Personal Narrative: My Developmental Crisis

Being a teenager is hard and being a teenage girl is even harder. In your teenage year’s, you go through many different developmental crises and ultimately it helps shape you as a person later in life somehow. Before I begin discussing my developmental crises growing up, what is a developmental crisis? Well according to A Guide to Crisis Intervention, “Developmental Crises are normal, transitional phases that are expected as people move from one stage of life to another” (Kanel, 2014). One of my developmental crises happened to be struggling with an eating disorder. Some of the questions that I will be discussing consist of how I dealt with it, if I dealt with it properly, and how I would help someone going through the same thing.
Middle school

is when girls and boys really start to notice themselves and others and it’s a time when image starts to count. And for me middle school is when I realized that I really wasn’t what society pictured as the perfect weight and it started to bother me.

My eighth-grade year I became more into fashion and would be obsessed with reading magazines like Vogue and became obsessed with looking like the models in the magazine. That year I learned how to start dieting so I thought and I also started exercising excessively. I started counting calories and became obsessed with that and only ate once a day, in addition to that I started running on the treadmill for at least 3 hours a night. While this doesn’t seem extreme, it really started to show on my body. Being 5’2 and with the body frame that I have, getting down to a certain weight can make me look extremely sick, and the weight I got down to at the time was 98 pounds. Over the next couple of years, I was still obsessed with dieting and my weight always fluctuated but I eventually began to weigh a normal weight until my sophomore year of high school. My sophomore year of high school was kind of like my eighth-grade year, I began obsessed with counting calories again, over exercising, and began taking laxatives. One day I had to go to the doctor’s office for a visit and during the appointment he told me that

my weight was completely unhealthy and that I was down to barely any bodyfat. When I told him what I did to get to that point he informed that it sounds like I may be a bulimic. According to eatingdisorderhope.com, “Bulimia Nervosa is a psychological and severe life-threatening eating disorder described by the ingestion of an abnormally large amount of food in short time, followed by an attempt to avoid gaining weight by purging what was consumed. Methods of purging include forced vomiting, excessive use of laxatives or diuretics, and extreme or prolonged periods of exercising” (Randy, 2012). After telling me this news the doctor also informed that if I didn’t change what I was doing by next visit that I would need to seek therapy.
After my visit my mother told me that I would need to start eating more or she would be forced to get me help.

Aside from hearing what my mother and doctor had to say I decided to help myself by not taking the laxatives anymore, eating more, and just eating healthier while also exercising daily. Thinking about how miserable and painful it was when I took the laxatives is what helped me stop taking them and thinking about how tired and drained I was during the day it what helped me starting eating regularly as

well.
Knowing what I know now I don’t think that my crisis was dealt with appropriately. While the doctor and my mother told me to stop doing what I was doing and to start eating more, they never really told me what effects the bulimia would and could have on my body and mind in the long-run. I believe that they should’ve explained to me the side effects of it, the death percentages a year from, and anything they could tell me to let me know that this is a real problem and not just something to be brushed off.
If I knew someone who was bulimic today I would let them know that they don’t have to try to be society’s definition of perfect. I would let them know that it’s okay to eat when you’re hungry and not count every calorie and that you should never resort to taking any type of pills to lose weight. And ultimately, I would let them know that they aren’t alone and should always talk to someone when they feel like doing this or anything like this that will harm them.
Everyone faces a developmental crisis at least once in their life and they had to figure out a way to deal with it. Overall, I described the developmental crisis that I went through as well as how I dealt with it, if I dealt with it properly, and how I would help someone going through the same thing. In writing this paper I learned how to help others deal with and understand their developmental crises and what may have brought it about.