Lost? Time To Find New Pathways!

First of all I want to thank everyone for your support and compassion when it comes to my last post. I was, as the title suggests, extremely discouraged and depressed. I still am battling depression hugely, but there have been little glimmers of hope for me since I wrote that.

That post, as some wise owls also remarked in the comments section, was an example of pretty screwed up, negative, unhelpful thinking.

By saying things like “I will NEVER…” I totally deny myself any chances of that thing happening, before I’ve even really tried. I close the door just like that. And I do deny faith, deny God. (I’m sorry if you don’t believe in God – each to their own. I do) Deny any plans that He has for my life, or any faith in Him that with Him I can get through anything.

Diane mentioned that to come back and use my newly minted CBT skills on those statements I made would be very helpful and I agree. Those are thoughts that have been going round and round in my mind, upsetting me, causing me anxiety and making me feel hopeless. If I am not challenging them, they will never change. Challenging them is the first step.

I may no longer have the dreams I had when I was younger – but who of us ever knows what is round the corner? Even the best laid plans fall, and often. If only we had a crystal ball, we could plan our way to success and happiness step by step, including navigation around every hurdle we would face on the way! But life is not like that.

Life doesn’t only give us hurdles. It opens doors. All the time, in unexpected places. Opportunities don’t always announce themselves. We have to keep a look out for them. And we have to believe in them. If we don’t, we won’t look, and we will sail right past them.

There is no factual evidence at all that I will never amount to anything in my life. NONE. I am ONLY 35 years old. That is not even half of a person’s life expectancy. And I might not have things like certificates or diplomas or degrees, I might not have a job or career or a family or house or car, but I have lived experience – and that is something you just cannot buy or learn.

I don’t have a crystal ball or ESP. I have no idea what the future holds for me. I don’t even know what tomorrow really holds for me as opposed to what I’ve planned. 35 is not too old to begin anything. I might struggle to have kids, and who knows, maybe I never will meet a partner, but I have wonderful friends who love me in the ways I need to be loved, and there are many kids out there who some day I might be able to adopt or foster. They won’t be ‘my’ kids, but I would hope that I could be part of thier lives even if briefly.

There are definitely things I can do – I’ve been researching with the help of a close friend, Tertiary Preparation Programs, which are short uni courses that help you get back into being a student. I might soon be doing one of these, online and part time. It would be awesome to call myself a student again after so long – and this might be a pathway into something like a psychology degree or case management or social work, which might be another 8 years if I did it part time (and then still not be actually qualified) but I’ve just thrown more than 15 years of my actual life away to the ED, more than that, so what’s another 8 years when it’s going to be positive stuff? And this is very sudden – yesterday my therapist just suggested it as I was bemoaning exactly what I wrote here in my last post. I do need to feel like I’m actually working towards something again. The cognitive difficulties? I’ll tackle that as it comes. Even if I have to do only one unit at a time, I’ll do this. I’m still not actually finishing most books I borrow from the library, in fact I don’t start most of them – but I’m getting through more of the book before I give up. That’s progress I guess.

I’ve been told of a program that is run by survivors of child abuse, for survivors, that’s situated out in a remote area, a series of 5 day retreats. It sounds really great, and what’s more, they do not turn anyone down based on financial difficulty – they help you come up with a way to do it. Feedback sounds really good – some people say the 5 days was worth more to them than a 6 month hospital stay. What’s more, since the volunteers who run the course are all past program participants who have come through their own troubles and trained to then come back and help, that again is another pathway to my future that I might choose. I’d be really happy with something like that. To help other people like me as a volunteer at a place like that.

Basically what’s most important to me is that my life is meaningful, in that I left something behind that was better for my having been here (as opposed to leaving a deficit because I took much and contributed nothing or very little.) For me, meaningful means helping others, however I achieve that (whether directly or indirectly.)

I’ve looked into some other options for therapy (8 sessions left for the rest of 2013) including funding that’s set aside for people with Eating Disorders to attend therapy (not very likely but worth a shot) and a community counselling organisation which would provide free or sliding scale sessions. They do seem to specialise in ED,  I do worry that they sound very ‘feminist’ based which isn’t my thing at all, but again, I have nothing to lose by checking them out and I have an intake appointment next Tuesday to meet them and see what they are like. (And I am, as usual for me, petrified!)

A close friend has recommended a psychiatrist who specialises in Trauma and will bulk bill (sadly bulk billing is getting scarce these days), and psychiatrists are able to bulk bill I think 50 sessions a year as opposed to the 10 that psychologists can. I had given up on psychiatrists – my experiences being that they throw medication and labels at you but don’t do anything to actually HELP you, whereas psychologists are all about changing your thinking and behaviours and working with your emotions. They give you real tools to take away and use for the rest of your life. But I will give this fellow a chance if he will give me one. I googled him and he has a huge reputation in this country so I just hope he’s not too busy for someone like me.

To help me face up to the anxiety that is ruining ballet and volunteer work with, I’ve been working with my care team to come up with ways they can support me to get there – after which once I get stuck into it I’m fine. it’s getting there in the first place where I fall down most, and it’s spending 2 or 3 days before hand constantly in panic attacks about it that exhausts me. I panic over the simplest things like “will I get up on time” and “I need to leave by x o’clock, remember that” and to have someone support me in the getting ready and getting there will help a lot of that anxiety calm down. I’m also changing my volunteering day, because Mondays is perhaps the worst day of the week for me. My weekends tend to be my busiest days of all and by Monday I am physically and emotionally a wreck, which doesn’t help in getting myself there in one piece or feeling very productive and helpful once there. And to help with the anxiety about what people will think of my appearance at Ballet, I’ve visited Bloch and come away with some really nice dance clothes that cover my scars, are loose but not baggy, and breathable. (I hate that I fret over this, but to me, the people at Ballet represent a group of people that once judged me very harshly, and to go back to them covered in self harm scars and underweight is something I feel very ashamed and self conscious about.)

I bought dancewear very like these!!

This leotard in Rouge

A similar wrap top, but very light and floaty material (for our hot summer) in baby pink

Black skirted jazz pants very similar to these, with a tie front, but no pattern.

And one for the wish list:

Another reason I NEED to have children some day. So i can dress them up in adorable clothes and shoes.

I don’t help myself when I catastrophise about possible disastrous outcomes (that 99.999% of the time never happen) or engage in all-or-nothing thinking (“I’m not a success, so I’m a failure.”) I don’t help myself when I let what I feel override what I know to be true (for example, feeling fat overriding knowing I’m actually underweight, or feeling that people will judge me and find me to be a loser over actually knowing that those particular people like me, are nice to me, and accept me.)

I don’t help myself when I close myself off to any possibilities not just right now, but in the future, by declaring my life ‘over’.

I don’t help myself by forgetting that I don’t have to fight my problems by myself, or even face them alone. By forgetting that God has a plan for every single one of us, and that He has a plan for MY life too – even if I don’t know what it is yet. He is fighting for me every step of the way, and everything that I go through is part of His plan for my life. I don’t help myself by losing faith not just in God, but in my own self. (Thank you, Missy, for the reminder.)

Giving up on myself is the same as declaring myself worthless. And if God finds me worth fighting for, and even worth creating in the first place, who am I to have the arrogance to say “God, you are wrong, I’m awful!”

I’ve been enlightened in SO many ways since I wrote my previous post that I DO have more options than I can even know of right at this moment, that more options will be coming along in the future. That it’s never too late to change or to start afresh, to begin with something new. And that the fastest way to really fail, is to declare yourself a failure before you have even tried. It’s not failure when you give something your best shot. It’s only failure when you never even try at all.

I could go on, but this is already a heck of a long post. I am also needing to work on my screwed up sleeping patterns and have taken proactive steps to try and get more and better quality sleep –  but I didn’t mean to include boring other people to sleep as well!

Thank you to everyone for your support and your belief in me – and for reminding myself to believe in myself.

(Image sources – 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6)

It Is Just Not Good Enough.

I hoped to avoid writing much more than a short acknowledgement of the tragic events in the past few days. I am heartbroken, both for my own reasons, and more, for everyone touched by these senseless, horrible events. But nothing I could possibly say could help anyone, change anything. Not only that, but I’m half a world away, in a country that has a totally different attitude to gun control, and it’s an argument that I can’t take part in right now since I am not well enough informed of any of the facts and circumstances.

