My mental health day
Called out sick from work this morning. Got an appointment to see B. for an extra therapy appointment. Tears kept stinging my eyes all morning and I just watched the clock waiting for that 1:30 appointment.
Cried and cried and chest ached and mascara ran and snotted and blotted with a tissue. And B. validated everything – the emotional abuse, the trauma that is reactivated every time he contacts me. She didn’t tell me that I just shouldn’t open the letters and that I should block the emails. She really seemed to understand how unbearably painful this is. This having a father who is incapable of authentically loving me and yet won’t leave me alone. To be stalked and threatened. To be conflicted between wanting to hurt him and wanting to take care of him so that he doesn’t go off the deep end and kill himself. To live in terror of the contents of the next envelope from him.
I explored the unsettling fear I have of his “6th sense” ability to feel – even states away – when I’m vulnerable, most susceptible to his hooks and lures. The terror that if I “go there” in therapy and dredge up this unfathomable pain and grief over my attachment to an inconsistent, unpredictable and emotionally abusive parent that it will elicit a stronger response from him. He knows. If I dream about him, he’ll contact me within a few days. If I talk in therapy about my late (great) Aunt Julie, Dad uses her as ammo in a letter (“I’m sure Julie’s heart would break over this estrangement”). It is as if we are so entwined that even my thoughts and feelings are not my own after a year and a half of not speaking to the man.
Which brought me to the following -
“It makes me want to hurt myself because it’s the only way to really hurt him.”
There it is. There is the eating disorder, the suicidality, the self-loathing – all in a fucked-up little nutshell. The only power I have is to hurt myself.
i’m drunk and punctuation is complicated
the weekend will have to take a back burner tonight it was fun and all nothing momentous but as i dashed out to catchmy ride to the airport the four-year-old part of me grabbed the mail and stashed a small package with familiar scratchy handwritinginto the outside pocket of my carryon backage. return address from “Gost Von Hooten” – googled it tonight but no literary connection as i hypothesized.no just some name he made up to get me to open what i already knew was a package from him. the address, the handwriting gave it away – or perhaps it was the email 10 days ago announcing with fanfare that he was sending me something.
that something was a mix CD and a long typed letter (3 pages with a chickenscratch signature at the end.
“my dear dearest daughter,” blah blah blah i listened to 2 tracks on the mix CD last night but was confused about whether the songs were included because they had the word ‘father’ or ‘cancer’ or because it’s a lovesong. that’s sick but it’s true and i got feeling all swirly weird inside so i switched back to NPR.
and today a little bird delivered an email to my inbox – a ranting, angry, hissing email announcing defeat and depression and desperation and what does he have to lose by showing up on my doorstep and havinghim yell i hate him. and that made me scared.
and then the panick attack and then the wine and call my mom. and talked rationally and calmly out of it. out of the experience and into dissociation. drunken dissociation. “you can control your feelings and your response to this”.
and now the numbness. before it was the i had a daddy who doesn’t love me because he cannot love another human being and the ow in my chest and the regression to a sobbing toddler wanting to suck my thumb and dig my teddy bear out of the attic. but now just the numbing numbness.
life and other busy-ness
My work life has been absurdly busy the last 4 days I’ve been there. My office is merely a place to toss my coat and Sam’s leash in the morning and a depository for paperwork throughout the day. Paperwork I never get a chance to file, look at or even sit still in close proximity to. It’s good to be busy, though. Certainly makes my not-so-busy evenings feel welcoming and comforting rather than painfully empty. Although, recently even those evenings haven’t been free of the busy-ness. Between cleaning, cooking and eating dinner, walking the dog, getting lost in Barnes and Noble* on my commute home and group therapy 2x a week – bedtime keeps getting later and my evenings feel pretty full.
I ate more than would have wanted tonight but luckily had stocked my pantry with really only healthy things….so my post-dinner snacks were half an acorn squash, an orange, and a yogurt. Hardly can beat myself up about that, right?! Still want to work on the food zone out and downloaded Geneen Roth’s book “Food is Love” tonight to listen to while dog-walking. Mainly I bought it because it was mentioned in a podcast I was listening to tonight (coincidentally about food and nutrition and even more coincidentally heavily weighted toward a “mindful eating” approach rather than counting calories, food logs, etc.).
