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Matthew Campling |
‘How I beat the inner demons of anorexia’
Psychotherapist overcame disorder by controlling negative force
EXPERIENCING the horrors of apartheid South Africa at the age of eight, Matthew Campling sought refuge in food.
A white English boy growing up against a background of racial hatred he didn’t understand, Matthew’s overeating escalated, turning him into a target for playground bullying.
Years of taunts as the class ‘roly-poly’ haunted him as a young man, setting him on the path to anorexia.
Now nearly 40 years on, Matthew has developed a strategy to help others overcome the eating disorder that became an obsession in his early 20s.
Matthew, a qualified psychotherapist, operates from his home in Malvern Terrace, Islington, doors away from Tony Blair’s previous residence.
Matthew said: “My parents took us to South Africa when I was eight. They thought I’d have a better life in the sun. But we lived in apartheid, it was appalling.”
Moving from Berkshire and having been born in Rhodesia, Matthew was used to having friends of all colours, and found himself unprepared for apartheid.
He said: “I remember one boy saying: ‘If I’m not better than a black, who am I better than?’ I used to see the ongoing line of black workers queuing to go back into the townships, while police with dogs patrolled the line, for no other reason than to cause fear.
“I was overwhelmed by the viciousness of it and took refuge in eating. I was bullied all through school and became the school’s whipping boy.”
By 18, as he started to develop into a good-looking young man, Matthew turned to exercise. He started to lose weight, which developed into an obsession.
He said: “This disorder that was growing in me told me if I ate I would get fat again. I was constantly dieting so I wouldn’t get fatter. I exercised every day, swimming in all weathers, I’d come home, not have dinner and exercise again for an hour.
“I would black out from exhaustion. My brothers told me I looked like something from Belsen concentration camp.”
At 20, Matthew suffered a breakdown at work.
He said: “At that point I realised I was dangerously ill. But I couldn’t put weight on again because this disorder was so strong that if I tried to put on weight I would panic and try to take it off again.
“I realised that not all of me was the disorder. I realised part of me knew what was going on and it was weak and the rest of me was this strong disorder.
“Once I’d realised this I was able to negotiate with my own disorder.”
It’s this strategy that Matthew has developed and teaches at his surgery.
Matthew, who spent several years as an agony uncle before setting up his eating disorder centre, said: “The willpower isn’t our willpower, the energy is in the disorder that has grown inside us. It takes our energy so we become weak and it becomes strong.
“This is why we can’t tell people to put on weight because they can’t. It’s the disorder that’s running the show.
“Gently and carefully I learned what the disorder would accept. I learned that to exercise you need energy and you need to eat to do this, otherwise you get too weak.
“By being able to eat a little more and by exercising, the healthy part of me got stronger and the disorder weaker and that’s how after about five months the disorder was no longer strong and it had been reintegrated in me.”
He added: “To be able to deny your body the food it’s been screaming for takes a certain amount of willpower. I tell my clients they can apply that willpower to the rest of their lives.”
Matthew has developed a website for people looking for support and runs therapy sessions from his home.
More information about Matthew’s technique can be found on
www.eatingdisorderself-cure.com
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