However, I do feel. Just like every other human being. And hearing about killing after killing, I cannot fathom why tighter gun controls are not put in place. I’ve heard all the ‘guns don’t kill, people kill’ and ‘take away the guns and the baddies will still get them and then we will be unable to protect  ourselves’ arguments. I don’t agree with either of those – it seems more often that the good people’s weapons are taken and used by bad people, or involved in accidents. And people kill people, yes, but why would you want to hand them an easy way to do it if the impulse strikes them?

Those kids.. they were just little innocent kids. I cannot even begin to understand how anyone, ever, could even consider killing a kid. A kid, let alone  so many. So many precious, innocent lives. Potential lost. So many families destroyed. So much trauma for the survivors. And trauma ruins lives, for years after it happens.

This brings me to mental health. There have been a lot of people saying that this is yet another sign that we need better mental health care – better access to it in the first place, better standard of care and follow up, just better, better, better across the board.

Or even ADEQUATE would be a good start.

It is truly horrifying that in our first world countries, it is easier to get a gun than it is to get help for your mental illness. It is easier to kill yourself or someone else, than it is to get even basic treatment, understanding, and a sense of hope. It is easier to end it all, taking a few out with you, than it is to continue to receive adequate care and support for the full time that it takes you to recover and rejoin life.

It sucks that when something like this happen, a lot of people think that most people who have a mental illness do things like this, are dangerous, are downright evil or stuffed up enough to do something like this. That’s not true. There are sick people, and then there are bad people. You can be both, but being sick does NOT mean you are automatically bad too.  I think people who perpetrate horrors like this are sick AND bad. It is far from the norm for people with mental illnesses to be violent or dangerous. But we are tainted with the same brush as the bad eggs, and acceptance among mainstream society takes another dive.

The stigma surrounding mental illness is still alive and well, today. People feel they cannot tell their friends, their families, because they will be ostracised. They cannot let their employers or colleagues know or they will lose their jobs or at least lose respect in the workplace. And they feel the brunt of having a ‘lesser’ illness daily. Mental illness causes unbearable distress, disability and death. And yet people who have them are treated like it’s a personal failing (which it is not)  rather than a genuine illness that they never asked to have (which it is).

Because my biggest problem is the eating disorder, I will talk more about that now, but the problems with getting help and understanding are across the board with mental health care.

If someone has cancer, everything is done to try and get them into treatment for it as soon as possible. And everyone recognises that they are sick. No way would they be told “You are not sick enough yet, come back when your cancer has spread to some organs or to X percent of your body.” You wouldn’t be told “If you just wanted to not have cancer, you would not have cancer. Put a smile on your face!” or “Just do it!”.

 

You wouldn’t be treated like a criminal by your treatment team. You wouldn’t have an inpatient experience that is akin to being jailed.  Sure the nature of eating disorders can make us dishonest and sneaky – mostly with ourselves – but that’s the illness, not us. It’s what we need their help to treat – not derision or punishment. If we need restraint and supervision, it is very possible to do this with kindness and retaining the patient’s dignity – and yet often the treating people do not seem to think these little yet essential things are worth consideration. Have they not realised that their treatment of people this way not only hinders their recovery chances, but if they just put some kindness and the willingness to try and understand into it, they would get better results all around? And how is punishment such as not allowing someone to see their loved ones, taking away their possessions and clothes, and forbidding them to engage in activities they enjoy helping them? Short answer – it’s NOT.

If someone has cancer, they will not be told they are incurable and left to die unless they really are. And even then, they will be offered comfort measures and support. But with an eating disorder, many are told they are ‘hopeless cases’ as if it was their fault, and, apart from when they are at death’s door, left to just survive in the community. They deteriorate physically and mentally and they lose hope. They exist in a living hell – unable to live, but not allowed either to die, just in limbo.

I have heard of people in other countries being unable to get into or kicked out of treatment centres because their insurance companies would not pay. I have heard of people who have travelled thousands of kilometres and mortgaged everything in order to just have a chance to survive. And I have countless friends who have died, and heard of countless others who also have died.

It’s just NOT GOOD ENOUGH.

There are a heck of a lot of problems in this world that come back to mental illness, and a heck of a lot of people in pain. We cannot just ignore mental illness and hope it goes away. Doesn’t happen. Never will.

How many more innocent people have to die, how many little kids? All for the want of adequate care, understanding, and treatment.

So where do we start? What do you think would be a good starting point? 

Have you struggled to get help? 

(Image sources  1, 2, 3)

Meeting Our Own Expectations – How Our Past Can Affect Our Destiny.

Please be aware that this post is based on my own interpretation of Schema-focussed CBT theory as someone who has only recently been introduced to it – I am not educated in psychology, and I am definitely very capable of making mistakes and getting things mixed up. If this interests you, please ask someone who is trained in Psychology for more information!  In the meantime, here is a very succinct overview. 

I loved your responses to my last post about what would be in your Christmas survival kits!  I especially loved the humour you all used, and found it interesting how many of us in some way worked at making Christmas a good experience for those around us.  It gave me a lot to think about.

Most of us seem to feel pressured by the expectations of others in some way at Christmas time.

It’s a running theme for many of us throughout our  lives.  Since I became a blogger, I have met quite a few people with eating disorders who do NOT struggle with being people pleasers, with putting everyone else before them and with living up to expectations both real and imagined.  But the majority of people I have met with eating disorders seem to struggle with this to some degree. I know I do, I always have.

Maybe it is something to do with certain personality types being more susceptible to eating disorders?

Meeting expectations is one of the reasons I’ve been feeling so stressed lately – and have felt stressed for most of my life actually. I tend to agonise about things for days, weeks even, before they are meant to happen. I catastrophise things in my mind, wondering if the worst possible things could happen, if I will ‘fail’, if people will have reason to be disappointed in me, angry, disgusted.  The more I worry, the more likely I am to have a bad time of it when the actual event takes place – because my anxiety levels have gotten so out of control, and I’ve convinced myself that it’s going to be awful.

How many of us do this? How many of us don’t even give ourselves a chance by believing we will be failures – and then somehow ensuring that this is true? If anything illustrates the power our beliefs have over our lives, it’s seeing how being convinced that we will fail can actually make our belief come true.

Working with my therapist has helped me a fair bit with this sort of thing already. I’ve just learnt about Schemas, as we are going to undertake Schema-focussed Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. 

An early maladaptive schema (EMS) has been defined by Jeffrey Young as ‘a broad pervasive theme or pattern regarding oneself and one’s relationship with others, developed during childhood and elaborated throughout one’s lifetime, and dysfunctional to a significant degree’.  Schemas are extremely stable and enduring patterns, comprising of memories, bodily sensations, emotions, cognitions and once activated intense emotions are felt.  When a person has an EMS like abandonment, they have all the memories of early abandonment, the emotions of anxiety or depression, which are attached to abandonment, bodily sensations and thoughts that people are going to leave them.  An Early Maladaptive Schema, therefore, is the deepest level of cognition that contains memories and intense emotions when activated. (source)

My understanding of  Schema is that they are our core beliefs about ourselves and about the world.  Formed in our formative years, they reflect how our experiences have affected us and shaped us. If  ”seeing the world through rose coloured glasses” is a phrase used to describe experiencing life as though it’s filtered through an extra optimistic viewpoint, I imagine that our schemas describe how we experience all of our lives through the filters created by our experiences.

Things happen to us in life that we have no control over whatsoever – this we know for sure. But how much of what happens to us, even as adults with the power to decide what we do and who we associate with – do we actually influence through our own core beliefs? I think we could be surprised by how much of our own destiny we shape, unconsciously.

For example, one of my early maladaptive schemas was identified as being Defectiveness/Shame.  The handout my therapist gave me described it as “The feeling that one is defective, bad, unwanted, inferior, or invalid in important respects or that one would be unlovable to significant others if exposed. May involve hypersensitivity to criticism, rejection and blame; self-consciousness, comparisons, and insecurity around others; or a sense of shame regarding one’s perceived flaws. These flaws may be private (eg selfishness, angry impulses, unacceptable sexual desires) or public (eg undesirable physical appearance, social awkwardness).” (source)

That could have been written about me!