This Friday I fly back to my homestate to visit a dear friend in Charlotte. Technically speaking, he was my high school sweetheart but it has morphed into my second longest friendship and a really wonderful supportive relationship. So I’m leaving my pup at home with a professional dog-sitting service. I have a lot of leaving-Sam-anxiety and it’s ramping up as evidenced by 4 drafts of an information page of everythingyouneedtoknowaboutSamandthensome because it didn’t seem thorough enough on the first 3 attempts. Should be a really great weekend, though, with coffee dates on the horizon with several other friends who live there. And it’ll be nice to escape the busy-ness and have a long weekend**!
*My local Barnes and Noble officially blows goats. Of the 17 books I have gone there seeking lately, they have had 1 – ONE – in stock. I finally caved and ordered two today and cross my fingers they’ll arrive before my flight on Friday.
**I don’t really consider it a day off, however, when I reschedule all my Monday clients for the remaining 3.5 days of my workweek. I wish I was better at just saying – I’m on vacation and will not be rescheduling. Maybe next time? For now my quest to make everyone else happy all the time continues…
p.s. as I was tagging this post I had a moment of shock and horror when I realized that in my tag cloud suicidality is bigger than The Avett Brothers. Must insert more TAB into my blogging and rectify this situation!
The response I cannot send
Today the email didn’t come from Barack Obama.
Hi,
I sent you a very long letter that you should read. It is not the kind of letter that will upset you or rake up anything that will set you back. It is, however, important, even crucial.
Thanks,
Dad
Dear Dad,
How highly you must think of yourself to deem yourself an accurate judge of what will upset me or set me back. You have twenty five years of contrary evidence working against that deluded assumption. I will read your letter, not because of any hope that it contains anything that will benefit me or bring me peace; rather, because I have a pathological desire to hurt myself, physically and emotionally and because reading your correspondence, without fail, reminds me of how fucked up and toxic you are and reinforces my desire to amputate you.
I wept over your email today. I am trapped. You have some sick sixth sense that must stem from our two and a half decades of unhealthy twisted enmeshment that allows you to feel what I’m feeling. You felt it, didn’t you…last Wednesday night when everyone was at G’s reading? No no else noticed my absence. You know when I feel left out and non-existent; and you feed on it. It fuels you. I can fake strength to everyone else in the world but you…you…you know somehow even though I haven’t spoken to you in nearly a year and a half. Only you know me, you sick fuck. It makes me want to hurt me, because I know you’ll feel it. I want to kill me because a part of you will die too. There’s no way out of this. For as long as I live, you will force your way into my thoughts when I’m most vulnerable. You will bring me down. You brought me into this world and you will not stop until you see me out of it.
I absolutely abhor you. You repulse me. I love you and hate you more than anyone else in the world.
-me
“What does recovery mean to you?”
…this was the subject line on an email in my inbox today from… (drumroll)….
President Barack Obama. Yep. You heard right. During the campaign I was on a mailing list and received nearly daily emails from Barack and Michelle and the whole gang asking me to support them in various ways. HA -if only they knew how unable I was to support ANYone, including myself, this fall. So these emails keep coming as part of Prez’s plan to stay technosavvyconnectedawesome with his people. I didn’t even open the email, knowing it would spoil the illusion that MY PRESIDENT is so in touch with me and my needs that he wants to know how my ED recovery is going. So, B., I’ll tell you:
Recovery means:
I have much more time on my hands to make things and pet my dog and free-read for hours at Barnes and Noble. Sometimes this time makes me feel edgy and anxious. Other times lonely or sad. I am getting better at tolerating these feelings without my infamous “maladaptive coping strategies”.
My mother doesn’t call every day and ask how “my appetite is” and encourage me to drink Ensure if I “can’t keep solids down”. The phone rings less frequently than when I’m sick, but I’m more likely to answer it when it does.
I’ve begun the journey to figuring out who the real ME is, beneath the skin and bones and mountains of jiggly, soft flesh.
Ironically, I actually think LESS about my body and weight at my “healthy” weight than I do at my “sick” weights. When I catch myself in the mirror, I am, however, still mostly disappointed. Such is life. Things don’t change overnight.
