I think one of the reasons why a lot of us find our feelings hard to deal with is that we incorrectly categorize them. Because they happen inside our heads and hearts we tend to think of them as a sort of wordless thought, but in reality feelings have a lot more in common with the senses.
Thoughts can happen fast, but a thought progression is also under our control. We can rewind, check our logic, reevaluate ethics, even revisit an entire chain of thoughts step by step. On the other hand, though a feeling (especially one that is being repressed or not appropriately dealt with) can last a long while, it is hard to recall a feeling with the same force without being exposed to the stimulus that first provoked that feeling. So, for example, I can think "I like cats." and think about all the reasons I like cats to confirm that conclusion of my own volition. But while having my cat on my lap makes me feel happy, I can't just will myself to be happy because I was happy that time there was a cat on my lap.
Similarly, with unpleasant emotions, we can't just will ourselves to not have them. We can learn to stop thinking harmful thoughts, but emotions arise in response to stimuli. We can't stop ourselves feeling scared any more than we can stop from seeing a bear in front of us. Both the feelings and the sight of the bear are a warning that there is danger nearby. Now, many of us want to stop feeling certain feelings, but that is as risky as shutting our eyes to the sight of the bear. The bear is still there, all you're doing is removing your early warning system.
So the real task is not to stop having difficult feelings, but to use them to alert us to the bears in our lives.
Sunday, December 25, 2011
Saturday, December 3, 2011
The Perfectionist in Me is Screaming "It's Been TOO LONG to Go Back Now!"
How long has it been? I could check, but I won't because it would only inspire self recrimination and make me feel like the comeback post should be way more amazing than it probably will be. I mean, it'll be moderately amazing, if you are easily amazed or just love to the point of no reason. But don't expect total amazement. You will be let down.
I had a professor at Fredonia whom I absolutely loved. At the start of a semester he would usually begin his classes explaining that we'd be sort of spiraling around the subject matter, visiting it, moving to other topics, then revisiting it more deeply with new information and insight. He said this was the way to approach literature, because it reflects life and in life you return to things with new eyes and new experience over and over again. Those of you who have read Eating By the Light of the Moon know that the chapter headings all have a labyrinth symbol, because recovery and life are like a labyrinth, a cycle revisiting the same areas again and again but always moving deeper in.
Over the past six months or so, my recovery had gotten increasingly more fragile. I was having binge purge episodes that would come in patches and then I'd regain control after a few weeks, but always feeling less powerful than ever. At the same time, my relationship with my boyfriend was moving from new and fun but a bit superficial to something more meaningful.
He'd known from the beginning about my bulimia, but there's a wide range of knowing and he had some misconceptions about my use of recovery. And I can be evasive when I'm feeling ashamed, so for a long time, I knew he was getting to know only parts of me, and that my ED self, and the self that is devoted to recovering (a huge part of me, two and a half years' worth of me) was still hidden. The thing is, though, that felt normal to me. Nobody knows those parts. Some of my very serious friends see the most of it, but that's through the reassuring portal of text. Internet connections count, but they often lack the immediacy of a face to face daily interaction. A lot of my friends know that I have been in recovery, but there's very little interest expressed. Nobody wants to pry, or feel uncomfortable, or make me uncomfortable.
I've said it to my friends who are also working on recovery a million times: ED's thrive in secrecy, make connections and share your experience. But I was living that advice only very shallowly.
Until I gave my boyfriend my copy of Bulimia: a Guide to Recovery. I'd realized that I can be too easily discouraged and too evasive to be able to explain myself fully. So I gave him the book that first explained me to me. My intent was just to help him understand, so that if and when I broke down and lacked the words to fully explain what was happening, we'd have to common experience of the book to refer to.
I was not counting on this boy's pair of brass social bullocks. Having read through much of the book, he sits me straight down and asks me questions, nobody does that. And he follows up. Now I have to be accountable for my behaviors to someone besides myself because every few days he's going to aske me how I'm doing.
It is so much easier to deflect the urge to binge when you know that someone besides you will know about it. People with ED's are used to feeling like we've let ourselves down, but we hate it when we disappoint our loved ones. That tendency to please is usually a factor in our ED development to start with. It's about damn time it helps out with recovery.
So this is me, revisiting one point of recovery and realizing I was still half in shadow, but am now stepping further into the open.
