Self Worth Part II

My self worth and self esteem is in jeopardy. I think that's why a lot of people become codependent. They don't feel good about themselves, so they save others in order to give themselves worth. I did that with a very broken ex bf of mine. He felt so badly about himself that he thought I must be insane to love him so much and care for him like that. He treated me like shit, abused me emotionally, and cheated on me.
My self worth issues began young. My father moved out when I was 10 months old. My mother worked a lot and left me at school or with sitters and was always late to come pick me up. It made me feel unimportant. As I got older, she was critical. Critical about my weight and about my looks. When I asked her if I was pretty, she told me that I was interesting. She was overly concerned about my weight and my weight gain. At age 13, she brought me to Wannamakers for new clothes. She found that my size was a (brace yourself) *GASP-- 7. Oh no! A size 7. She told all the neighbors (in front of me) that I was a size 7 now and that she was taking me to Weight Watchers, so if anyone saw me eating or buying junk food around town, they had to tell her. And so began weight watchers. I went from 112 pounds to 105 pounds. But that wasn't actually the start of weight watchers. It actually started two years earlier, at age 11, when I was 106 pounds. Back then, I went down to 98 pounds. But weight watchers taught me all about calories. And I learned that if I ate nothing all day, I could eat a candy bar (or five) for dinner and that's it. So, you probably don't have to guess too much about what happened after that... yup. Eating Disorder. I remember my first Thanksgiving with laxatives. I found them in my Grandmother's boyfriend's daughter's medicine cabinet. Three chocolate ex-lax let me eat as much turkey, creamed corn, mashed potatoes, bread & butter, pecan pie, and ice cream as I wanted. Then I came home, stepped on the scale, and with every trip to the bathroom, weighed myself again until the magic number (98) was there. Then I could go to sleep. I experimented with purging, but was never a good bulimic (thank god). I never really got super into laxatives. But what I struggled with for years was bingeing and restricting. As a young teenager I would pop dexatrim and smoke cigarettes and guzzle diet coke to avoid eating. I'd binge on bagels and chips and ice cream late at night when everyone was sleeping. Mommy called me "sloppy fat." I wasn't very overweight. Don't get me wrong, I was a bit over weight, but perhaps more like 10 pounds overweight, yet my mom made it seem like I was morbidly obese. She was really appalled by me. She's say things like, "Charlie thinks your pretty, but he says you need to lose weight," or "Grandma thinks you've gotten fat." And of course she would say things like, "Laney, no man will want to be with you if you're bingeing." Little did I know that Mommy was a binge eater too. I found out years later. But she was like me, binge/restrict and her balance threshold kept her skinny. Anyway, I began having sex with any man who wanted to have sex with me. I didn't understand that any many would have sex with me because, well, I was a woman. I was desperate, and kind of pathetic, and had no self esteem, so if someone wanted to fuck me, I'd do it with them because I thought it meant that they were attracted to me and that I was pretty. I stopped binge eating (and only restricted), lost 30 pounds and had men falling over themselves to have sex with me. I had sex with many of them. I wanted love, but just got sex. It was empty and terrible. I did this for years. More to be continued.