My issues were Anorexia nervosa, Bulimia and distorted body image. I hated myself so passionately that I couldn’t focus on anything else. Everything I did, every thought I had was built around these issues.

It controlled my life. I was in so much pain. I hated this world and I hated god for creating me so ugly and fat.

I used to stand in front of the mirror and cry hating the reflection that I saw as a monster. I avoided most of the activities life had to offer because I was scared to be noticed because I didn’t want people to judge me, I was scared of what they thought of me. I lived with the feeling that everyone was talking about me all the time and it was literally killing me.

My mother begged me to try therapy with Carmen. She heard about her from a friend who had similar problems with her teenage daughter and she managed to teach her how to love herself. I heard that and thought “whatever, I’ll go just to get her off my back, no one will teach me how to love myself, cause what is there to love”.

Well, I was wrong, not easy for me to admit but I was wrong. Carmen shared with me her story and her past with eating disorders and self-loathing and I saw this woman that was so confident sitting in front of me telling me that she was exactly where I was and now she loves herself even 18 kilos more (after the birth of her first child it took her a while to lose the weight) I was intrigued.

Then she explained how something in my past made me create an aggressive attitude about myself.

She explained how patterns are created and how they influence the way I see and experience myself. Then she gave me a few things to practice (there are assignments you have to do and she’s not chill if you blow it off) and she did a process with me that she created called “The Black Screen” that helps you get over stuff from your childhood that you don’t remember, and to my surprise it started working.

The first thing that happened is that I started seeing myself in a different light, I was no longer that ugly creature I thought was staring at me from the mirror. Slowey but surely I started accepting my body and my face, then liking it, then loving it. Loving it…me?! Who imagined it was even possible.

As Carmen taught me, our development is never done and we should make sure to stay aware of ourselves, how we think, how we speak and what we do, every day- in order to not allow our problematic patterns to blind us again and distort the way we see our reality.

So I work on myself every day but I’m in a different place now. I love me, I am not ashamed of me, actually, you can say I am even proud of me and how I took charge of my life and chose to stop being a victim of the information that was controlling my head.