I save water by flushing 75 fewer times per day.
The hopelessness has receded. I’m pretty sure on most days that I should be alive and that I may have things to contribute to the world.
I can eat most meals without acute distress. There is often regret and shame and self-loathing afterwards, but I don’t struggle to put fork to mouth or skip meals altogether.
I can choose not to go to the gym – if I’m tired or busy or want to take a long walk instead. The gym is not punishment for my last meal. But I have to go tonight because I didn’t go yesterday!
Looking skyward and whispering, “thank you” to whatever god, goddess, life force, quantum physics or nothingness has helped me make it this far. Pleading with it to stay near and keep helping.
Really really hoping that I never have to crawl out of the black pit of despair again.
FRUSTRATION
Conflict with J is ongoing and immensely frustrating. It’s really stirring up my parts and resembling the dynamic between me and my father (which Bree asserts isn’t coincidence – apparently we have a tendency to partner with people to continue a familiar cycle). Luckily I had a therapy appointment at 1:30 today but the hour before was spent in conflict culminating in me weeping hopelessly on the couch. The drive to therapy was consumed by the following thoughts from my “firefighter”parts:
1. I want to kill myself
2. I never want to eat again as long as I live
3. I want to fly home right now
4. I want to rent a hotel room for the next week and not come out of it
5. purge purge purge
I rehashed parts of the conflict with Bree and got major reassurance that what I was saying to J was HEALTHY and marks progress for me. Laying down boundaries (I don’t want anyone I know to read my blog), asserting my needs (I need some space right now and don’t feel like cuddling), speaking for my parts (Part of me felt really abandoned and rejected last night when you slept from the time I got home to the time I went to bed).
She tried to deduce from what she knows of J what might contribute to his particular conflict style. But mainly she explained that what J fell in love with was a me who was obsessively nurturing and caretaking, asserted no needs or boundaries, appeared always happy and was “highly functional”. I was living from my manager and helper parts. As I’m gaining some Self, he’s feeling like he’s losing something (something every man would want….a woman who takes care of EVERYTHING without so much as a peep). But ultimately she reassured me that gaining Self is what I need to do – for me and for the long-term sustainability of any relationship I am in. I just hope J can hang in there through it and adjust to the new me. I hope that he can use his therapy time to work through some of this stuff. Unfortunately I’ve never felt like he gains much insight or clarity or perspective in his therapy – truly I don’t know what he talks about or works on. I wish we could be back in couples therapy so we could talk about this stuff. Maybe something to put back on the table as an option.
Weird ED moment of the day: during conflict trying hard to get a salad down before therapy but started crying and feeling really really emotional. So….right there in front of J I spit the chewed lettuce back on the plate and proceeded to swab by finger all over my mouth to remove all the food. Ugh – gross. But I could NOT swallow food at that moment. It was revolting to me. I finished the salad a few hours later after therapy. Don’t want to eat dinner at all but there I’ll sit in front of J’s entire family pushing food around on my plate. FUCK I hate this.
Anyhoo..it’s Christmas eve. We’re supposed to be at his family’s house in 25 minutes for dinner. J isn’t home yet from Christmas shopping. I’m irritated. I’ll put on my happy face for the next few hours, I suppose. Really I’d like to stay home and read…although that is really sad and pathetic on Christmas.
Hope Santa’s good to everyone. Merry Merry, as my mom says.
quiet night at the Moseberg’s
J has been sleeping since I got home from work at 5:30. It is now nearly 10 p.m. and I’m wrapping up my day and about to go to bed for the night. I can’t help but think that his slumber is fueled by avoidance and passive aggressiveness. It’s making me feel really really pissed off.
I purged my dinner. Fuck. I have grandiose schemes in my head of serious restricting over the holidays. Double fuck. Yesterday may have been a bit much for my system to handle without flaring up my ED/protector parts. I hate this. I hate this. I hate this. Dinner wasn’t anything more than I’ve eaten over the past few days without purging so I feel like that is a nice bit of empirical data that tells me so much of it has to do with emotions (wait, but I already knew that). Days like these I just want to run away from my life. Parts of me don’t want to marry this man. Parts of me don’t want to join his name and mine on a mortgage. Parts of me get hopeless and start thinking suicidal thoughts. Parts of me imagine planning a trip to NC to see my mom and just not returning. But those are just parts. They have their reasons.
