may find ourselves whining like a teenager in stressful circumstances. We fly off the handle over an inconvenience. We have zero patience. Everyone is annoying. We want to go off and sulk somewhere. It is can be mystifying and embarrassing, but this is to be expected.As we stop our habit, we have to restart the learning process from where we left off.

Learning Skills

There is no shortcut around this, though. We still just have to learn whatever we never learned back then.

And that brings us to those skill deficits. Not only have we not learned certain kinds of self control, we also have not learned proper self care and how to manage situations. 

A​nything that serves as a drug is a substitute for good healthy habits. Think overuse of coffee as a substitute for good sleep habits. Drinking alcohol to unwind instead of learning real relaxation skills.

So the person with the unhealthy habit usually has to learn to care for themselves in some way—emotionally, mentally, physically, socially, spiritually.

To do this, we have to learn certain skills—stress release, caring for others, managing anger, recovering from hurts, forgiveness of grievances, making friends, assertiveness, conflict resolution, and so on. That may sound intimidating, but you can tackle them bit by bit and make solid progress, especially with the help of a mentor, coach or counselor.

This is why these kinds of healthy habits are things that we need to learn at the same time as we wean ourselves (oops, no pun intended!) off our unhealthy dependence on our habit. It makes our freedom and recovery truly sustainable.

Written by John R. Williams, MA LMHC, Mental Health Therapist for The Center • A Place of HOPE. John seeks to not only empower individuals to find peace and fulfillment, but also establish warm and strong relationships. Located on the Puget Sound in Edmonds, Washington, The Center creates individualized programs to treat behavioral and mental health issues, including eating disorders, addiction, depression, anxiety, and more.