Landslide

What do you do when things start going out of control faster than you could have ever anticipated? That’s one of the trickiest things about eating disorders. When you start to feel things getting slippery, all of a sudden, you’re halfway down the slope.

One shouldn’t play with fire, but sometimes the temptation to do so is just too strong. Running back to behaviors is a safe place. It’s that little hole that you just want to crawl into and hide in to feel better. So, when things start to get too chaotic, that hole seems more and more appealing. It also gives that sense of “stability” that I crave when things feel uneasy. That’s the biggest reason I have been using behaviors lately.

Recovery is an exhausting process. Sometimes, it’s just too overwhelming to even think about the meal plan and challenges that come with each new day. I am ready to be at the point where I don’t have to think about these things and just do them, but I know I’m not there yet. So, I catch myself sometimes taking a break from recovery to use behaviors to just feel at ease. That’s pretty backwards logic. In order to stay in recovery, I can’t use behaviors, but behaviors make me feel safe. It’s a horrible catch-22.

How do we break the chain? The first thing is to stop the landslide before you reach the bottom. I have been very lucky to have the gift of self-awareness to my behaviors and irrationality. I once had a supervisor tell me that I could rationalize myself out of anything. That’s exactly what I’m doing now, but it’s also coming from a disordered place. The next step is to reach out for help and support. I’ve done my best to be honest with my team, my family, and my boyfriend, because they’re the ones who confront me when I’m being disordered and support me when I need it. Finally, I need to make changes. This week, I did some self-care and was forced into some, which ended up helping. I reached out for support and was honest about when I was struggling.

What matters most is the effort. I know if I give up, I will only end up back where I was last year. I don’t want to lose my freedom and the trust of others again. I also need to get my shit together and stop running back to behaviors to feel better. That doesn’t break the cycle. Only making small daily changes can lead to major overall ones. That’s what it means to have a life in total recovery.

Habits

Old habits die hard: a situation I am finding myself in quite frequently lately. It’s weird how your eating disorder can still creep into your life during recovery, even if you feel like you’re doing well. Overall, I am. I have been completing almost all of my meal plan every day and am trying to stay less stressed about my lack of job situation. I had 3 interviews this week, so I can’t be that bad a candidate. It’s just frustrating. But when I met with my dietician this week, she told me to be cautious.

There seems to be this cloud in the recovery process. Sometimes, people can sit on it and think, “Look at this, I’m 100% in recovery. Nothing can go wrong. I’m great where I’m at and I’m never coming down.” Then, they fall from the sky and hit the ground hard.

I don’t consider myself fully up on this cloud. While I feel like I am doing better than I have been in previous months, I know I’m far from recovered, as pointed out by my dietician. One of my biggest behaviors was counting and measuring. I had a set point that I would reach every day and not allow myself to go over. If I went over, I would be filled with this self-loathing and overwhelming guilt. This pattern seems to have transitioned with me into recovery.

When I first entered recovery, I didn’t want to know my counts for my meal plan, because I felt it would be too triggering, especially when I was still on a weight restoration plan. But when we got to an idea of what might be maintenance, I was having difficulty reaching my full portions for some meals. So, I asked to know so I would have that goal. While this has helped me actually reach my restored weight and maintain it, which is still strange and slightly uncomfortable to say, it has also become a modified behavior. I now know the counts of most of the meals I eat in a month and always strive for the lower end of the calorie range. If I go outside the range for that snack/meal, I will apply to excess to the next eating period. While I am getting my appropriate meal plan in, this is a dangerous behavior.

I am able to see that this is not the healthiest way to keep track of my meal plan; however, it is nice to have that numerical validation that yes, I did actually do a full day like I was supposed to. That’s exactly the problem though: numerical validation.

When I was sick, that numerical validation is what kept me there. There was a number that defined every day. Whether it be caloric intake, weight, size, whatever, my life was ruled by them. Now, while I might not be looking at unhealthy numbers, it’s still that control. I am still controlling my intake. I still get uncomfortable by that number on the scale or the size of my jeans. Numbers continue to be my world, even though it is for a better life.

Now, I find myself this place of being stuck between a rock and a hard place. While counting ensures that I get my full meal plan in, it always makes me use some form of behaviors, which will ultimately affect my recovery. So, what do I do?

My dietician is forcing me to pick things that I don’t know the counts for at least once a day, which is proving to be more difficult than it sounds. I know counts for almost every food I eat on a somewhat regular basis. It’s also just overwhelming to think about not knowing how much is going into my body, which is just a sign of how much further I have to go in this recovery process.

The body moves faster than the mind, but it’s a matter of keeping the body healthy while the mind heals that will ultimately impact how well I can stay in recovery. If I allow my mind to stay in this unhealthy state, it will lead to my body becoming unhealthy again. So, by keeping my body in as best a place as I can and with time, patience, and hard work, I know my mind will catch up.

