Working Girl

Starting next week, I am officially back to work! After 2 months of unemployment, frustration, multiple interviews, and getting slightly off track, I felt really good about this job. I had my first interview on Friday and was scheduled for a second interview on the spot. So on Monday, I went in for my second interview. After about a half hour, they asked me to wait for 10 minutes. At that point, I had a pretty strong feeling that I would be offered something and sure enough! They brought me back into the office and offered me a job on the spot! Now, it’s time to face another transition.

This is a big transition for me. Not only is it returning to work after a shaky 2 months, it’s also returning to my career field, counseling. After discharging from PHP a year ago this month, I looked into counseling jobs. I even interviewed at a variety of organizations, including an eating disorder treatment center; however, after getting an offer from the ED center, I decided I wasn’t ready to go back to giving therapy, especially for eating disorders. So, I ended up working for a boarding school where I could incorporate some of these skills, but it wasn’t the same. Towards the end of my time at that job, I was finally feeling ready to return to counseling, if only because I missed it.

Going into the counseling field was an easy decision. I fell in love with the idea of being a therapist in college, and I’ve never looked back. Even during grad school with my toughest clients and worst days at the clinic, I knew that this is what I was meant to do. With some time off for reflection and learning to work again in recovery, it’s time for my return to doing therapy; however, I am anticipating that it will not be without its challenges.

My biggest challenge will always be balance. As my therapist likes to remind me, I suck at self care and making that separate time to take care of myself. I have always been a perfectionist. I have sacrificed relationships, friendships, family time, and my own health just to ensure that I am the best worker I can be. I have never wanted to disappoint, and I make sure that I do whatever it takes to avoid that. That combination of perfectionism and people pleasing can be my downfall. So, ensuring to incorporate self care will be the most important thing I can do to be successful both in recovery and at work.

Another challenge will be being a therapist again. I knew I couldn’t go back to the field after doing 70 hours of therapy for 12 weeks. After doing so much of my own work, I was emotionally burnt out. I could not have the amount of empathy needed to maintain therapeutic relationships, because I had been forced to use it on myself for the past 3 months. Also, going from being on a locked unit for 3 months and returning to a regular work schedule is a kind of culture shock. But now, I will be working with men who have been recently released from the criminal justice system and are required to attend treatment for drugs and alcohol. This population tends to have higher rates of trauma, and substance abuse recovery has many of the similar constructs as eating disorder recovery. It’s going back into a world that I haven’t been out of for a year, but I’m on the other side of the table this time.

My final challenge is meal plan fulfillment. I am still doing multiple bottles of Ensure a day just to make sure I get everything in. That’s always a tricky question. People who don’t know my struggles almost always ask me why I’m drinking it. Most normal 20-somethings aren’t drinking nutritional drinks. Typically, you see Ensure/Boost in hospitals or nursing homes to help patients who can’t eat for whatever reason. So, I have to brace myself for the questions. I also need to make sure I make the time throughout the day to eat all my snacks and meals, and be honest with my dietician if it’s not working.

As with every other transition, the best thing anyone can do is have a plan. I need to have an idea of how/when/what I will do self care. I have to be mindful of my meal plan and try not to feel ashamed of doing what I have to do. I need to be the best I can be without pushing myself past feasible limits. Without recovery, I won’t have a job. I will be back in treatment.

I will always go back to the title of this blog: You Don’t Want to Go Back to Treatment, Do You?
Nope. I’m good with finally returning to a normal life. It’s pretty nice.

Fighting to Win or Maintain

So, this week, in one of my many battles with my therapist, we discussed the idea of fighting. In recovery, there are a lot of things we fight, good and bad. The bad things are easy to list: cravings, triggers, urges, etc. But what about the good things? Why is it that we fight so many of the things that are good for us when going through recovery? One answer: to maintain the eating disorder.

I've been incredibly guilty of fighting to maintain lately. After being sick, it's been difficult to get back on track. Even though I wasn't actively restricting, I still was from being sick. That allowed my eating disorder thoughts to come in full force, which when already feeling under the weather, doesn't help. I've also had an increase in my anxiety and PTSD symptoms in the face of upcoming trauma work that have also made my need for control even higher. So, I've been allowing that voice in ever so slightly, but it's enough to make a difference.

