What I Know Part II

This is a ongoing series of blog posts about my journey so far in therapy. For the previous parts of this series, click here: Part I

I started EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing) therapy in January this year. After only about three sessions, I began to reap the benefits. People who experience trauma will disconnect from their body sometimes to the point of not feeling pain if they are experiencing it. They do this in order to survive when faced with overwhelming circumstances or situations that happen repeatedly. This is what I did.

Upon my first session, my therapist gave me homework; a worksheet with the outline of a person on it with a list of 8 or 10 emotions. The instructions were to draw a line to the part of the body where you felt that emotion. I told my boyfriend that I didn’t understand the sheet because we feel all of our emotions in our head. I drew lines mostly to my head. I had disconnected so completely from my body, I did not know I experienced emotions below my neck. When I gave the completed sheet back to my therapist, she looked it over then put it in my file without a word. She is very diplomatic. 

She explained that you have two selves. You have a conscious/adult self which runs on thinking rationality, reason, logic, maturity, what is good and right for you. It makes good decisions.  You have a subconscious/inner child/symptom self which does not think. It runs off of all of your stored memories and beliefs. If you hear something negative about yourself when you are a child and you believe it, that’s where that knowledge goes. My therapist uses the Adult Self and Symptom Self terminology so I’ll use that here.

Until just a few months back, my Symptom Self was fully in control of me. All of the negative things about myself that I’d absorbed over the years ran rampant and I wasn’t even aware of their constant replay in my head. I almost always had anxiety rolling in my torso and wasn’t aware of that either. I had migraines, sinus infections, joint pain, swelling, high blood pressure and more and ignored all of it until it stopped me from being functional. Rage was always just beneath the surface. I was and am still very good at rage although it has gotten moderately better as I work longer on it. Rage was my go-to emotion for everything. My boyfriend said he had never seen somebody get so angry so quickly. I went from calm to ready to commit murder literally in seconds.

As my brain and body began to reconnect again and I gave my Adult Self permission to take the reins with the help of my therapist, it made its presence known on February 21st at lunch. I will never forget it as long as I live. I was beginning to realize I had an issue with food of some kind and was reading various books trying to figure out what healthy eating really was. I was on my way to lunch and was gleefully planning a gorgefest just short of making the employee at the drive-through question if I were going to eat all of the things I was planning to order. That was my modus operandi. I had still had the full/hungry disconnect because I wasn’t paying attention, didn’t want to have to listen to that…didn’t want to have to change that huge thing. I liked the feeling that food gave me. The comfort. The numb. It was my good girl high. As long as  nobody asked questions about the amount of food I ate, as long as I could sneak it past people, into my office drawer, into my car when I was alone, I could continue to numb my out of control emotions with food. As long as nobody confronted me about it, I could keep doing it and get a thrill. Like I was getting away with something. Symptom Self was in full control of my eating, and she loved it.

As I reached for the door handle of my car that February day, a voice piped up in my head. I have since named that voice Jiminy for it has asked me many important questions since that day. The question that day was, “Who wants that food you’re gleefully planning to order? Your Adult Self or your Symptom Self?” Time stopped. I could hear the blood rushing through the veins in my ears. I could feel the floor of the parking garage shaking as a coworker passed over a speed bump behind me. The answer was obvious, even to my disconnected self: my Symptom Self wanted the food. I immediately grabbed my cell phone and began texting and emailing people, searching for support to let me know I had not finally lost my mind. After my lunch of A GREEN SALAD, not a double bacon cheeseburger with cheese tots and chicken nuggets with BBQ sauce and a Coke to drink that I’d planned, my therapist replied to my email to let me know I wasn’t turning into the kid from The Shining.

I decided to try the diet that my parents had been on for over a year with a few tweaks of my own that just seemed right for me. I lost 5 pounds that first week. Seven days later, I admitted to myself that I was a binge eater. That I had Binge Eating Disorder. I continued the diet I had chosen, which is a modified Paleo diet, because my joints had stopped hurting, my acid reflux symptoms had disappeared, my bloating had gone away and I had more energy than I’d had in years. As I continued to read about my eating disorder (ED) and others, I learned that there is no “diet” that works long term. The reason I was feeling so much better on my Paleo diet is because I am gluten intolerant and didn’t know it until I stopped eating gluten. I was losing weight because I was paying more attention to my full and hungry signals from my body. If you decide to make a lifestyle change to be more healthy, to eat healthy, whole foods, that is entirely different from a “diet”. If you have yo-yo dieted and you have gained and lost weight your entire life, there is something going on with your body, with your thoughts, with your emotions that needs to be dealt with. Your body is not the issue. You will not be magically happy if you weigh ___, or if you get into size ____ or if your thigh gap is as wide as ____. You may have disconnected your hungry/full sensors as I did so I could numb with food and not feel the miserably full stomach afterward. You may be motivated by outside sources to eat. You may be motivated by negative thoughts to restrict or to purge or to binge. The bottom line is that diets do not work and if they worked, it would not a multi-billion dollar a year business. Everybody would lose the weight the first time and that would be the end of the diet business. Give yourself permission to stop dieting. Go to your library and pick up a book called When Food Is Love by Geneen Roth. If you pay attention to your body, if you eat MINDFULLY, if you listen, you will lose weight naturally. You have to be conscious to do this. You have to be connected to your body. You have to be honest with yourself. Facing the addiction is TERRIFYING when you first start. TERRIFYING. I’m in the middle of this fight and can already say that it’s a helluvalot easier being conscious than feeling how I felt before. Than binging to hide what I was feeling.

I have a conversation with myself before I even reach for anything that is not water now. Are you really hungry? Is that anxiety rolling in your stomach or hunger? What is going on around you? Are you stressed out? Are you bored? Do you just know the food will taste good and that’s why you want it? To distract you from something? What is that something? I have this conversation with myself ALL DAY LONG, EVERY DAY OF THE WEEK. I will not lie to you and tell you it is easy. It is hard. Anything worth fighting for and keeping will be difficult sometimes. I have cried. I have been in a place where numbing with food again looked so damn good to me. I have felt sorry for myself. I have bitched to friends in emails and Facebook posts. I have struggled. I have read every book the library has about ED. I started following all sorts of ED professionals and groups on Twitter. I have joined and left support groups because I realized I needed less toxic and more celebration than they were giving me. I made a therapy board on Pinterest. I have continued my very modified Paleo plan because my body feels so much better without the grains and sugar but if I want a piece of chocolate, I eat it. I listen. I question. I have lost 34 pounds. I have started weighing myself again so that I can continue to be conscious (I did not weigh myself before. At ALL). I am not a fat person trying to get skinny; I am a sick person trying to get healthy. I started my own Positive Body Support Group on Facebook for all genders, ED’s and body image issues.

Through all of this, what I have not done is binged. I have not binged since March 1, 2013. A third of a year has passed and it is very slowly getting easier each day. Will I relapse at some point? I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe I’ll have to start over again. But this is what I know: If I relapse, it will be because I have let my Symptom Self take control again and I will know why. Because I was not using the tools I have to ask myself questions. Because I stopped being honest with myself. Because I slipped back into denial. And I know that I can start again and binging is just a coping mechanism that I chose to help me. An unhealthy one, yes, but that doesn’t make me a horrible person. Just one that has survived things other people have not. I know one other thing too…

Relapse is not a part of recovery. Relapse is the lack of recovery.