We also have individual coping styles, which explains why two children who experience the same abusive home, might grow up to be totally different. It certainly explains why I have become the person I have, while my siblings have if anything, destructive and violent, and yet quite successful in their public lives.

Generally, there are three overall coping styles - Overcompensation (Support), Avoidance, and Surrender – and a list of coping responses for each of those styles. All of the maladaptive coping responses listed under Schema Avoidance jump at me straight off .

Applying them to my sense of shame and defectiveness, I absolutely tend to withdraw and strive to be as autonomous as I can be. I’m scared that people will reject me if they realise I’m as awful as I am. I have learnt that the only person in my life I can ever depend on is myself – and I tend to push people away first before they can abandon me.

I’ve long sought distraction through becoming engrossed in reading, to the point that teachers used to confiscate my books to stop me reading TOO MUCH.  Through dancing, and through excessive exercising, and when all is too much, through dissociation.

I’ve addictively self-soothed through restricting my food, through bingeing and purging, through exercising, through self-harming.

And psychological withdrawl pretty much sums ME up. As young as I can remember, I’ve been withdrawn into my own bubble through dissociation, through my books, through whatever way I can.

I also exhibit Schema Surrender – I give in to others, am passive, a people pleaser, surrender to the wishes of others, and definitely do all I can to avoid conflict.  I am compliant, and despite my efforts to push others away, am also pretty dependant.

All of these coping responses have had the effects of isolating me from other people. They have kept me safe, sure, but they have been a thick wall that traps me, too. I have struggled to learn to trust others, to have actual relationships with other people, to even talk to other people (I spent several of my teenage years uttering a total of two, maybe three words a day.)

I can see now, how my absolute certain belief that I was inferior, disgusting, wrong, that people would be disgusted and want nothing to do with me if they knew what I was ‘really like’ – shaped my reality into just that. My coping responses to these beliefs pushed people away from me and ensured that I was always the odd one out.

I can also see, with great hope, that over the more recent years, with my growing ability to believe in the inherent goodness and sincerity of people, and that they can like and accept me – based on their actual treatment of me – how I have started to move away from being so isolated and stuck in those patterns. It does give me hope, because it shows that even before I started learning all about this, and despite those beliefs still being extremely ingrained, I was able to change my behaviours and therefore, actually start to change my destiny.

The Fiona you know, through this blog, the Fiona who has good, close friends, who despite her fears, can actually interact socially and take part in things more and more – is a girl who dared to trust blindly, based on a bit of positive evidence that was tiny compared to a lifetime of rejection and hurt.  I have a heck of a long way to go, because I still tend to hide, most of my social interaction is through technology, and the people I see on a daily basis are mostly my workers/helpers. But in a way that only people who have themselves experienced these issues would ever understand, just that I can talk to people, enjoy their company, feel like a human being when with them – it’s a huge improvement over how I’ve been for much of my life.

I dared. And I keep daring – and every time I do, I prove to myself yet again, that my fears don’t have to be real – and that I do have some control over my destiny by what I do right now.

Can you see ways in which your beliefs have shaped your destiny?

When reading about Schema-focussed CBT on the pages I’ve linked through in this post, do any of the schemas, coping styles, and coping responses sound especially true for you? 

(Image sources: 1, 2, 3)

Psychoeducation – And I Don’t Mean Education About Psychos.

Lately I’ve been shaking my head a lot, wondering why I waited so long to insist that I needed more help than I was getting.

Maybe part of the reason was that I’ve had SO MUCH support. So many people involved. And I certainly didn’t feel like I deserved to ask for more..

I know I’m not alone in finding it very hard to ask for what I need – let alone for what I feel is more than I need. Hands up any of you who are reading this who find it hard and avoid asking for help, or have found it hard and now are practising asking despite feeling undeserving?

In a way, I’m actually very fortunate that I became so sick, and that I had no family support whatsoever. I have often asked my treatment team members why I got so much support – when I had friends just as sick who seemed to get none. The answer was usually that they had family and I didn’t.

I know, too well, that just because one has family around, doesn’t mean that they are actually supportive. Or that they are prepared, or equipped to be your support person through such a serious illness.

So yes – I’m very lucky. It meant that the public health system – from which getting adequate treatment and support services is like extracting blood from a stone – decided I needed more and I ended up with an extensive treatment team – consultant psychiatrist, up to two mental health case managers, GP, physiotherapist, endocrinologist (changing to bone specialist now), private psychiatrist, dietician when needed, and also the help of Non Government Organisations (NGO’s) for help with everyday living. On top of all that, over 100 admissions to hospital.  Very, very lucky.

Before I go on with my post, I just wanted to give a call out to Fed Up NSW Health. A friend of mine has been searching high and low for treatment for months now – and she’s critically ill with her ED. Is there help to be had? NO. Not just that, but she’s constantly told she’s ‘not sick enough’. Finally, fed up with the health system, she started rallying.

I would really appreciate as many people as possible supporting Ella’s cause. You can sign a petition, and read a recent article about Ella and her cause here.

If you are living with an eating disorder, you know just how hard it is to ask for help. The battle doesn’t end there for us – accepting and using any help we get is also a struggle.  How many times I simply turned away from help because I couldn’t let anyone help me – because I believed I was worthless and that the world would be a better place without me.  ED screamed at me abuse for daring to ask for something I didn’t deserve and wasn’t ‘sick’ enough for.

These patients not only have to fight for what is a right – basic care – but fight their ED to allow them to fight for their own lives, too.

Valuable time is lost, and people with an eating disorder can deteriorate so quickly. Ella has been in emergency, her life in danger – but she still isn’t deemed ‘sick enough’ for a bed. One of only two beds for people with eating disorders in the entire state of New South Wales.

The situation is similar in my own state – where there are only four beds for a state that covers nearly 2 million square kilometres, and has a population of 4,580,700 people. (Source) That is simply crazy, and dangerous. We don’t have other services to back up this deficit either – no day patient or outpatient programs, for example. If you are a public health patient – and many are – that’s IT for you if you have an eating disorder, and if you are ‘sick enough’ to be in one of those four beds, (even if you ARE, there is a wait list longer than Santa’s) this ED unit is really just basic care – refeeding. Not therapy. It’s the ED unit I myself have spent years at. And as you can see – I’m far from better.

Back to asking for help – far deeper than the ED runs the complex PTSD, past traumas torment me day in, day out. For years, I’ve just borne this. I’ve seen it as my lot to live with – and had no hope at all of ever living any kind of peace and safety in my own mind. I feel like I’m constantly surrounded by ghosts – of my past, of myself. I’m haunted.

I’ve seen so many psychiatrists and had a few psychologist and counsellor sessions – never have I really done more than told them how my week has been, or how I’m going with the ED symptoms. A few of them in more recent years talked about my past with me – but then it was just talking. I am very much able to separate myself emotionally from my story and just tell it.

But talking about it is NOT processing it.

Trauma therapy does not only consist of telling your story or focusing on traumatic memories, though of course that is a crucial part of the work. Bringing trauma memories to mind, talking about them in a trusting relationship, and developing the capacities for managing them while staying present in the moment are all crucial parts of the healing process. A premature emphasis on traumatic material can in fact do more harm than good. Many trauma survivors may first need to learn and practice a variety of self-care skills that you can then employ during the memory work phase of therapy.

In the past, trauma survivors were encouraged to speak about their abuse in the belief that this catharsis would be healing. Sometimes this instead led to re-traumatization rather than mastery of the material or healing. In fact, some trauma survivors are able to tell their stories easily, but in a dissociated manner. Because of the risks involved, this healing work is best done with the help of an experienced trauma specialist who can help you learn techniques to cope with memories effectively. One goal of trauma therapy is to help you connect to the past while staying in the present. – Dr Kathleen Young (Emphasis mine)

Yesterday I had my second session with the psychologist who specialises in trauma. And this is the main reason I’m shaking my head about waiting so long to insist on seeing someone like her. Only two sessions in, I know without a doubt that this woman can help me in ways that nobody before has even touched on.

I have hope, because for once it really does feel like I am not going to spend the rest of my life haunted.

We have started with some psychoeducation. My psych wants me to understand why the trauma affects me the way it does – a better understanding of an illness leads to being able to better manage it.

