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.