Interesting how you flipped from endulging in food to then starving yourself. Sounds like flip sides of the same coin. Its still about food, just acting it out in different extremes. Unfortunately, I can relate to that!

I think most of us would agree that we can't use our negative childhood experiences as an excuse for inappropriate behavior as adults, but it can't be denied that those childhood experiences set the stage for how we enter our adult lives. We learn coping mechanisms early in life to deal with what hurts us. Its a human being's way of surviving because as a child we are at the mercy of the adults around us. Pretty powerless little people.

Unfortunately no one takes us aside as we are leaving childhood and entering adulthood and helps us to evaluate those coping mechanisms to see how they will help us or harm us in the adult world. So what do we do? We just carry on into our adult lives, sometimes for the rest of our lives, the coping skills that a little child set in place. I can't undo what others did to me but I can undo the coping mechanisms that I set in place many years ago. I can't keep letting a little child control how I live my adult life.