I now do regular yoga so that’s still a part of it and but it’s just another way just to have a bit of sort of time where you’re just, you’re not doing anything for any reason. it’s just like an hour of kind of, I don’t know, being in the moment or whatever. You know, not actually doing anything so it’s good for me and I think that has come through that sort of mindfulness path where I first experienced a bit of yoga and that sort of therapy, yeah.

I went to art therapy and absolutely refused to do art. I was like, I’m not going in, I can’t do it, I hate art and like [laughs] I was crying and screaming the room down and they made me go in and I hated it, but I learnt from that issue that I have such a great fear of doing things that I’m not good at, you know, I was able to work on, you know, what my fear is and why I’m not able to do things I don’t know and you know, that, from just from that session they set me a lot of tasks and I now, I set works upon just doing simple things that I’d never done before and simple stuff I felt that I was, wasn’t good at and it was really breaking down all the different barriers. So I just, I don’t think there was one thing, I think it was everything put together in that way.

What is art therapy like?

Absolutely awful [laughs]. I hate it; I would never ever want to go again. It was, I don’t know if it’s different everywhere you go but for us, we kind of had an art teacher kind of thing that would set you a task. He’d just be like, OK this is the theme like say some place would have, like he’d show us an Egyptian picture for example and he’d be like so I want you to look at it and think about it, and just draw something which your emotions are telling you to draw. I still to this day, don’t get the point of it; I don’t agree with it, I just, I don’t understand it at all. One day, just to annoy him, I just decided to draw a smiley face with nothing else. I just thought, Well fine, if you’re going to make me do this, this is what I’m going to do I got so frustrated cos then he tried to psycho-analyse it [laughs] so you know, I’d draw this smiley face cos I was really angry and I was just trying to get everyone to leave me alone and [laughs] things like this and I just, I don’t agree with it, but it obviously works for some people, some people find it therapeutic, for me it just made me even more angry, which I didn’t think I was actually and it showed me that I obviously did have anger issues as well that I needed to let out. But as I said I was able to learn something from it and I focused on that instead of [laughs] what he psychoanalysed me to say.

I didn’t find group therapy as helpful really because everybody’s at different stages of recovery so some people wouldn’t really want to get better and they’d be a bit negative in group, and then it’d, I’m one of those people that if somebody else is in need I’ll always feel like I need to help them, and so I started to feel like, I stopped focussing on myself really which is what you need to do when you’re in hospital. You need to focus on getting yourself better, but I started to think about how can I help such and such to get better, and so in that way I didn’t really find the group therapy as helpful.

If you forget about yourself there?

Mm. And sometimes it would remind me of bad thoughts that I’d been ignoring and sort of re-iterate them to me so.

What does the weekly mentor mean, how does that work?

it’s part of the disability scheme and they allocate it based on your need and, obviously when I had my first assessment, I was quite needy, safe to say. So I actually get allocated an hour and a half each week to go to the mentor and it’s kind of up to me and her what we do, like I work with her. Any anxieties or problems that I’ve got I work through, like she lets me if I have a presentation to do, like I can go there and practice my presentation, she helps me work out the timetable for the week so that I can make sure I get all my work in at certain times, and she also sort of, actually really encouraged me over the last year to make sure I have social time and time for myself which I think, what else do we do? If I have any problems, she’s just there to listen.

So, which is nice to know that there’s someone impartial that I can go to. But yeah it’s really just up to me whatever else I needed. If I need any help, she will contact other people for me, on my behalf, and help me do that, like when I had issues. This year I had to find accommodation again without friends, but she helped me do that and she helped speak to people on websites and all of that so, it’s just really whatever you need.

So it’s very pro-active and very involved?

Yeah, really. If there’s time to that I just, she can see that I’m, I don’t want to be there she’ll kind of just be like, OK, is there something I can help you with? What’s up And sometimes I’ve, I just, I just don’t need anything that week and she’s just like, OK well, we’ll leave it at that, you’ve got my email And if I ever do go upset or have any issues, she’ll email me during the week before our next meeting just to check up on me. But she’s nice so I do always know that she’s there. That’s very helpful.

And eventually I went to hypnotherapy and I think actually that was probably one of the main things that helped, possibly because it didn’t give me an opportunity to think whether the treatment they were giving me at the clinic was very much like, it depended on me actually taking the first step and doing what they were telling me to do. And I just, it just didn’t have any effect on me. I just didn’t want to do it and I wouldn’t do it. Whereas kind of perhaps with the hypnotherapy, I just sort of kind of by that stage wanted to be a bit better but needed something that wasn’t really me necessarily telling me to do something. I didn’t, I didn’t really understand. I can remember the sessions, I was completely lucid. But they kind of gave, gave me the skills the cognitive behavioural therapy was meant to give, but that for some reason I just didn’t get when I went to, went to the clinic.

So what happened in the hypnotherapy sessions?

It was it was like friend of the family or someone who had set up her own, she’d gone private having done it with the NHS I think, and she had her own practice in her and so it was like a very nice kind of like room and you just went in. And she spoke to me for a couple of sessions about the condition, trying to understand it so that she knew exactly where she was approaching it from.

And then in, when I ultimately went in for like the first hypnotherapy session, it was, I sat down in a chair, and then was told to kind of, I closed my eyes, and then it was more like we continued the conversation really, so there wasn’t any element of kind of like, Now you’re going under, one, two, three, and, but then that kind of like sort of, in a slightly more sophisticated way sort of came in a little bit later on, and you know I was completely aware of my surroundings the whole time. It was basically just like kind of really deep state of relaxation, just kind of sitting there, completely aware of what was going on, not quite asleep but under still like hearing, I can’t remember what her name was, hearing the woman talking to me. And responding. I was able, I was talking back to her and she was just asking me about like, oh God what was she asking? Kind of asking about things from like my childhood and things. And then I think asking me questions about the eating disorder as well, and the condition, and trying to understand it as well. So I was in a state where I was giving her completely honest answers, and yeah without kind of being able to double foot her.

And do you remember that you were sort of fully you know in full capacity to stop it should you have wanted to?

Yeah, no. She was always very much kind of, I understood completely from the very, from the word go how the sessions would be run, and how much I would be in control because that was one of the reasons I was so hesitant about it at first because I was like This is complete, this is nonsense like there is no way that I’m going for hypnotherapy sessions. This is absolute rubbish.

And kind of having met her and having like looked at the work that she’d done in the past, and having done a bit of research on her and realising that it was actually quite like a reputable thing, and she said from the word go, you know, Look this is what will happen when you come in here. You’ll be in complete control. If you tell me to stop then I’ll stop. You’re able to wake up if you want to at any stage. So it wasn’t a concern of me after I’d met her for a few times yeah.

And how many times did you see her?

I think maybe five or six. It must have been less than ten because they weren’t cheap sessions. But certainly we went for about a good five or so.

And what do you feel that the benefit of it was for you?

I think I just had more confidence to kind of, I was more not necessarily enthused is the right word, but just more willing to kind of approach the, not necessarily the treatment that was being given to me, but on my own terms to kind of improve rather than, whereas beforehand I was just on this sort of flat level of, I am not going to improve, I am not going to take any steps to try and improve my condition or get better. The hypnotherapy kind of sort of rationalised I think a bit for me, and sort of helped me realise that you know the behaviour and the lifestyle that I was living was not healthy, it wasn’t fair, and I just sort of approached it more, with more clarity.