Where did my Self go?
“Just Stay in the Bathroom”
It’s days like this that I am reminded why I go to therapy. Somehow in the course of 50 minutes I can get a little breathing room. Some renewed perspective. Some kindness towards myself – even when that self feels messed up and unhealthy and crazed.
We talked a lot about the cycle that started up right around my visit to my brother’s about 10 days ago. The yuck started bubbling up more freely and I was reeling from it. The yuck is my exiled parts making themselves known but I explained today it feels less like parts with voices and agendas and more like a terrifying forcefield – a black hole of yuck. My toe got sucked in and my whole system freaked the fuck out. I spent last Friday in the eat what feels to me like a binge/purge cycle to the point of wreaking physical havoc (which terrified several of my protector parts) and making me feel out of control (also terrifying, and angering some protectors). I spent the rest of the weekend f00d-focused, meal plans and sticky notes on the fridge of distractors to use if I feel like purging. Bree (admitting that she was unlike any therapist in dispensing such advice) asked what would happen if I just stayed in the bathroom. Huh? Just stay with those parts that are purging. Let them know that you weren’t going to go back to the kitchen and eat to undo what they had just done. That you weren’t going to tune them out with distractors. Given this possibility, we explored listening to what those parts were trying to purge or to avoid or to run from. Maybe giving them the attention they need in order to relax a bit and not feel so frantic. And, well, let’s face it – staying in the bathroom at least keeps me from re-loading in the kitchen, thereby breaking the cycle. But her approach is more that that – it’s not an avoidance tactic. And it doesn’t attempt to strip my purging parts of their voice and their power. Talking about it relaxed those parts so perhaps I’ll be able to draw upon this session if I’m back stuck in that horrible cycle again.
Another valuable IFS-related exploration that we did had to do with my “self-destruct” response to perceiving myself as trapped. This is a definite frequent occurance for me – most recently I talked about it when my mother came to therapy. I find myself in a situation that is very uncomfortable and I start to feel panicky. I don’t see a way to extricate myself from the conversation nor any way to voice my feelings in a way that feels safe or effective – so I start to crave hurting myself. When I was young my parents would meet in a parking lot to “exchange the kids” for weekends or Wednesday night dinners. Inevitably my dad would be late and the tension and anxiety in my mom’s car would become unbearable. I remember a recurring desire to slam the car door on my foot so hard that it would break a bone. Again: stuck in an uncomfortable place – want out – don’t know how to get out = hurt myself. So part of my terror about the “yuck” is that if I get stuck there I will only have my self-destruct button to resort to. And because I don’t trust myself and (as everyone does as some point in their ED life I believe) have had glimpses of suicidal ideation. So the bigger the yuck the bigger I fear would be my self-destruct response. Bree really framed this dilemma well and explained that there IS actually a third option to remaining stuck and panicky or self-destructing. It involves bringing Self energy to the situation. It seems so foreign to me that I don’t even begin to imagine what this might look like. However, I trust this woman and have seen the process of bringing Self Energy to situations and parts work. So I’m eagerly anticipating progress toward unearthing this third option. God, how dreamy would it be, how unfathomably comforting to know that in really uncomfortable situations, I have an option that honors my feelings and keeps me healthy. I’m close to saying it sounds too good to be true.
The final therapy de-breifing is around the J issue. Bree said that as a chronic “helper” who tends to be hyper-sensitive to others’ feelings and needs (amen, sister), there are times where having someone in the same room as her inhibits her ability to be with herself. This really resonated with me in the fact that I can’t stand it when J wants to snuggle or sit close while I’m blogging. I think he interprets it as me thinking he’s spying or looking over my shoulder. Really I think I just need some space and time to myself. Now, admittedly, snapping is not the most compassionate way to get that space and time. But it motivated me to start thinking of ways to sensitively but assertively frame a request for some alone time to type.
Sigh. Therapy went so well that I feel the caucophony of eating disordered voices in my head quieting a little. They’re there and they’re speaking their agendas, but I know feel like I’m 20 yards away from their picket line rather than trying to cross it.