Objectives of psychoeducation for PTSD:

• Develop vocabulary to describe PTSD feelings
• Identify cues and symptoms that he is experiencing PTSD (and similar symptoms of anxiety)
• Link those feelings to specific triggers and areas of vulnerability
• Develop a short-term action plan for dealing with PTSD
• Accept that his PTSD is causing him problems
• Link cues and symptoms of PTSD with triggers and with harmful coping behaviors (Source)

She also stressed that there has been exciting research in recent times about how creating new neural pathways in the brain helps people who have been through trauma - you can learn how a trigger makes you feel, then learn a new way to respond to that trigger. By practising the new response, you are creating a new pathway, and the more you do it, the stronger that pathway becomes and the old one dies off. (This is a very simplified explanation from my understanding) It means that you don’t have to spend the rest of your life feeling fear, danger, panic, anxiety, etc when something triggers you. You can teach yourself not to.

At the end of the session, I admitted to her that I wasn’t sure that cognitively I was doing very well, because I’m still struggling with my eating – and that was an issue for my case manager about me seeing her, along with the worry that digging up the past was causing me to relapse. She said that being cognitively impaired will not at all stop me from getting a lot out of therapy – and was shocked when I told her how all these years the most constant refrain I have had from everyone who has ever been a treating professional in some way has been “You cannot work in therapy until you are weight-restored and cognitively well.” It has been a catch-22 for me – the traumas fuel the eating disorder, but I can’t work on the traumas because the eating disorder makes me too cognitively off-the-planet.

Here I am, shaking my head yet again. All those years, I bought into that myth that it was pointless for me to engage in therapy while I was cognitively impaired. That I would have to simply live with being haunted by my past and all that it caused me to go through until such time as I’d been sufficiently able to fight my eating disorder to gain and maintain adequate weight. I truly thought that I was a lost cause because what I needed to gain weight to have therapy for, has always been one of the biggest causes of my eating disorder in the first place.

So round and round I went. No more!

I’m going to get the most I can out of this opportunity.

And I’m not wasting any more time. My psychiatrist – Headshrinker –  is fired. I don’t have the rest of my life to tell him how my week was while he fidgets, watches the clock and surreptitiously picks his nose. (I wish I was joking about the nose picking.)

I always have so much fun finding the pics for these posts! I am in love with a lolcat-filled Internet

Anyway – never let anyone tell you that you can’t do therapy until you have gained weight. Never give up asking for help when you need it. If you think you need help, you need help. Remember that being able to access the help you need means you are less of a ‘burden’ to society than if you don’t get that help and end up much sicker for much longer.

I hate even writing that ‘burden’ bit – that’s the sort of thing a few ignorant and nasty people have loved to say/write about me. Many of us believe it. But it’s not true. ALL of us are worthy of the help, care and support we need. Every single one of us. Nobody should have to fight to get just basic care, and nobody should be made to feel guilty for being sick and needing help – something none of us chose to be in the first place.

We didn’t choose to be sick, but we can choose to fight to get better. And so, it’s even more important that we be able to get help when needed – and low of those who guilt us for being ‘burdens’ for attempting to take away our choice to fight, too.

Keep fighting, everyone. Because there is always hope! There’s a whole world out there to discover! 

Have you struggled to ask for help? Have you struggled to access help? How has this affected you? 

Have you ever had therapy, and do you think it’s helped you? 

What improvements would you make to the public mental health system in your country? 

Image Sources 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

Deja Vu… (Wake Up, Fiona.)

Have you ever had that strong feeling that you have been here, done this, before? Lived this exact moment of time before?

Last night I had a moment of deja vu. I don’t know where I saw myself sitting here before, reading web pages on my computer, half an eye on the news on TV, one hand idly scratching Shalimar’s neck as she purred on my lap. I was looking at the TV guide open on my screen, and the shows were exactly the same as when I ‘lived this moment’ the first time’. Gosh it was eerie. I often sit at my computer while watching TV, Shalimar often sits on my lap, the TV shows are endless repeats – but it wasn’t just ‘doing the same thing’. It felt as though I’d previously viewed that exact moment of time before it happened – and it was happening right now.

I often have experienced moments of deja vu throughout my life. But along with the events of the last few days, last night took on greater meaning for me.

On Thursday morning, I woke up and tried to get ready to go to ballet classes, despite the usual amounts of fear. But I couldn’t do it, and I didn’t end up going. Instead, I sat down and wrote an email to the lady who runs the ballet school. I explained to her that I haven’t lost the plot yet, but I know I’m walking a very fine line and that I need to take a break from the ballet classes until I’ve gotten myself well again. I know I’ve lost weight – in my opinion only a little bit, but enough to matter when someone has a history of ED. Not only have I had to admit that two hours of dancing when I’m not maintaining my weight is not good, but I have become even more self conscious, and I don’t want people looking at me in skimpy clothing and freaking out! It’s been hot, and it’s only getting hotter as we roll into summer so there is no way I can hide under lots of layers during ballet classes any more.

I also don’t want to have ballet become linked with the eating disorder, since up until now it’s been a little slice of heaven – an oasis where the eating disorder has not had a chance to intrude. I want to keep it that way.

I hugely fear having made this decision though – because the way my eating disorder works is that it does strip me of things that are meaningful to me. Instead of being able to use the motivation of going back to classes to help me fight to get back to where I was (at the very least), if things were to go true to my history with ED, instead it would be a case of “You aren’t worthy of going to ballet anyway, and you aren’t going to ever dance again so just give up” and that would be the end of it – forever. ED has convinced me that my life was over and I had to die so strongly, so many times. I don’t want this to happen again.

So I compromised – the reply from the lady who runs the ballet school was “Why don’t you concentrate just on pilates class until you feel better?” and I thought this was a better plan. Pilates is very easy going, and it would mean I would at least maintain some of my rediscovered flexibility and strength until I could do ballet again too.

I sent a copy of my email to my case managers, because they are hugely supportive and I wanted them to know why I chose to do this. I didn’t want them to think that I was copping out, that I didn’t want to keep moving forward. I just didn’t think they would take it so seriously.

Yesterday morning, my Home And Community Care case manager came over for a catch up – asking how she can help me. She’s lovely and I felt a lot better after a chat with her. I’m truly lucky to have the level of support that I do, and that the people who support me as professionals do genuinely care.

At the same time, I had a text from my Mental Health case worker – wanting to see me ahead of our appointment next wednesday, to talk about things. I just assumed that she felt I might be upset and need support,  since she knows how much ballet means to me.

What happened was that I found myself being given an ultimatum – “Turn it around.” I have never seen my case manager SO intensely serious. She’s known me for ten years now, and been my case manager on and off for much of that time. She’s always been a really laid-back and good-humoured – even though she’s been with me through the best of times and the worst of times – far, far worse times. And yet, I’ve never seen her as concerned as yesterday afternoon, when she repeated those three words to me.

Bottom line is, not only do I need to take a break from ballet, but I can’t do pilates either. I’ve been advised to take a few weeks break from all of the classes (well I guess it means my decision was the right one.) I also have been advised to not see the psychologist any more – the one that I’ve only just met!

I meant to write a blog post about finally getting to see a psychologist, but I haven’t had a chance! I’ve long been needing more help with the traumas of my past – and I wasn’t getting it from Dr Headshrinker. It took a long time and much pleading, but finally I was referred to a psychologist who came recommended for doing trauma work, we did up the necessary paperwork to access her* and I made the appointment. And she is just who I need to see – I have a very good feeling about her. She ‘gets’ me. She says she can help me help myself – help me process the traumas and be able to move forward from it. So I came away from my first appointment with her feeling relieved and confident.

(*in my state of Australia, in order to access 5 sessions with a psychologist bulk billed under Medicare per year, you must have a mental health care plan drawn up with your GP. Psychologist sessions are not otherwise covered by Medicare.)

My case manager’s opinion is that it’s a pattern with me – as my anxiety and my inability to cope with the past traumas increase,  I relapse. I can’t not listen to her – she’s known me for so long and she has never been wrong so far, she’s also deeply insightful. I truly respect every single thing she says.

But I personally think that it was just rotten timing! This situation has been a long time developing, and my first psych session just happened to coincide with me no longer being able to appear ‘okay’ to others.  But my case manager has a point. Also, she added, I’m cognitively impaired, and to continue seeing the psychologist in this state would be a waste of the few sessions I can access.