I had a professor at Fredonia whom I absolutely loved. At the start of a semester he would usually begin his classes explaining that we'd be sort of spiraling around the subject matter, visiting it, moving to other topics, then revisiting it more deeply with new information and insight. He said this was the way to approach literature, because it reflects life and in life you return to things with new eyes and new experience over and over again. Those of you who have read Eating By the Light of the Moon know that the chapter headings all have a labyrinth symbol, because recovery and life are like a labyrinth, a cycle revisiting the same areas again and again but always moving deeper in.
Over the past six months or so, my recovery had gotten increasingly more fragile. I was having binge purge episodes that would come in patches and then I'd regain control after a few weeks, but always feeling less powerful than ever. At the same time, my relationship with my boyfriend was moving from new and fun but a bit superficial to something more meaningful.
He'd known from the beginning about my bulimia, but there's a wide range of knowing and he had some misconceptions about my use of recovery. And I can be evasive when I'm feeling ashamed, so for a long time, I knew he was getting to know only parts of me, and that my ED self, and the self that is devoted to recovering (a huge part of me, two and a half years' worth of me) was still hidden. The thing is, though, that felt normal to me. Nobody knows those parts. Some of my very serious friends see the most of it, but that's through the reassuring portal of text. Internet connections count, but they often lack the immediacy of a face to face daily interaction. A lot of my friends know that I have been in recovery, but there's very little interest expressed. Nobody wants to pry, or feel uncomfortable, or make me uncomfortable.
I've said it to my friends who are also working on recovery a million times: ED's thrive in secrecy, make connections and share your experience. But I was living that advice only very shallowly.
Until I gave my boyfriend my copy of Bulimia: a Guide to Recovery. I'd realized that I can be too easily discouraged and too evasive to be able to explain myself fully. So I gave him the book that first explained me to me. My intent was just to help him understand, so that if and when I broke down and lacked the words to fully explain what was happening, we'd have to common experience of the book to refer to.
I was not counting on this boy's pair of brass social bullocks. Having read through much of the book, he sits me straight down and asks me questions, nobody does that. And he follows up. Now I have to be accountable for my behaviors to someone besides myself because every few days he's going to aske me how I'm doing.
It is so much easier to deflect the urge to binge when you know that someone besides you will know about it. People with ED's are used to feeling like we've let ourselves down, but we hate it when we disappoint our loved ones. That tendency to please is usually a factor in our ED development to start with. It's about damn time it helps out with recovery.
So this is me, revisiting one point of recovery and realizing I was still half in shadow, but am now stepping further into the open.
Saturday, September 10, 2011
Something Even Harder
...for people who experience it is the tendency towards theft than sometimes accompanies an ED. I think (not sure, too lazy to check now) that there's a higher incidence of this with bulimia and binge types than with restrictive types of ED's.
Essentially what's going on here is that we try to fill an emotional emptiness with food. And sometimes we try to fill it with things. Things that we take. The rush of the theft is momentarily distracting the same way that a binge is, and sometimes the two get mixed together and then we're shoplifting the food we will binge on.
Thing is, ED people are usually pretty convinced that they're no good. And compulsive theft just underscores that feeling. We're obviously bad, we think, because bad people steal. So if you have experienced this phenomenon, understand that it's not you being bad. It's that you're reaching out for anything at all that will shove away your feelings for a second or two. And understand that you are not alone. This is a really common thing, it's just even harder to talk about than all the rest of it which we already know is damn hard to talk about.
Essentially what's going on here is that we try to fill an emotional emptiness with food. And sometimes we try to fill it with things. Things that we take. The rush of the theft is momentarily distracting the same way that a binge is, and sometimes the two get mixed together and then we're shoplifting the food we will binge on.
Thing is, ED people are usually pretty convinced that they're no good. And compulsive theft just underscores that feeling. We're obviously bad, we think, because bad people steal. So if you have experienced this phenomenon, understand that it's not you being bad. It's that you're reaching out for anything at all that will shove away your feelings for a second or two. And understand that you are not alone. This is a really common thing, it's just even harder to talk about than all the rest of it which we already know is damn hard to talk about.
Saturday, August 27, 2011
Personal Blog Established!
There will be some crossover, still, since a lot of my personal stuff is ED related. But thisiswhereiblogthings.blogspot.com is where I shall be putting more general stuff I feel like sharing. Goodenougheddiscussion.blogspot.com will be pretty much just for ED talk and related talk.