Pitfalls

It's been an incredibly challenging week. That's the tricky thing about recovery: when things seem to be going well and you are beginning to feel comfortable with where you're at, all of a sudden pitfalls begin to appear to try and set you back. This week has been full of them.

First of all, a very unwelcome person decided to try and re-enter my life via LinkedIn. This person has not been a part of my life in quite some time because of the choices he made, ones that hurt me very badly. So, I made the decision to stop contacting him but I have never been ready to truly say I feel in order to officially end things. He has been blocked on all other types of social media; however, when I joined LinkedIn approximately 2 weeks ago in order to help support my job search, I did not think to automatically go block this person there. So, when I got a message from him asking me to add him, it was all total bullshit.

This was very triggering for me. My phone number and e-mail address have not changed in 10 years, but he could not make the choice to contact me there? And LinkedIn of all places? What the fuck? It just brought up a lot of the anger I have tried to shut out for the last few years. I had had it. Finally, I found myself with the courage to finally send the "Go Fuck Yourself" e-mail that I have never been able to do. I was always worried that, because it would be the final nail in the coffin of our relationship, it would ultimately backfire,and I would become a more damaged person from it. As I have learned in recovery though, this is not the case.

Because I kept holding onto that relationship, I was staying a damaged person. I was not able to truly process and grieve the loss like I needed to, which resulted in my constant state of being shut down. This set off my eating disorder behaviors and the vicious cycle continued. Every time I would become upset about the issue, I felt that damage more strongly than I had before. Each time I pushed it down, it simmered and grew. All the time I spent "protecting" myself was wasted on unhappiness and pain; however, I wasn't ready to do it yet. It took me a long time to get to this point, but I finally reached it. So, I hit send.

There's nothing more validating than finally telling the person who hurt you to fuck off. Those small words mean so much, because it means I'm no longer allowing him the occupancy in my heart or mind. I will no longer allow him to continue causing me pain, especially when he is no longer a part of my life. I will not allow my eating disorder to creep in and say that I need to use behaviors to cope with this loss. I am my own person who is deserving a life with only people who love and support me, not those who use me to make themselves feel better. I am taking back my life from my abuser, something that I have never been able to say until now.

One of the most important steps for me after sending that e-mail was to write a goodbye letter for myself. I waited until the next day and put myself in the position where I could do it. I used a picture of him and my journal to sit and write all of the things that I never could say. These will be things that I never will say to him, because he doesn't deserve to hear them. I did this for me and surprisingly, I didn't shut down. By giving myself the space to write the letter and using the picture, I cried for the first time in 7 years about the pain he's caused me. I cried for 45 minutes, which is something I haven't done in years, and it felt good. I even made my therapist cry when discussing it, so that's pretty damn good. The next (and most dreaded) step will be processing the letter in therapy though, which is going to be the most difficult thing I will ever have to do. Pitfalls at their finest.

The other major issue this week has been with my license. I found out last night that my counseling license is actually NOT valid in the state of Missouri, which is overwhelmingly frustrating. I have thought that I would be fine, which I clearly looked at the wrong information. So, I quit my job to return to a field that I love but cannot currently practice in until I take another graduate class. With it being the middle of the semester, I am going to have to wait until at least summer and maybe fall in order to do so. So, the internship I just started has no benefit for me and I just feel very stuck. With my stuckness came the possibility to shut down; however, for the first time in our relationship, I actually sat down with my boyfriend and cried... a lot. I've teared up and cried a little, but nothing like this. It was a really great moment, because it shows that I don't need to shut down and I am safe being vulnerable. Rationally, I know that, but it's still very uncomfortable for me to experience emotions. I am the luckiest lady to have such an incredibly patient partner.

So, now what? This is a question I don't really know the answer to at this point in time. For now, I'm just going to try and figure out a plan B. The one thing I have to keep in mind is that pitfalls will pop up everywhere. Whether it's a bad body image day or a major life changing event, life isn't perfect. Neither am I. The best I can do is rely on things outside of my eating disorder in order to keep moving forward. Even if I do use behaviors, it's better to take one step back and get up swinging than to fall back to a full blown relapse. All I can do is one day at a time.

Shutting Down

My number 1 coping skill, even above ED behaviors, has always been shutting down. Any time I feel any strong negative emotion (angry, sad, hurt, shame, guilt, etc), I have the automatic reaction to cut those off and turn them into anxiety. While anxiety is also a negative emotion, it's one that I'm pretty used to and am somewhat comfortable sitting with. It makes things easier to deal with, but it also has some wicked consequences.

