Felt Reality or Real Reality?

I'm two people.

One is a body. Which, despite the skewed concept of the other, does actually have organs and life. Inside me, wherever me is in all this mess, I cannot see this body as a living, dependent thing.

Somehow, the mind of me doesn't believe I exist. Or at least, it doesn't believe that my body exists. It seems a common feature of eating disorders. On the one hand, a bulimic has a more intense relationship with the body, veering from a desperate need for physical sensation, and a sudden feeling of guilt for momentarily accepting the reality of her body and corporeal needs.

The anorexic, because part of her is aware of the body in her existence, is trying to make the body disappear. She feels her body does not exist, and is busily trying to make this fact into a reality. Two people. Two people. Twin sisters in a way. When I look in the mirror, I see someone else looking back. I see my body in the same way as one sees a car when they are driving it, I think. You know where your Self ends, and the car begins. So my personal self boundary is not where it should be - the limit of my skin, but probably my skull. That's where my association with my corporeal form ends, and the strangeness begins. A confusion of existence.

When desperately starving, I am confronting the part of me that says my corporeal boundary is in fact my body, my skin. I attempt to draw back that boundary. Back and back and back. Somehow attempting to change reality, to make it more acceptable. To take up less space. We know what we see as reality, but we are trying to confirm it in an external sense. It's a sensation that seems to attach to other disorders as well. There is a mental illness in which a person is convinced that a limb is not actually a part of their body. They are convince, say, that their left lower leg is not part of them, and want it removed, so that what they feel is their own reality, becomes a physical reality, so that other people will see them as they feel they really are.

I don't really have a theory on why we have this strange dissociation with our physical selves. It is easy to explain why it isn't something found in nature, if one refers to those great philosophers who have dealt with why we have a sense of self beyond the simple physical stuff of eating, sex and death. So it is perfectly reasonable to suggest that there are people who have a sense of self which is somehow, someway disordered.

What I like about this, is that it takes the blame, the responsibility off us. I used to say it was my choice, my responsibility. In fact, taking this into account, I can say to myself that in fact, my mind is of a disordered nature, producing a flaw in my judgement and association with myself. Because I am fighting against reality, but because my perception is altered and skewed, it is not my fault. I am resolving an internal struggle the only way i know how.

But how do you change that?

How do you readjust your dissociation, your feeling of disembodiment?

How do you learn - intuitively - that your corporeal boundary is your skin and not your mind? And then, if you can grow to understand with both parts of you that your boundary is your skin, your body - how do you learn that it is a good thing, and not something that has to be shrunk? If I have already found that my boundary is my skin, I may get panicked and want to alter the reality again.

So confusing...