Feel free to scoot over to This is Where I Blog Things to bask in the very first post there. It has stick figures ;)
Feel free to scoot over to This is Where I Blog Things to bask in the very first post there. It has stick figures ;)
Saturday, August 20, 2011
Well, I won't have the internet for very long, so I thought I would just toss out some things. I like vegetables. People from the ghetto look at you funny when you tell them you don't weigh yourself. Mental contamination happens when one thing is associated in your mind with something bad and it takes on the bad feelings even though there is nothing bad about that first thing other than it's proximity to the second thing. Writing with carpal tunnel is hard, but it distracts from self criticism. I miss my fingertips, though. Paragraph breaks make things easier to read.
Sometimes I wonder if my occasional breakthrough binge/purge behaviors occur (in part at least) because so much of my identity is based on my ED experience and recovery and I am afraid to be totally without it. The bites all over my legs are healing up, so I feel less like a leper. But I am so afraid of bedbugs now that I spend half the time convinced that my awesome new place has got them, too. And then I wonder, am I being paranoid, or are my fears legit. Since I am much more of an anxious person than I used to think, it's hard for me to know exactly how much credence to give my fears. I bought new shoes from a guy selling them on the corner (oh, the ghetto!) and I love them.
Tonight I am buying a vacuum. Chores are easier and more fun in a house that it just mine because it's not work, it's making things how I like them. When I was younger, I had a big cackly laugh. It went away for a while, but seems to be coming back. My friend is making another upswing of progress against his depression and alcohol dependence and somehow that makes me feel a bit useless. I get the feeling this blog is going to be trending towards personal entries. Or maybe I should make a personal blog and keep this one for ED topics only? Thoughts, oh nine followers? Ha! You're like the Fellowship and I must be the One Ring.
Sometimes I wonder if my occasional breakthrough binge/purge behaviors occur (in part at least) because so much of my identity is based on my ED experience and recovery and I am afraid to be totally without it. The bites all over my legs are healing up, so I feel less like a leper. But I am so afraid of bedbugs now that I spend half the time convinced that my awesome new place has got them, too. And then I wonder, am I being paranoid, or are my fears legit. Since I am much more of an anxious person than I used to think, it's hard for me to know exactly how much credence to give my fears. I bought new shoes from a guy selling them on the corner (oh, the ghetto!) and I love them.
Tonight I am buying a vacuum. Chores are easier and more fun in a house that it just mine because it's not work, it's making things how I like them. When I was younger, I had a big cackly laugh. It went away for a while, but seems to be coming back. My friend is making another upswing of progress against his depression and alcohol dependence and somehow that makes me feel a bit useless. I get the feeling this blog is going to be trending towards personal entries. Or maybe I should make a personal blog and keep this one for ED topics only? Thoughts, oh nine followers? Ha! You're like the Fellowship and I must be the One Ring.
Wednesday, August 3, 2011
Boyfriend and I had our very first fight a few days ago. Hardly a fight really. A tiff. He startled me, then teased me about it. I got mad and a little bit shrill. He was taken aback. Basic two-people-interacting stuff.
This was pretty significant for me, though, for a couple of reasons. For one, I am pretty sure it was my first real relationship fight. My first boyfriend only ever was with the me that was too occupied with food obsession to be mentally present, and it's hard to fight when you're not really engaged with your own life at all.
Second, it led to a talk about me and how my brain works. See, right after we settled our little fight, I needed to quell the part of me that was screaming that I screwed up and nobody would ever love me and I was BAD because I'd gotten angry. Boyfriend wanted to go into a related discussion. I stopped him and asked if we could table the serious discussion until I processed some things. This was only moderately successful because then I had to explain why I needed time (Boyfriend liked to get to the heart of things as they happen, which I admire, but was not capable of) which wound up being a serious discussion itself, but less draining than the other one would have been.
Fun fact, I cry when I'm overwrought. And since outside of my own head there was nothing particularly upsetting going on, Boyfriend was understandably confused. He took it all like a champ, though. He didn't say anything stupid like "don't cry" and he took my word for it when I explained my needs and that everything was long-run fine but short-term overwhelming.
All of this led to a talk the next day which covered a lot of things, how ED's work, how long I'd been affected, how it affected my previous relationship and so on. I learned that I'm getting better at speaking out loud about these things, even if they're about me in particular and not just general ED facts (that has been a problem for me in the past, being able to discuss ED's in a generic way, but not able to articulate my own experience). I also learned that I like the kind of questions Boyfriend asks, and that he does, in fact, ask them at all. So many people are afraid to pry, but I crave their interest. After all my ED and recovery are a part of who I am and that part gets routinely avoided. So it filled a need to be grilled gently for a while.