Shutting down prevents me from being 100% vulnerable with the people I care most about. I always have that last protective layer from the really ugly parts of myself. Rationally, I know that they aren't truly ugly, but it's how I feel about the emotions related to my trauma.

I have become comfortable discussing my trauma through treatment and having to retell it to various doctors, counselors, and dieticians, but it's putting the emotion behind it that I continue to struggle with. I tell my life story like it happened to someone else. It's like giving someone the details of a movie plot. I'm detached. I'm emotionless. A robot. This is what happens probably 95% of the time.

The one major time I have been able to push past my automatic shut down mechanism was in a psychodrama group during treatment. Psychodrama is basically a group where someone will use other people or props to discuss something. I chose to go the 3 chair approach. The first chair represented me without ED. The second was my eating disorder. The third represented grief/loss. I have experienced a tremendous amount of loss in my life. From my sophomore year of high school to my last year of grad school (7 years), I lost 11 friends in a variety of ways and all but one of them were unexpected. This coupled with the loss of relationships and other things have crushed me in the grief/loss department.

So, in this type of psychodrama, you have to move yourself between the 3 chairs and talk about what you experience in each of them. I started in the self chair and talked about what my life might look like without using eating disorder behaviors. In the next chair, I talked about my eating disorder and how it kept me safe. Then, I had to move back to my self chair to talk about how I used that middle chair to protect me from my grief.

It’s incredibly hard to sit there and talk about what the real reasons you use your eating disorder are. One of the biggest misconceptions about eating disorders is the idea that they are solely about weight, size, shape, numbers, etc. when, in reality, that’s barely scratching the surface. For me, my eating disorder has primarily served as my wall between myself and those strong emotions that I am extremely uncomfortable with. ED keeps me safe from truly having to feel those things. While that wall keeps the anger and sadness out, it also prevents others from getting in.

So, after those 2 chairs, the worst part comes: having to sit in the chair of grief and loss. Sitting in that chair, I finally had to let myself feel everything about that suicide 8 years earlier, which set the stage for how I dealt with every subsequent loss. As I was talking and (finally) crying about the tremendous guilt I felt for this suicide and how angry I was, I said something about the other losses.

So, the therapist asked me how many other losses I had experienced. She added 2 more chairs: one for my father and another for my first relationship. So now, I had 3 chairs for grief. As I kept talking, she kept adding more chairs for every other loss until I was surrounded. The sheer visual impact of the amount of loss in 10 years was overwhelming and I felt it as I sat there. Then, I had to move back to the first chair.

As I sat in my self chair, I had to look at the number of chairs beyond my eating disorder. Again, just a huge number of chairs, none of which I have ever really dealt with. All of that grief carries a huge amount of weight for me that I work really hard using my eating disorder to keep it out. Without my eating disorder or shutting down, I have to feel all of that, which is too much for me to bear most of the time. So, I stayed numbed out, with or without using behaviors.

One of the most difficult things about my journey in recovery has been allowing myself to have myself and my emotions become one thing instead of these separate entities. Recovery is feeling and experiencing all of the bad that comes with the good, and honestly, I really suck at that. I’m very good at shutting down though.

While it hasn’t been an easy process, I am genuinely trying to reverse this automatic system, because it’s not fair for other people in my life and I don’t want to be this robot forever. It doesn’t go away overnight though. I can’t all of a sudden feel all of these things I’ve been blocking for years. It’s too overwhelming that way. But by taking the steps to try and sit with feelings or to come back from shutting down to discuss what’s going on, I feel like I am taking teeny tiny baby steps towards feelings, as terrifying as that truly is.

New Beginnings

When I first entered treatment, I was wondering what my life would like like afterwards. I had 2 options: Return to Milwaukee and try to resume the life I was living without using behaviors OR I could stay in St Louis for a while and try to figure things out here. I’m really glad I chose option 2.

Although things haven’t been perfect or easy, I have a pretty peaceful life now. Milwaukee was chaotic and fueled with memories and bad choices. There, if I began struggling with behaviors, I could easily get away with them. I wouldn’t have as much accountability there and would also probably return to my hard partying ways to cope with all the changes I had just undergone. I would have been back to square 1 and probably on another train back to St Louis.

I think new beginnings are important after going through such huge personal growth and change. If we go back to the familiar but remove the eating disorder, it will always feel like something is missing. It makes the mourning period for the loss of that identity longer and harder. Also, the strength of that progress seems diminished. You’ve busted you ass in 12 weeks of treatment to go back and maybe have that work go to the wayside as the day to day routine comes back into play. New things lead to new routines.

