Hi Jillann. Thanks for your reply. It helped to get me to think (which is a lot of what this rambling is).

With the ED, I eat variety and maintain a stable, healthy weight that is much higher than I would have ever been okay with. I monitor my intake on my own and do know about how many calories I eat - though I am not afraid to go out to eat or to try samples at a farmer's market (normal things that were once terrifying). Of course, my mom always sees me as too small or too restrictive. I just have that interfering negative thought process that channels into feeling "fat," and nothing seems to shake that. It is like a record that repeatedly plays in my head and interferes with my life as much as background music in the hairdresser might draw your attention - sometimes it is all-consuming and sometimes it just is a noisier version of silence. I agree with you, intuitive eating is just not going to be a reality in my life. I don't listen to/know hunger/fullness cues, and I wouldn't trust myself to know them. But, the part of recovery that is just getting to me is whether I am always going to be sharing my thoughts with a demon or whether these thoughts can ever really leave me alone. It is hard to be crying on the inside but putting on a show of strength because people either don't know what you are going through or - for those who know - consider you weak or choosing the eating disorder or simply not fighting hard enough because you have those thoughts. I'm angry at the eating disorder, something my T always wanted, but I am not angry enough - according to my T, my mother, and, by default, myself. What it did to me is horrible, but it is also a crutch and hard to actually hate. I don't even have the energy to hate it - I'm really medically messed up right now, which makes everything harder.

As for my T, I don't need her to stay on the right track, but I need her to more easily stay on the healthy path and to more rapidly move forward instead of accepting this stasis. Unfortunately, I'm between schools, so I don't have a school psychology office at my disposal, not that I would ever trust confidentiality in a school counseling center (making that out of the picture for me; I have trust issues and have had that trust broken too often to risk my status in such an important environment). I know non-ED therapists can be helpful, but with my T, we didn't focus on the ED. We just understood that the ED was a behavior to monitor, not the subject of therapy. The ED exists for other reasons outside of the diagnosis. Unfortunately, non-ED T's won't work for me for two reasons: (1) I am triggered in a situation where the T doesn't understand the ED for a variety of reasons - the ED can be more readily secretive or can "show off" without anyone there to recognize the issue; the T thinks everything IS about weight, which is the worst I've heard; or the T treats me like a label. I've had it all and it is just a dangerous situation. I'm better off on my own without a T than with a non-ED T, because I put my guards down with a T to focus on the real issues instead of monitoring the ED. I also can't work with a non-ED T because there is not a single non-ED T on my insurance (I won't pay $125 for a T without ED knowledge) who will work with me. My history is too terrifying for anyone to touch. I was lucky my T never gave up on me. I did try to find a new T, and literally everyone either triggered the ED from their ignorance or was afraid to meet me.

What you ended with is what I really need: friends. I need to more than kind of trust one person in my life, but I have no clue how to get to that point. It's hard to learn what friendship is when you had the capacity for friendship taken away from you during middle school, but I hope I'll eventually figure it out.