In discussing this with my therapist, a few things were highlighted. My anxiety about facing my trauma has always been bad, but now that we are getting closer to it, it's even worse. I have always been fairly uncomfortable with deep or strong feelings, especially when they're negative; however, connecting that emotion to my trauma is a bigger hurdle. It's one that I rarely have faced throughout my life. This is primarily because I've spent more than half my life using eating disorder behaviors to cope. So, by letting that voice back in, it's the start of a return to a past, very dangerous cycle of relapse for me. Here's the wise quote from my therapist this-

"You fight so hard to keep that trauma and those negative feelings away that it's exhausting, and your eating disorder is there to help maintain that disconnect. If you fought even half as hard on processing them, the eating disorder might actually go away."

Well damn. She's right. I have spent countless days and weeks using eating disorder behaviors instead of just sucking it up and dealing with my trauma. Granted, I have to be in the right place to do my trauma work, and those have been far and few between throughout my life; however, I've been there for a while now. There is just this overwhelming, crippling fear that prevents me from ever truly going to those dark places; the ones that no one, not even myself, knows what's really there. That's where the fight begins.

I know that I will never have complete recovery if I do not do my trauma work. I will not stop using behaviors unless I go to that dark place, feel the pain from those events, and learn to accept and move on. I will not stop hearing those disordered thoughts unless I stop shutting down. So, baby steps are the most important part of this. There are multiple traumas that I have to face. The first step is determining what will be "easiest" and hardest and make a list of what order to face them in. By building my tolerance to emotions in the "easier" levels, I'll be better equipped to handle the hardest. From there, I stop living and fear and choose to begin to feel how angry, upset, hurt, and scared I truly am instead of numbing out.

I make that choice to fight to win.

Sick, Sick, and More Sick

I thought my biggest obstacles in recovery would be things like: trauma work, depression, anxiety, unemployment, etc. Nope. The worst of all is being physically sick. I’ve been battling a really wicked stomach flu bug since late Thursday night/early Friday morning. Tonight is the first time I am starting to feel real improvement. It’s been completely and totally ridiculous.
So, I’ve thought of some steps to take when battling a temporary physical illness that may throw off your recovery.

1) Tell Your Team!
This has been one of the most important things for me. I use the Recovery Record app on my phone, which is connected to my dietician. This way, she can track all of my logs and make sure I’m following my meal plan without avoiding fear foods, lacking variety, and consuming appropriate amounts. She checks this at least 2x a week, if not more. So, she was the first person I needed to talk to about being sick. We set a game plan for when I started feeling better to help me get back on track and make up some of the missed components of my meal plan. This leads to my next step:

2) Have a plan for when you feel better!
This has been really helpful for me. I know it would be difficult to transition back into my fairly high calorie meal plan afterwards. Also, after being sick, many of the foods on my meal plan sounded really unappetizing. So, I worked with my dietician to plan out options for meals and snacks that I could try once I started feeling better. This has helped me better transition into what will, hopefully, be a full day back on my meal plan tomorrow.

3) Self care- Do it!
I am pretty notorious for avoiding self care. I’ve been working with my current therapist for the last 6 months, and she always calls me out on this being one of the pieces I continue to struggle with. In being sick, there wasn’t a lot I could do. I basically had 2 choices: distract or self care. So, while I did do my fair share of distracting, especially when anxious, I did take the time for self care. This included: journaling, listening to music, sitting with my dog, and doing my body image work book. All of these things helped keep me occupied but also helped reduce the ED thoughts I was experiencing. Self care is a great thing that most of us, me included, fail to make time for.

4) Challenge those Eating Disorder thoughts.
One of the worst things has been the rapid increase and strong presence of ED based thoughts this weekend. Being sick caused my body to be restricted of food, even though not by choice. This made my ED incredibly happy. When I started to feel better, that nagging voice has been there saying “You can just keep doing this. It’s not doing you any harm. You’ll be fine. Keep this up.” This is all kinds of bad and incredibly easy to follow. The best thing I have been reminding myself is that I am not using ED behaviors intentionally and that those thoughts are trying to take advantage of things beyond my control. That’s way easier to say than to actually follow through on, but it has given me some piece of mind as I begin meals and snacks again.

5) Be proud of yourself for making the choice to stay in recovery.
 Recovery is an incredibly hard journey, especially when we get those unexpected and unavoidable roadblocks. It’s good to remember that things will happen beyond our control, but that doesn’t mean recovery has to be one of them. Getting derailed is difficult, but by choosing to take care of ourselves and get back on track, recovery continues to be possible and make us even stronger.

So, stomach bugs suck, but it’s just a part of life. Now, I just keep rolling along (and sleeping).