It’s a stalemate on whether I’m not seeing the psychologist again for now, and this is where the ultimatum comes in. I see my case manager again on Wednesday next week, and she wants me to have ‘turned it around’ by then. I guess if I have ‘turned things around’ sufficiently, then I can go on with seeing the psychologist.

If I haven’t?

I don’t know. There are no ‘or elses‘ here, because this isn’t serious yet, this is the heads-up that if I don’t do something NOW, it WILL become serious, fast.

But I guess the ‘or else’ is the fact that I will lose EVERYTHING if I relapse fully. Everything. Including my life. And I cannot do that.

I will not do that. 

I’m fighting. 

I feel awful for letting down people who were so supportive of my progress, who have been cheering me on through all of this.  I’ve let myself down. And I’m scared. Scared, because my ED does have so much power, and it gains that power over my mind so fast. Scared, because I know how deadly this is. Scared because I know my body can’t take another relapse. Scared because I can’t take another hospital experience!

So what does the deja vu have to do with all this?

Last night, turning all these events over in my head, I realised that without a doubt, I’m in a serious position. And that it could go either way. This is a truly life-changing decision – to fight or not. And then I felt that deja vu – such a spooky moment. I can’t remember the rest of what actually happened in that slice of time that I was ‘shown’ ahead of time – but I do know that whatever I decided to do last night affected my ENTIRE LIFE.

So I know what I have to do. And this weekend I’ve been fighting hard to do it. I reached out to some of my close friends, and with their support I’ve had a good day so far with my eating and drinking.

Never let your guard down, when you are fighting an eating disorder. Never give up, either.

Sending courage and strength and hugs to all of you out there – those of you who fight this, or your own personal battles, and those of you who care for someone who does.

While there is life, there is always hope!. 

Image Sources 1, 2, 3, 4, 5,

Walking A Fine Line. Huge Trigger Warning. Even Huger TMI warning.

This post is going to contain a lot of pretty huge triggers. Weight talk, ED talk, TMI (bowel motion stuff, so click away if you are easily queasy!  But honesty is the only way for me to go here. And to be honest, I have to be completely honest. Partially ‘honest’ doesn’t actually count.

If you are not in a place where it’s safe for you in any way to read something that could be upsetting or triggering – please click away now. If you want to know what the post was about, I can tell you in more G rated wording via email if that’s what you would like, just drop me a comment on any other post, or email me if you have my address.

Still being honest – I really hate having to write this. I wanted to be a source of hope and to show people that no matter how far you fall, you can still get back up again – because that is what I did. And kept doing, for all my life. Hoping that someone else who believed it was impossible to ever come through a nightmare such as this and out the other side safe, okay, and able to actually LIVE, might see that I was actually getting there myself and give themselves another chance. Because when we give up, I think that’s the beginning of the end. Hope is so important to LIFE. It really is essential – without it, you go nowhere.

I don’t think I’m relapsing – hence the title of this post. But I do feel like I’m dangling on the precipice. I need to be very, very careful. Or I could absolutely lose my life.

A couple of weeks ago, I came down with the flu. It knocked me about, really did a number on me. Since then, I’ve never quite been able to get back to how I was with eating, with purging, with how my body actually just seems to handle food. And I have to admit, before the flu happened, I’ve always been hanging on by a thread – I’ve made no secret of the fact that I do still struggle big time with restricting and purging, and with the bingeing and purging. (Oh God I hate Anorexia, I hate Bulimia. And I hate having them both. One should be enough!)  And yet, something was different, far different than for all the years before this. I managed to maintain my weight, managed to stay out of hospital for the longest period of time ever, and have been working hard at returning function and FUN to my life!

However, I’ve long felt that my weight being stable for 2 years and 3 months was a fluke. Well my fluke is over. I’ve actually been ‘watching’ what’s happened with interest at the same time as I’ve lived this. Watching with fear, too. That fear that we feel when our mind says many different things and pulls in all different directions. Where nobody can win because it means somebody has to lose. One of the scariest things about living with Anorexia Type II has been the sheer power that my own mind can have over me, how powerless it can make me feel, and how unable to save myself when [insert sarcasm here!] ‘all I have to do’  is put food in, and not take the food out again.

In the past couple of weeks, I’ve dropped about four kilograms, (8.82 pounds) without trying to lose weight or doing anything different really. I’ve always had huge shifts of fluid – chronic oedema problems will do that to you, but this isn’t oedema, this is weight. You can feel the difference when it’s weight as compared to oedema. This is not critical, it’s easily regained, but it’s left me mentally, emotionally, and physically walking that fine line – I don’t feel safe in any of those ways any more. The little bit of extra weight did big things for my ability to think and to be more rational, it also made a big difference to my physical health. I still weigh a lot more than when I used to be discharged from hospital most times – so please don’t think I’m lost – I’m not. I’m not lost, as long as I grab hold of this and steer back in the right direction right now. 

Back when I used to lose huge amounts of weight pretty much immediately after being discharged from most hospital admissions, most of it seemed to come off in the first few days. And always, always, my body seemed to announce it’s weight-dropping with (okay, TMI here, sorry, but how else can I say it?) a humungous going-to-the-toilet. I did nothing to bring it on, and I do wonder if perhaps being out of hospital and moving around a bit more rather than bedrested stimulated things. But I’d suddenly get urgent pains and have to go to the toilet – NOW. Oh crap, I’m going to shit my pants in a minute urgency. And then, it would feel like my entire insides were pouring out of me. I would just sit there and, ahem, poo and poo and poo. It just wouldn’t stop coming. I would seriously start to worry about blocking the toilet where ever I was, perhaps blocking the entire city’s sewer system and causing a state emergency. And then, when it was over, I’d sit there, limp, exhausted, feeling like a hollowed out skin. If I wasn’t home, I’d begin to panic because even getting up off the toilet suddenly required more energy and strength than I had. I’d never get that strength back, or the kilos that one long crap dumped from my body. From there, it was always down, down, down, yet again.

(Image Source)

I still think it’s ironic how this happened every time I then lost weight – because in more ways than one, my life was actually going down the toilet.

Well, this did not happen after my last hospital admission. Whatever was different, my insides stayed in me, where people’s insides are meant to be. I did have problems with IBS like symptoms – the period of such severe constipation I was investigated for possible bowel obstruction, and the bouts of diarrhoea without any known cause (I have not used laxatives for years unless you count the medically prescribed movicol when I had the constipation – which didn’t work either. In fact, I’ve not touched the coloxyl that the hospital sent home with me after my  last discharge) (WTF hospital ED ward, sending ED patients home with coloxyl?). The diarrhoea was nothing like the huge dumps – my actual insides always seemed to stay in me. (Does this even make sense? What a shitty paragraph haha.)

Oh dear. Crap. I can’t resist a lame pun, can I?

Anyway, to cut a long story short, not only have I suddenly started dropping weight, but a long crap happened. And it reminded me just how scary those long craps are to sit through (shit through?) because of how they make you feel, and how hard they are to recover from.

Okay – end poo talk! If you are still with me, you deserve a medal!

I cannot believe I’m sitting here telling the WORLD about my bowel habits. My mother would be so proud of me.

So, where to now?

Life is seriously overwhelming. And exhausting. Today, I saw my headshrink doctor, and had a bit of a “Wake up, Fiona!” from him. He sat me down and opened up the session with “You’ve lost weight” followed by a lecture about how nobody but myself could rescue me, that losing weight was dangerous and would kill me, that I would never deal with my past by going back that way (he’s right). Headshrink said to me, “Your past is very complicated. You have Complex-Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Complex. You have never up until recent years not known abuse. There was no break between one situation and the next. You went from childhood abuse and neglect, and torture, while being ostracised and bullied at school, straight into being abused and tortured by Wanker, and straight from there into years of  torture at hospital.” Yes, he actually said that – torture at hospital. And again, he’s right. He said that it’s not likely that I will ever recover from my past – I never had a chance to form any other views of the world other than that it was abusive, and when I got finally free from that, I took over abusing my own self. He’s right yet again – and I wish he wasn’t.

The past is what haunts me the most – and what drives my eating disorder. Starving has been a volume switch on the memories and the pain. Bingeing stuffs the feelings and memories down, especially those of my mother’s cruelty around food. Purging happens because I feel just so dirty and foul inside.