The less emotionally able parts of me want to be able to just tick "fight" off the list of Relationship Things and never come back to it. But Boyfriend can be as infuriating as he is adorable, so I doubt that's going to happen, and it wouldn't be a good thing if it did happen, anyway. But hey, maybe a few more fights and I'll start getting more comfortable with expressing my anger and learn to do so effectively and appropriately.
This was pretty significant for me, though, for a couple of reasons. For one, I am pretty sure it was my first real relationship fight. My first boyfriend only ever was with the me that was too occupied with food obsession to be mentally present, and it's hard to fight when you're not really engaged with your own life at all.
Second, it led to a talk about me and how my brain works. See, right after we settled our little fight, I needed to quell the part of me that was screaming that I screwed up and nobody would ever love me and I was BAD because I'd gotten angry. Boyfriend wanted to go into a related discussion. I stopped him and asked if we could table the serious discussion until I processed some things. This was only moderately successful because then I had to explain why I needed time (Boyfriend liked to get to the heart of things as they happen, which I admire, but was not capable of) which wound up being a serious discussion itself, but less draining than the other one would have been.
Fun fact, I cry when I'm overwrought. And since outside of my own head there was nothing particularly upsetting going on, Boyfriend was understandably confused. He took it all like a champ, though. He didn't say anything stupid like "don't cry" and he took my word for it when I explained my needs and that everything was long-run fine but short-term overwhelming.
All of this led to a talk the next day which covered a lot of things, how ED's work, how long I'd been affected, how it affected my previous relationship and so on. I learned that I'm getting better at speaking out loud about these things, even if they're about me in particular and not just general ED facts (that has been a problem for me in the past, being able to discuss ED's in a generic way, but not able to articulate my own experience). I also learned that I like the kind of questions Boyfriend asks, and that he does, in fact, ask them at all. So many people are afraid to pry, but I crave their interest. After all my ED and recovery are a part of who I am and that part gets routinely avoided. So it filled a need to be grilled gently for a while.
The less emotionally able parts of me want to be able to just tick "fight" off the list of Relationship Things and never come back to it. But Boyfriend can be as infuriating as he is adorable, so I doubt that's going to happen, and it wouldn't be a good thing if it did happen, anyway. But hey, maybe a few more fights and I'll start getting more comfortable with expressing my anger and learn to do so effectively and appropriately.
Saturday, July 30, 2011
Because Guin and I have both been feeling inappropriately responsible for things lately.
Mental Checklist to Determine if it is Appropriate to Feel Guilty, Responsible or Generally Bad
No? All right, then, you're fine. A lot of us have tendencies towards control and towards self directed negativity. That means we tend to think "I should have prevented this, I should have done more, or be doing more. If I can't fix this, then it's my fault." Not true. You only need to feel accountable for things you did knowingly.
This doesn't mean you need to walk away from situations you're not accountable for. If a friend is in a bad place, for example, you may choose to help her. But it is your own choice and not something you are required to do. Nor is it your fault if a problem is too big for you to fix, and all you can do is offer support. Just remember it's not something you SHOULD do. Should is a word that means I expect myself to do this for no good reason and I think I'll be a bad person if I don't do it. And some situations, though not your fault, do require action to keep yourself safe and happy. But having to respond to a thing is totally different from having caused that thing.
So, in conclusion, stop taking on more trouble than you've earned.
Mental Checklist to Determine if it is Appropriate to Feel Guilty, Responsible or Generally Bad
- Did you take direct, specific and conscious action to cause this situation?
No? All right, then, you're fine. A lot of us have tendencies towards control and towards self directed negativity. That means we tend to think "I should have prevented this, I should have done more, or be doing more. If I can't fix this, then it's my fault." Not true. You only need to feel accountable for things you did knowingly.
This doesn't mean you need to walk away from situations you're not accountable for. If a friend is in a bad place, for example, you may choose to help her. But it is your own choice and not something you are required to do. Nor is it your fault if a problem is too big for you to fix, and all you can do is offer support. Just remember it's not something you SHOULD do. Should is a word that means I expect myself to do this for no good reason and I think I'll be a bad person if I don't do it. And some situations, though not your fault, do require action to keep yourself safe and happy. But having to respond to a thing is totally different from having caused that thing.
So, in conclusion, stop taking on more trouble than you've earned.
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