Frustration is
-wanting to not eat a damn thing tomorrow, feeling hunger envelop me like a staticky, scratchy wool blanket on a cold night
-tears flowing in shavasana tonight at the end of group
-J having a horrible day of depression and shuffling around the house like an empty shell of the man I love
-not having the energy to fight today
-feeling alone no matter how many people are in the room
-realizing that relapse, recovery, sickness, relative health, quiet, noise, company of others, solitude all feel uncomfortable on some level
-losing hope that there is a comfortable place in the near future and if there is not having faith that I’m able to find it
-two more excruciating days until therapy when I really need it about 2x per day right now
-losing sight of the want to want to get better
-the up and down of it all, the cycles. the not being able to hold tight to an ounce of motivation and positivity for more than a few hours before it slips out of my hands like a flailing wet fish. the not being able to hold tight to the hopelessness and negativity either because the road keeps curving back to motivation.
blech. today was a void. December 15 was just a day on the calendar, empty of content. Like a place someone set for me at the table of a dinnerparty I just couldn’t bring myself to attend.
Working full-time, Eating Disorder full-time
Once again I had a double dose of therapy yesterday and another slotted for Thursday. Individual and group. And this on top of my full-time job working with kids with special needs. I need to keep this in the fore-front of my mind when I’m beating myself up for not posting yesterday. Not that anyone likely noticed. But it was bugging me so much today that I think it actually made me procrastinate this post. Damn, I am so frickin’ hard on myself. For everything I set the bar so high. Blogging is supposed to be FUN. I don’t have to do it – it’s recreation, a hobby. Sigh.
The depression saga has continued and I can feel it (and possibly other emotional undercurrents) manifesting as some serious perfectionism and controling. Translation: restricting, rule-making and goal-setting. Hmmm. At least I’m noticing it. Even though noticing doesn’t really combat it, just adds a little perspective.
J joined me for a bit of my “individual” session yesterday so that he could touch base with my therapist about the medication issue. It seems to have reassured him that I’m not going to jump in front of a train anytime soon and that my increased symptomology (a.k.a. relapse a.k.a. failure a.k.a. success – all depends on which part of me you’re talking to) is not a reflection of his love or nurturing abilities. In other news I agreed to address some of my darker, suicidal parts on Thursday (oh boy – can’t wait for that!). Perhaps this is a gross overgeneralization, but I assume that anyone in the midst of an eating disorder with a divided mind, a sick body and dwindling hope has had suicidal parts start to put their two cents into the mix. Well, at times they can really freak me out and make me uncomfortable and I have no idea what to do with those thoughts and feelings. And I consider myself very lucky to have a therapeutic relationship where I can talk to Bree about those thoughts without the fear that she will immediately check me into a hospital. So stay tuned for Thursday’s season premier of Conversations with my Suicidal Parts (the hot new reality series on Fox).
I’m experiencing an almost palpable increase in body dysmorphia daily. I’m back in my “skinny jeans” When the scale exited my life (it has since re-entered – DOH! stupid. stupid. stupid.) my pants became the gold standard measurement for my self-worth weight. Granted, the skinny jeans are not hanging off my non-butt the way they did a year and a half ago (said non-butt later turned into a disgusting lumpy healthy, feminine recovery butt) but the fact that I can squeeze into them is doing a bang up job on my head. Hence the 5:30 a.m. run at the gym. All my bad habits are gradually creeping back in. There is this headspace that I sometimes occupy where the bad habits and disordered thoughts elicit fear and disappointment and the desire to do something to rectify the situation. Yeah. I’m not in that headspace. I’m on a fucking eating disorder high when it starts to feel good and you’re kind of in a rhythm with it. Okay, probably shouldn’t glorify the situation so as not to trigger others.
Alright. So I know the current situation is not good. So I’m trying to gain a little handle on the why’s and how’s and what I’m thinking is behind all this is that it brings me a bit out of the depressed place. Energizes me. Gives me a mission – something to do, something to think about, something to organize my life around. Effective? Extremely. Healthy? No. So what else could energize me, give me a mission and something to organize my life around? Think think think. Marathon training? Oh, right, no, not the best idea. I’m drawing a blank here, folks. Any suggestions?