I have never known what it’s like to not feel like a horrible person. I still expect people to loathe me on sight, to instantly pick me as inferior and just, bad. This means I constantly battle social anxiety and deep feelings of shame.

I know there are people out there who say – JUST GET OVER IT. Put it behind you, and move on. And they have to be the most ignorant of all ignoramuses – because you cannot just get over something like what I lived. You cannot. You cannot just put it behind you and move on (and I tried that – first with throwing myself into life and pretending that none of it hurt me or affected me, then with every new permutation of eating disorder, over-exercise and obsession – and look where it’s gotten me). In fact, I don’t know what I actually can do. I don’t know if it’s actually possible for me to heal from it. Perhaps it’s possible for me to reach a place of acceptance and healing where I’m able to exist on a day to day basis without being in excruciating emotional pain – and that will be a blessed relief. I’m happy if that’s what I could achieve. But totally healed? As Headshrink said today and I’ve long suspected – just not possible.

In recent weeks, my search for a new Headshrink catalysed current Headshrink and my GP putting their heads together and finding a psychologist who does trauma work. In Australia, you can get five visits to a psychologist per year under Medicare if you have a mental health care plan – so we spent hours yesterday doing one up for this, and now I will book the appointments. Headshrink wants me to take the appointments fairly close together for an intense period of trauma therapy – and we will see how I go. In return, I’m not leaving him and defecting to a knew, unknown Headshrink after all. Trauma therapy was what I wanted. And it’s now what I’m getting. I hope, HOPE it helps.

I also don’t believe that I can fully recover from my eating disorder. I’ve long suspected it. I DO believe that recovery is possible. It is entirely possible. I have friends who have gone from being extremely sick for years with eating disorders to completely recovered today – to a point where food does not bother them, weight does not bother them, the ED negative screaming voice does not bother them. They actually are LIVING and HAPPY and ED doesn’t have a place in their lives any more. So it’s possible. And just because I no longer believe in it for me – does NOT mean it’s not possible for anyone else. Every single one of us comes from a different background, with different genetic make-up, different support structures, different lives. No two people with ED are the same. So it’s entirely possible that you can recover, even if someone else cannot. 

Tetyana from Science Of EDs Blog said it best  in this thread on the F.E.A.S.T Facebook group. (If you are not a member of this Facebook group, please click here to see the cut and pasted thread)I absolutely recommend reading this thread – it’s HUGE, but it’s one of the most interesting, enlightening discussions I have ever read on eating disorders, on the possibility of recovery, and the causes. Tetyana said:

“..I don’t think you need co-morbid conditions, or trauma, or anything like that, per se. Whatever triggers it, in my opinion, is whatever it is that leads the individual to “discover” that restricting is either anxiolytic, or eating food is anxiety-provoking. I do think that co-morbid conditions, and this has been shown in the literature, make recovery harder. That’s why I don’t think it is fair to say everyone can recovery 100% in the sense of being free from the mental aspects of the disorder. Regarding how many genes are involved, oh, I have no idea, I was throwing around random numbers just for scale…”

So it’s different for us all. Some of us can recover fully. Some of us will not be able to – but that is no reason to give up. People live with serious illness every where. People manage Diabetes, for instance, and can manage to live fully and happily despite it if they manage all  aspects of their health properly. I’ve been told for years by most of my treatment people that management is really what my best hope is – but I’ve often rejected that. Now I see that they are most likely right.

I’m just not going to give up – in case any of us were wrong!

I’m still going to keep on going with trying to fight this. I’ve been fighting slipping back into my old patterns of not eating or drinking at all until 8pm-ish, then my dinner turning into a binge and purge. No more. And and I’m not going to let this rob me of my chance to actually have a life not completely full of ED stuff. I’m still doing ballet - and loving it. And my tentative trial of volunteer work went well, I’m now going to be working on a weekly basis. And what an opportunity it is – I truly am beginning to think it was meant to be. What better place for someone who is so lacking in confidence and skills to volunteer than with people who help women with just these issues every single day? Lucky me.

I also managed to finish my painting in the art workshop I’ve been doing for the past few months – this was something I really struggled to attend, especially given that I never knew from one week to the next what I was even painting – I sat in front of that canvas and felt clueless, scared, blank, and I hated whatever I’d done on it. It changed hugely from one week to the next – from orange to purple to red and blue in the mountains, from a daytime setting to the middle of the night, from being a seascape to being a landscape with no water at all! But I finished. And on Thursday this week my painting is in the exhibition and silent auction we were preparing for. I’m so happy. Here is a sneak peek:Rotten photo – sorry. But I was pretty pressed for time!

So I’m fighting again. And hopefully, letting everyone know how much I’m struggling will help me by keeping me honest about it. It’s easy to hide your struggles on the internet. Hopefully I will have some far more positive news to report next time I talk about how I’m going.

Thank you for reading – I really appreciate all of you who read, who comment, who lurk, who CARE. You are all just awesome. 

Update: Escaping, Spiralling, Opting Out Of Life – And Choosing To Opt Back In Again.

It’s been a long time since I’ve done a serious update, or a really serious post. There’s a reason for that – I’ve been not out of action, but hunkered down, holding on for dear life. As you do when things get stormy!

(Image Source)

Sometimes, that’s all we can do – hang on tight. And that’s okay.

My biggest ‘storms’,  as usual, have been the PTSD most, and the depression and anxiety. I had my monthly appointment with the consultant psych on Monday (the head of my treatment team) hoping that he could help in some way that would ease the worst period of both anxiety and depression in my life – and that’s including all the years of abuse and bullying. Instead, he complimented me again on how far I’ve come, and how well I’m doing.

I’m still far more functional than I was for over a decade, and for them, that is more important than the level of depression and anxiety I’m feeling. I do worry that these will make me lose function – avoiding doing things and hermiting, being too lethargic and miserable to move most days – doesn’t make functioning very easy! The PTSD, I’m hardly even asking for help with that any more – trying instead to keep using my strategies and wait for the new psych appointment – finally – next week! It seems like I am haunted by the nightmares and the sense of horror  every waking, and not waking minute. There is no easy cure to any this, I wish there was. There is only really bearing it.  But I guess I have to just suck it up and hang on tight.

I’m feeling worse now, because I’m not running away any more. I ran so far, for so many years.  In the past, when the depression was this bad, I used to go out stomping across the city, counting everything I could possibly count – calories, steps, kilos lost, kilos to lose, grams of this and that to two decimal places, to block out everything else. Later, I would cut myself to bits. Or I would take an overdose and hope that this was it, it was all over now. Or I’d  purge until I was sure my stomach itself was going to come up. A lot of the time, I did all of the above, and still hadn’t escaped far enough from myself.

When I became bulimarexic, I would spin out of control – rushing around at top speed, in and out of shops, amassing as much food and other odds and ends (clothing, housewares, bits and bobs, most often gifts for other people) as I could afford and hold.  Stuff them all in the back of a taxi or struggle onto a bus,  and charge on home to binge and purge, binge and purge, collapse for a few hours of exhausted slumber, wake up and survey the mess and the things I’d bought that I neither needed or could afford. Taking them back to the shops was a good excuse to buy more food and repeat the whole thing again. And again, until the money was gone, or more likely, I collapsed in a heap.

Then, came depression so deep that I couldn’t move. I’d spend days in bed, blocking it all out.  Opening my eyes was painful and took too much energy. Life had too many problems to face and I just couldn’t cope with them – so I didn’t. I pretended I wasn’t there instead. I fell deeply into that dream world, the one that I wished dearly I could stay in. This lethargy was heightened because when I came down from whatever frantic phrase, I would always have lost all the weight I’d gained last hospital stay, plus interest, so I’d hit rock bottom like a lead bomb. In later years, I was still too sick on being discharged to even be able to go on that frantic spree, so I went straight home and to bed most times.  This would go on until one or both case managers came round to shovel me out of bed like one might shovel roadkill off a road – and ship me back for hospital admission number whatever.

It wasn’t a life. And I’m not surprised I wasn’t able to function at all. It shocks me how much pain I put myself through in order to avoid pain – even writing this sentence – it’s crazy! It’s like chopping off your whole arm because of a little scratch on your finger. (I know paper cuts can hurt like hell, but really?)

