What If Recovery Isn’t Becoming Who You Were Before?

By Ashley Steenhausen

My parents never let me forget how badly they wanted “the old me back.” Their teenage daughter, whom they had raised, the youngest of three girls who was once energetic, spunky, and full of life. They wanted their daughter back, apart from the eating disorder that had taken over so much of her life.

But the thing was, I never wanted the “old me” back.

When I was deep in my eating disorder, I think my parents hoped those words would motivate me. They wanted to remind me that there was a version of me, outside of the illness, and that they missed her. But that wasn’t how it felt to me at the time. Instead, it made me feel guilty. I knew how much pain my eating disorder was causing them, and hearing that they wanted their daughter back made me feel even more responsible for everything they were losing.

The scariest part was, I didn’t really know how to become that person again. At that point, the eating disorder had become so consuming that it felt like all I knew. The “old me” felt far away, like someone I was supposed to remember how to be, but couldn’t.

Later, when I started to genuinely want recovery for myself, those same words affected me, but in a different way. I was no longer hearing them as motivation to fight the eating disorder, but as if the person I was becoming wasn’t enough.

That was hard because, by then, I was changing. So much of me was still there, but I wasn’t exactly the same as I used to be. I carried myself differently, coped differently, was more sensitive to certain comments, and held different values. Many of these changes were the result of the work I had put in during treatment, parts of myself I was beginning to understand and even appreciate.

Despite my appreciation, I didn’t want every difference in me to be viewed as evidence that I still wasn’t “back” yet. I didn’t want getting better to mean going backward just so everyone around me could recognize me again.

I think that is where this becomes important for parents and caregivers. When a caregiver says, “I just want my child back,” I hear what they mean. My parents wanted me. They were grieving the loss of the daughter they knew, and so desperately wanted the eating disorder to disappear and our life to return.

But getting your loved one back may not mean getting back the exact same person you knew before. Recovery changes people. They may have different interests, new goals, or a different way of seeing themselves and the world. For me, recovery was not about rewinding my life until I reached the point before everything changed. It was about moving forward and figuring out who I was outside of an eating disorder.

So maybe alongside “I want the old you back,” there is another question I encourage caregivers to ask: “Who are you becoming?” Not because the person they were before needs to disappear, but because there might be a lot about the person in front of you that has been buried by an eating disorder, and you haven’t gotten the chance to know yet.