Had I returned to Milwaukee, I would have returned to my case management position. This required me to visit clients, deliver medications, and work on paperwork. The vast majority of my work day was in my car, which made it so easy to restrict. If I had a scheduled time to meet with a client, I would make sure I didn’t have time to stop. If I just kept going, I wouldn’t be able to feel how tired or weak I was. It’s not that I didn’t love the position, because I did, but it would have been difficult to balance the requirements of my meal plan with the job specifics. However, this also happened in St Louis.

After being promoted at my last job, I relapsed. Even though my apartment was literally down the hall from my office, I found excuses to skip meals and stayed in my office to avoid eating. I got back into IOP pretty quickly, but still. New beginnings are not without their challenges.

Now, I have accepted an internship program at a private practice in order to finally begin working on my licensure hours again. I’m finally moving forward in my career, and I feel ready to do that. After leaving PHP, I knew I wasn’t ready. I needed time before being able to give therapy again, but it’s time.

While I know that this will come with its own struggles, including learning how to incorporate my meal plan into this schedule, it’s the next step in the new beginning I’ve been waiting for.

All good things come to those who wait. Be patient.

After working incredibly hard the last year on myself, I’m happy to say that those good things are coming in all the time, and I am very lucky.

Does It Ever End?

I had an interesting discussion with some of my favorite ladies tonight. These ladies have been there with me through every step of treatment and my subsequent journey in recovery. They know that part of me better than anyone. So, when we get together, we talk about our lives and how we are doing in our recovery journeys. Tonight, an interesting topic came up. What is full recovery?

There are 2 main ideas behind “full recovery.” Some people believe that those with eating disorders will eventually get to the point where they no longer experience ED thoughts, so they won’t have to use behaviors. Others believe that full recovery can be defined by the presence of thoughts but abstaining on behaviors long term.

I happen to fall into the second group of people. For me, I will consider myself fully recovered when I get to the point where I no longer turn to restricting and other ED-related behaviors as my first choice of coping skills. I believe while the thoughts will always remain, the frequency will decrease, but they will never be completely gone. I have a few different reasons for this:

1) I have spent 10+ of my last (almost) 24 years on this earth experiencing ED thoughts. Even in the time periods where I wasn’t using behaviors, the thoughts have always been there. There are times when I have them a couple times a day and others when they are constant; however, they are still there.

2) Recovery is a conscious choice. With my mental illness, I accept that I will always more susceptible to relapses due to my triggers and previous experiences. I have to make the choice everyday when I am triggered to use behaviors or do something else. While I am working on those things in therapy, my trauma will never go away. It will become less painful, but in some way, that trigger will remain. It might not set off the bomb in my head it previously did, but it will spark a thought or a memory.

3) Eating disorders impact our brains similarly to addictions. I am not saying that eating disorders are addictions; however, using ED behaviors and using substances are both coping skills that produce an instant gratification effect. So, they are similar but still very different. In discussing with people and clients who have previously struggled with addiction, most (not all) have said that the desire to use will pop up, even after 20 years of clean time. I think this can apply for ED too.

These are just some of the bigger reasons that I have for my stance on full recovery. I also am of the mindset that being prepared for the worst is the best approach. If I maintain the belief that maybe one day these thoughts will be gone forever, I feel like I would be waiting for that day and losing hope if it never came.

So, does this ever end? I will never know the answer to this until the end of my life. The most important thing to keep in mind is that, regardless of what your definition of full recovery is, eating disorders will come in when we least expect them. It wants us to choose behaviors at every twist and turn, but in the end, full recovery, in any way, will not be possible if we continue to rely on ED.

Forgiveness

Do we forgive those who have hurt us?
The people who walk out when we need them the most.
Those who forget us when we are struggling.
Ones that look the other way when we reach out.

What about the times that they have tried to make amends?
The moments when you think that maybe things could change.
Times when it feels like the relationship can be fixed.
When both parties are willing to admit that they were at fault and move on.

Then, they are met only with a stonewall that neither party is willing to climb.
Where a compromise can never be met.
Blame is placed and responsibility is denied.
He claims no wrong doing.
She knows differently and places that blame inward.

When years go by and no words are exchanged.
The relationship continues to fall apart.
Each moves on with their lives without consideration of the other.
A thought is triggered and someone reaches out.
Contact is restablished.

Another discussion is had.
More walls are built.
Communication breaks down.
More years go by.
Memories and nightmares remain.

Then, an unexpected message asking for forgiveness.
He acknowledges that maybe help is needed.
She is left asking why now?
Why not a year ago?
What's the point?

Will it help alleviate the pain that's been caused?
Are answers finally going to be given?
Would it change anything?
Does it really matter?

Words have already been said.
Feelings have been hurt.
The damage has been done.
One has been left a broken person,
Because she has placed all the blame on herself.

So, should she forgive him?
She spends days debating the answer.
Ruminating on thoughts and feelings.
Then, she gets an answer:

The person that she should forgive is herself.