Thinking about this more – I’m sure this overreaction was because of FEAR of the pain – I find that the fear of things is often far worse than those things I feared.

Anyway – I’m now feeling things. Staying with it. The sky still hasn’t fallen, despite that ever-present feeling of doom approaching. I do still struggle with bingeing and purging, and with restricting – and this makes me feel like I haven’t made progress at all. That my weight maintenance and great bloods (this is a big deal for me) and actual ability to do things, are  flukes.  That at any moment it’s all going to come crashing down around me. I’m not just letting it happen – I’m trying to approach each meal as it comes. Trying to have meals, and then at night, trying  not to binge on anything I didn’t eat during the day that I was meant to. How I hate that word, “trying“. Every time I write it I wince.

It makes me think “not enough” immediately – another of the myriad problems all tangled up in this web of disorder. I’ve never been good enough, I’ve always felt like an imposter. My best efforts always fall short, I’m not trying hard enough, I’m just not enough. Except when it comes to my body and then I’m too much.

I never wanted to be slim, beautiful and vogue. I did want my dancer’s body back at one point – but that was more about my belief that weight gain had ruined my dancing rather than being sick from chaotic eating habits, and was aimed more at function than form. I never understood how people cared about “thinspiration”. I didn’t want to look like anyone else. I didn’t want to look like anyone at all – including myself.

I wanted to be gone. Nothing. Zero. Not size zero. ZERO. Not there. Not taking up ANY space. Not seen, not heard, not felt. GONE.

Because it wasn’t my body I couldn’t cope with. It was LIFE. And I was trying to opt out of life and all that I had to feel to be there, in any way possible.

These days, I am coming round to the fact that I can’t be ‘gone’ and still be alive. Rationally, it’s an easy thing to realise – if you aren’t here, you are dead, right? In my brain, despite the rational knowledge, the irrational ‘can be both’ line of thinking persists. As does most of the ED screwed-up-irrational-thinking. See Missy’s post for a good explanation of how her ED brain screws things up too. We know it ain’t true. It’s like always having to argue with a whinging, stubborn child who knows the rules, but wants his own way regardless. It’s another kind of ‘storm’ we must weather – and then wade through the lies to pick up and keep hold of the truths.

I now have a lot more wisdom and insight than I had back in those days. The dialogue (accusations and threats is more appropriate!) from my ED brain is still the same as the worst years – but now, I am able to tell the difference between ED brain thoughts and rationality. Not just that – but I’m getting closer to being strong enough to change what’s not right. One step at a time.

(Image from Facebook)

When it comes to life – I have to stay here. Take all that comes my way. Accept it. Tolerate it. Hang on tight. And trust that this too, will pass, and I can survive it.  Cause let’s face it, it hasn’t killed me yet, right?

So that’s it. For me, right now, it’s about -

• Weathering the storms. They will pass.
• Trusting my team, life, my body, the process.
• Not backing down when anxiety fights my ability to get out and engage in activities and socialisation.
• Using my strategies – mindfulness, acceptance, being in the present moment, distracting myself.
• Not fretting over the small things – keeping in mind the bigger picture, but
• Not trying to leap huge bounds instead of taking one small step at a time.
• Refuting lies – hanging on to the truth.
• Challenging myself constantly, and
• Remembering there is no failure – only the failure to try. 

In future blogs, I’m thinking of writing about my experiences as a long term patient of the public hospital system in Australia, specifically going through a psych ward ED unit. I’m wondering if there is anything in particular you might like me to write about in this context, or any other subject. Thank you

Finally, I just had to share this with you. I was google-image searching for pictures and came across this hilarious thing! Enjoy

(Image Source)

(Featured Image Source)

 

Living In A Bubble World, and Primary and Secondary Emotions.

First of all, it’s been such a lovely sunny Saturday! You would hardly believe it’s Winter here, it was quite warm outside. Shalimar has been soaking up the sunshine.

As you can see, she’s going to have to be careful, because soon she will not be able to roll back over again! She will be stuck, like a big cat-pat with four waving legs. What a belly!

I also managed to catch her red-pawed in the middle of waking me up from my afternoon nap. This is why sleeping in my household is never an easy thing.  Simon’s Cat could have been based on Shalimar.

Sleep for humans is a precious commodity around here. Sleep for cats, not so much. Food is too, now that I’ve gone back to feeding her just what she is supposed to eat and nothing more. I feel awful because she’s not happy about it – but I’d rather have her a bit bitchy and here for the long term than die early from not being healthy.

It was really interesting reading everyone’s comments about how their eating disorders affected their feeding of their pets. It sounds like food is a far  more complicated thing for many pets than ‘just eating’.  Like it is for us, I guess.

Food and eating isn’t actually my biggest struggle. Neither is my weight. They are huge problems for me, every single day, all day every day. But despite having an eating disorder they aren’t the biggest source of problems for me.

Emotions are.

Even when my eating disorder kept my emotions totally hidden away – they were a problem. The problem then was that I was denying them. And a legacy of my life-long habit of NOT facing up to how I feel is that when I do face my emotions – they are just too much for me to cope with.

OVERWHELMING.

Which sends me right back into blocking them out again – by starving them silent. By bingeing to create a ‘greater’ pain or filling up the emptiness. By purging to try and get them out of me. Exercising to beat them out of me, or (more often) to beat myself up.

Since as young as I can remember, I haven’t been able to stay in the present. I haven’t been able to cope in the world around me, and then with my own feelings. I only recently recognised that I’ve spent pretty much most of my life not even here. 

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A dear friend of mine wrote about her own life in an email, and mentioned two words – derealisation  and depersonalisation. I had an inkling of what they would mean – but looked them up anyway. It was another one of those ‘aha’ moments. I had words for something I have been doing all my life.

Derealization is a when the outside world is experienced as unreal to you personally, while depersonalization is unreality in one’s sense of self. Both of them are ways I have felt more often than I’ve felt ‘normal’ – whatever normal is –  because I haven’t a clue.

Since I was very little, I’ve created a ‘bubble’ around me, to protect myself, but more to just shut everything and everyone else out. My earliest memories are bubbled away. All that existed for me at times was myself and what was around me that I wanted to include. The world ‘out there’ wasn’t very realistic. It seemed far away and sometimes I ended up stuck in my ‘bubble’ – unable to break out and join in. Derealisation  as an adult still feels like I’m in my own bubble, but I don’t shut the entire world out. I’m able to interact with everyone else and go about my business, but it’s all a very long way away outside of me.

Depersonalisation feels like I am almost watching myself go through life, not quite there. Watching my life happen from outside of myself. Not standing a distance away – for me it’s as though two realities are superimposed one over the other, but not quite in sync so that  the images don’t quite match up. So I’m watching myself from very nearly the same place as I’m actually occupying – if that makes any sense.

Both these states have led to my entire life feeling dream-like. Either it’s been a nightmare, or a really nice dream I’d like to relive – or now, just not… real.

Depression being such a battle lately has been a bit harder for me to endure because of this. It’s hard to go through your life feeling depressed, but the distance from reality makes me feel far more like I’m underwater or unable to actually ‘touch’ the world around me.

I also talked about primary and secondary emotions with my case manager yesterday and that’s something I want to do a post about when I’ve read the handouts she gave me. It’s a new concept to me, even though it makes a lot of sense.

I’ve spent my life not feeling safe to show my real feelings. If I was happy, it might get taken from me. And I certainly wasn’t going to show people how much they had hurt me. So for lot of my life I cultivated a blank, emotionless exterior.

As a result of feelings not being ‘okay’, I have a lot of secondary emotions. An example might be feeling happy (primary emotion) but that’s not okay. So I feel ashamed, and that shame (secondary emotion) lasts a lot longer than the original feeling of happiness did. Shame is actually something that I seem to feel a LOT of the time, more than anything else, these days. It makes sense to me that I’m not really feeling shame all-the-time so much as my real feelings becoming feelings of shame.

