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| Caroline Brockner |
When Caroline Brockner spoke
recently to the eating disorder patients at Sol Stone Center, she shared a
simple message: Recovery is possible.
But the 35-year-old Ithaca
resident, who has been recovered since the birth of her first child eight years
ago, also said it takes great patience, hard work and plenty of support to get
there.
“It was a very long process,” said
Caroline, now an executive assistant at Cornell University and a married mother
of three children. “There were no magic moments. It was a combination of being
tired of being sick, hanging around with healthier people and developing an
internal drive to get better.”
Raised in Westchester County,
Caroline first showed signs of an eating disorder in her early teens when she
was training as a gymnast. By the time she was 15, she was struggling with
anorexia.
At the start of her senior year in
high school, as she moved from gymnastics to cheerleading, school officials
took note of her medical condition and Caroline was admitted to a hospital in
Westchester. She stayed for more than three months.
When she graduated from high
school, she moved to Ithaca to attend Ithaca College and her struggle
intensified.
From 1995 to 2002, living in Ithaca
and then back in Westchester, she was hospitalized more than 40 times, which
included a 1999 cardiac arrest, and she took at least 15 medical leaves from
college.
Caroline was determined to stay
healthy when she returned to Ithaca in 2002. She taught gymnastics and resumed
her counseling with Carolyn Hodges Chaffee, the owner and CEO of Upstate New
York Eating Disorder Service, which had started in 1998.
“Carolyn was a life saver,”
Caroline said. “She was the one person I trusted who I went back to every time.
I knew she cared about me and wasn’t going to give up on me.”
Caroline also met her future
husband, Josh, in 2002 in Ithaca.
“I had always pushed people away
from me, because that’s what eating disorder patients do, we prefer to be
alone, but he was persistent, thank God,” Caroline said.
Later in 2002, Caroline was eager
to finish college and returned to her parents’ home in Westchester so she could
attend Hunter College in New York City while maintaining ties with Josh and
Carolyn back in Ithaca.
There were no more relapses, she
said.
She graduated summa cum laude in
2004 with a bachelor’s degree in English Language Arts. She was engaged to Josh
and four months’ pregnant with her son by the time she finished school. She and
Josh were married shortly after graduation.
“Two of the biggest factors in my
recovery were getting married and having a baby,” she said. “People with eating
disorders tend to isolate themselves, and I didn’t want to do that anymore. I
had to eat healthy and take care of myself for my children.”
Caroline now has a 13-year-old
stepson, an 8-year-old son and a 4-year-old daughter, and says she has been
recovered since 2004.
She’s never been happier, and she
wanted the patients at Sol Stone to know they can recover, too.
“It took me a long time to get to
this point in my life, and I found the best way to do it was with baby steps,”
she said. “You have to take it slowly and understand that slips are going to
happen.
“It was overwhelming at first to
think about changing, and I think that was part of why I kept relapsing,” she
said. “I didn’t think I could take it all on. But once you realize you don’t
have to change everything immediately, you feel great relief.”
In her Sol Stone talk, Caroline was
quick to answer when she was asked whether recovery was worth the struggle.
“It’s so much nicer to live your
life when you are healthy than to just be feeling sick all the time and
worrying about your weight,” she said. “Twenty years ago, I wouldn’t have
pictured myself having a family, owning a house and having a good job. It’s
definitely been worth it.”
This story is included in the Winter 2013 issue of Food for Thought, a newsletter published four times a year by Upstate New York Eating Disorder Service. To receive a free copy of the issue, or get on the mailing list for future issues at no charge, call 877-765-7866 or send email to enc1003@aol.com.
