Born Starving: A Journey To Self-Compassion
By Sarah DeCecco, LMSW, Guest Contributor
I was born starving, literally.
I was born with pyloric-stenosis and at 5 weeks old was within 24 hours of dying due to starvation. I ended up with an emergency surgery that had it not happened when it did, would have been the end of my life. I’ve had a life-long struggle with consumption and capacity in general that began at birth (most likely in utero).
My spunky little spirit was not to be ignored and clearly had much grander plans. The surgery at 5 weeks old removed an olive-sized blockage from the space between my stomach and small intestine. This blockage prevented any nutrients from passing through my stomach as well as created projectile vomiting that prevented any nutrients from being absorbed by my body. I lost weight, and as a 5-week-old infant born at 6 lbs., this was not ideal. My mother was a young military wife, alone and on her own with no family nearby. She tried to tell the doctors that I was not well, and they sent her home stating I had a virus. The neighbors called child protection on her as they thought she was starving me. Had she not insisted a second time that I be further examined, I would have not survived. This diagnosis was managed much differently 45 years ago than it is today.
As a young child I would experience immense anxiety that I was unaware of, I would be nauseous every morning on the way to school, sometimes getting sick on the bus. I would learn to withhold eating until later in the day due to not wanting to be sick. This began my relationship with restricting, which became my default disordered eating pattern. I also LOVE food and LOVE to eat. I also can overeat like no one’s business and drop into the shame and guilt cycle despite my education and awareness on a regular basis.
It took me almost my entire life, years of therapy, and a lot of growth to realize how much this initial entry into the world would shape everything. In combination with some serious tolerance in my DNA, a capacity unmatched to; hold space for others, to do, obtain, strive, and consume (not just limited to food and drink), I was set up for a disordered relationship with food before I was even born. This led to a lifetime of navigating the world of dieting, diet-culture, disordered eating, and disordered exercising. I was well into my 40’s before I harnessed (and maybe accepted) the idea that all of what has been presented by society and diet-culture can be harmful.
It took me most of my young and adult life to realize the disordered eating patterns and how this impacted every aspect of my life, including my relationship with alcohol. That was a relationship that was 28 years in the making to be figured out and eventually led to taking alcohol out of the picture entirely, another article all together. Another major lesson in the consumption-capacity landscape.
Somewhere along the way my obsession with my appearance, weight, exercising, and food led me to yoga. I began my practice in my early 20’s in the desert of Arizona while finishing up my bachelor’s degree. At that time, I had no idea the impact that this would have on my life. As I moved across the country, back into routine with family, and started a career in the mental health field, I utilized yoga as another “exercise” and was a million miles away from understanding the true nature of yoga and all it had to offer, never mind how Western society was appropriating the rich history and practices of yoga.
As I moved through life, careers, having a child, and being a single parent in a difficult job as a child protection worker for 15 years, yoga continuously surfaced. I deepened my practice, deepened my study of yoga, (and continue to do so), and have been sharing my practice for several years. My individual yoga practice and now my offerings in Yin yoga are part of my recovery. My healing is rooted in the flourishing of my individual practice, my continual training, my intuitiveness connections to my body and self-awareness, my ability to honor humanity and my own self-compassion. Sharing this with others is a bonus and a way to honor how important yoga is and how it should be respected.
Mental health, physical and nutritional well-being, and my relationship with food is all tied into my yoga practice. Not just the physical practice, but all of the limbs of yoga. My ability to honor the origins and traditional cultures that yoga comes from, accessing, supporting, and compensating those whose traditional roots brought yoga to the West is important to me. I took private yoga studies with the amazing Rachna Tewari, who I connected with after meeting her just one time in a class many years ago. I always experienced discomfort around how yoga was being “distributed” here in the West. I had an inherent understanding about that long before I understood what appropriation meant.
I just didn’t have the language to express what I was deeply feeling. Rachna was one of the first to incorporate Ayurveda into my practice, and she was supportive of my personal practice in a way that I cannot describe. She did not focus on the “image” of any part of the practice which was a completely different experience than anyone else I had worked with. I knew instinctively that I was delving into areas that were not mine, but that I could still respect and honor what I did connect with.
I struggled with the different directions this piece could take me in and all of the various layers that can be addressed. I’ve landed on what resonates the most, self-compassion. This is different than self-care. Self-care plays a big role in my recovery, but at the end of the day, in order to truly take care of myself; I have to have self-compassion. I give that to myself through my yoga practice through sharing yoga with others, through holding space for others, and being truly present. This is not to say that I am not a hot mess at times, and that I have any semblance of “perfection”, if anything I am openly the opposite of that, and am very transparent about that in all of the roles that I hold. I just know that my practice is the glue that holds all of my messy pieces together so that I can do what I can to help others.
Sarah DeCecco, LMSW, is a therapist, a certified yoga teacher who specializes in Yin Yoga, and works for the State of Connecticut. Sarah’s focus is on intentional and radical self-care for the helpers and healers in all front line fields and is passionate about the deep connection between yoga, healing, and recovery.