EDs and salvation

This morning, as I was just leaving for work, I happened to notice one of my amazon shipments arrived. I ordered 9 or 10 books which will be trickling in all throughout the week. Some were eating disorder-related books, including Harriet Brown's, Feed Me! one lengthy running book--over 900 pages, looking at ALL aspects of running, a Korean survival book for the future, and a few Suze Orman books. I've been a fan of her for a few years but hadn't read one of her books yet.

The first book that arrived was Kathryn Zerbe's Integrated Treatment of Eating Disorders: Beyond the Body Betrayed. I read her previous book The Body Betrayed a number of years ago and felt that was a good comprehensive book on eating disorders, so I was interested in what this book had to offer as well.

This book is geared more towards the practitioner/therapist, but I think it is likely useful for the client, especially in giving a perspective of what therapists may feel like/struggle with in treating the eating disorder population. The book is broken down into three sections: phases of treatment, treatment through life cycles, and special issues such as sexuality, transference, counter transference, and assessing outcomes and resiliency. I'm quite curious about the last section as those issues aren't necessarily talked about much in eating disorder books. In just a skim of the book, like her previous book, she devotes sections to biology too.

I'm only on the first chapter, but this quote struck me. I believe the quote was also used in her other book where she went more into detail. The context of the quote is in talking about how therapists have a difficult time in retrieving information from eating disorder persons due to the aspect of "identity" as the ED which the client encompasses.

H.N. Boris, a psychoanalyst said, "What we call their symptoms, they call their salvation."

In certain ways, I agree with this. For a long time, the ED was like a "salvation" to me, a way of survival. It was the tool I knew how to use. Later, as I developed other tools, the ED was no longer completely like a "salvation" but something else. I never quite figured out what the purpose was after my die-hard years of ED Hell, but there must have been one. Otherwise, I would have recovered a long time ago.

What are your thoughts? Are ED symptoms like salvation?