You will hear from some hardcore recovered people in 12 Step programs that “the disease wants to kill us.”

I have a different take on it:  The constituent parts that comprise the disease don’t want to kill us, they want to protect us, help us, make us feel better.  However, even though they have good intentions, they will kill us just as easily as if they did have malevolent intentions.

I spoke earlier about the disease as this monolithic thing that is attacking us.  I truly believe that in one sense, and I think it’s valuable to try to take that intellectual leap to externalizing the disease.  Otherwise, every time you relapse, you’ll just blame yourself for changing your mind again.

The more research I have done, however, the more I think we can identify some of the different parts of our disease.  If we can recognize the different parts, we can better learn to deal with them.

I see the disease as something akin to a fiber optic cable.  From the outside, you see what seems to be one solid cable.  However, if you look from one end, you will see that it’s made of many, many strands that make up the finished cable.  I have identified in myself a great number of “threads” that go into making up my compulsive eating disease as a whole.

As much as many of us talk about being born compulsive eaters, it’s not really true.  No nurse in a hospital nursery has ever yelled “Get me three more bottles, this one’s a compulsive eater!”  We’re born into this world with primal urges, one of which is hunger. Somewhere along the way, though, the disease insinuated itself into our lives.

In many ways, we’re made up of different parts.  The conscious mind, the one that’s reading this now, and that wants to get or stay abstinent, is like the main actor in a play.  However, there are many supporting players in there as well.  I’m not talking about dissociative identity disorder (commonly known as multiple personality disorder), but something more subtle.

We start off life with just the one self, the being we were meant to be.  However, I believe that we keep adding components of the disease (which I’ll call “threads”) as we grow up.  We develop these characters (or threads) over the years in response to different events.  Some of the events are more banal, while some of them come from trauma with a small “t,” and others from trauma with a capital “T.”