Part of my struggle with self image and self hatred is tied to this overwhelmingly constant feeling of shame. I feel like I’m a terrible, horrible, monster of a person, like I should not even be in the same room as other people, lest I infect their lives somehow. I’m ashamed of my appearance, because I always just look so, so wrong. Ashamed of what I’ve done – what the ED has made me do. Things like being selfish, shoplifting food, bingeing and purging. That’s actually a HUGE source of shame for me – the bingeing and purging. I walk around all the time feeling so, so small and horrible and hoping the world won’t guess my horrible, disgusting secret. (image source)

So to realise that I feel shame automatically as a result of pretty much any emotion is a revelation for me! I find myself wondering how much of the shame I feel is ‘learnt’ and how much is actually real, pure legit shame? Growing up I felt a lot of shame from being dirty and unkempt and not having the things kids were supposed to have, and I was shamed more often than not by my own family. So now as an adult, I realise that my constant feelings of shame are something I have learnt to feel and that I could be a much happier and less shameful person if I work on those feelings. Working on them sounds like another constant challenge to add to the acceptance self-talk I’ve been doing –  to continually notice and accept my real feelings ( “I feel happy.” “I feel sad.” and so on) before it turns  into shame or whatever other emotion I feel secondarily.

I don’t know how or even if working on my primary and secondary emotions will help me feel less distant and more ‘here’,  but my case manager did say that it would help with the depression and that alone is more than enough to motivate me.

All this is very long winded and introspective – but that’s what I think is important when it comes to fighting our eating disorders – being able to look within and start to notice what’s really going on – so we no longer need to abuse our physical bodies because of it.

I would love to  hear your thoughts and experiences! 

Instead of Feeling, Instead of Dealing?

I think that for most of my life, the eating disorder and exercise in the form of striving to be a dancer has taken the place of staying with my feelings and with my reality – good and bad. In fact, I think this is a huge function of many people’s eating disorders and also could be true for people with addictions like alcohol, drugs, people who self harm.

I think eating disorders are a smoke screen. I’ve said this before, I know. I look back, and when I was hurting the most in my life, instead I turned to food and weight and ballet.

When the abuse at home and the bullying at school was out of control, I spent every waking hour practising my ballet. I even spent most of the night awake doing quiet exercises in bed or on the floor next to it. My mind was lost in the ballet music I imagined to keep time of each foot exercise or relevé or plié or pirouette. If I was too upset or too anxious or too angry I just counted in time. Counted to a thousand and started again, over and over.

I can see now that I was upset, angry, anxious, lost, scared. I can see that now. Back then, I remember thinking “How strong I am. You have hurt me every way you can, and still I do not show anything. You will not make me cry, you have made me stronger.” I didn’t realise that in fact, I was losing myself bit by bit, becoming stuck inside an armour that I built up bit by bit, then made thicker and stronger. An armour that protected me – but also trapped me. I now have to take  it off – bit by bit so that I can  replace it with real ways to cope.

Now that I’m in my thirties, I’ve noticed for the last couple of years that even though a lot of my feelings have been coming back (and this is scary as I don’t know what a lot of it even is!) I do not feel things anywhere near as intensely as I used to in my teens. I am wondering if any of you have found this, too? Maybe it has something to do with the cocktail of hormones that our bodies are producing at that age as we become adults. Things that used to be the ‘end of the world’ for me, don’t bother me anywhere near as much now.

Maturity is a factor, sure, but it’s not so much about my mind, how I am thinking – it’s FEELING. It’s stuff that doesn’t need words, stuff that can’t even be described with words sometimes. Feelings that could physically hurt. Grief that could leave me keening. Happiness that made me heady and ecstatic over simple little things like a teacher telling me I was doing well. Betrayal felt like being stabbed through the heart – physically. I feel all these things still, just not anywhere near that intensely. They don’t make  me feel like my heart will explode as they used to.

I wonder if things would have been different if back years ago, I’d had the insight I have now to recognise what I was doing? I did not know anything about eating disorders, so when I didn’t eat because of how I felt, or ate to make myself feel better, I didn’t think I was doing anything dangerous. I just couldn’t bear to do anything else right now. I’d eat later and make up for it, or deal with whatever was wrong later. Problem was that later I was too busy or felt as bad or the food was off. Also my mother was extremely controlling with food, and when I did not eat a battle would erupt, but when I wanted to eat, that wasn’t easy either.

I often feared having it found out that I did not eat my breakfast in the mornings or my lunch at school – throwing food in the bin seemed to get me caught out every time. The teachers would notice, or my older sister would tattle tale on me. Same for giving it away or swapping with others. So breakfasts were squished down the kitchen sink and uneaten lunches were crammed in on the way home, or left in my bag as I panicked about what to do with them. Too many times I was forced to eat something that was discovered because I had tried to throw it out, or it was just a few days old – really bad, rancid food. “Waste not, want not” was my mother’s mantra, and these experiences really turned me off against eating in general. Food was pushed on me or taken from me. Food was punishment. Food was comfort. Food was reward.

Food was not fuel.

On the other side of the coin, I was always hungry. I went full time as a ballet dancer at fourteen, suddenly going from every other night classes and my own practising to every single day – four or five hours of classes, a few hours of my own work in the studios between, before and after classes, and most of each night doing exercises.  Hunger really stepped up with all the extra movement, so when I wasn’t not eating, I wanted to eat everything in sight.

A particular treat became saving up $1.20 from finding the odd coin on the ground, and then going and buying a packet of jelly beans that I slowly dissolved in my mouth on the two hour journey home. It was my little secret, knowing that my mother would be furious about my ‘transgression’ but it was a mood lifter, somehow I always found enough money when I was feeling particularly low and so jelly beans have become forever linked with self-soothing.

After things imploded, I’d run away from home, found somewhere to live, fallen into the next nightmare and was struggling to cope, the link between food and soothing myself became even stronger.

Every single time that someone hurt me, instead of thinking about it or processing it, or asking for help – my mind did a big switcheroo to numbers. I constantly counted and recited lists of calories, carbohydrates and protein grams per 100g of foods in my head. I constantly planned days of intake in my mind, and how much of each fruit and vegie I would be allowed to two decimal points. I walked and walked and counted as I walked.

Surprisingly my ballet started to falter. I couldn’t leave my problems at the door any more. I was distracted, and that combined with feeling completely self conscious and hating myself and my body, meant that I was never ‘really there’. Looking back I see that a lot of the time I was actually dissociated. When you are nutritionally in trouble and dissociated you aren’t going to dance well. I was also missing classes because I was too distressed about my skin – my face had broken out like a pizza – my weight – I saw a michelin woman wobbling as I tried to dance among a roomful of sticks – and the depression was so debilitating that many days I just could not get out of bed any more. It ended in tears – me being kicked out of the performance strand.

This was the last straw, and from there I fell headfirst  into the  anorexia, and not long after that, into hospital for the first time of many, a cycle I was not to break out of for nearly fifteen years.  Dancing had been the last reason to stay alive, and it was gone.

Throughout my childhood there were offers of help and support. Teachers always seemed to pick up that home was not a good place – constantly they asked me why I was always late, always crying, always filthy dirty? Why didn’t I have tissues or a hanky when I had a cold leading to snotty sniffing and teasing? Why was I sent to school when so unwell? Why didn’t I have this or that necessary item for school? And more direct questions – what was going on at home? What did my mother do all day? How did she treat me? Where did we live, and who lived with us?And Was everything okay at home, you can talk to me any time? All questions I had been coached to answer, and I couldn’t even begin to think of saying Yes, please, I need help, things are unbearable. That they constantly hurt me or neglected me or made me feel awful about myself. They were my family, and I couldn’t turn them in, it would be the ultimate betrayal. And it must have been my fault any way for being so ‘bad’. Or I’d really cop it if I said something and it got back to them. If I was taken away by the child services I would be beaten up in the foster home.. all sorts of things I was scared of. So I declined help and support, insisted that everything was fine til I was blue in the face. And denied to myself that I wasn’t coping at all. 

We can spend our lives ‘running’ from what we can’t deal with for a long time, but not forever. Life has a way of forcing you to stop and face your own shit head on. In my case it was by breaking me down completely, bringing me to my knees in every possible way. I was completely captive to something that was killing me just because I could not face up to my troubles, and it came down to the choice to live or die – I couldn’t avoid this  choice any more by living in the limbo of denial that I’d been in for years. My body simply couldn’t survive any more. Either I started fighting to save myself, or I WOULD die.

And it’s hard. I don’t think there is a right way or a wrong way to deal with the past. I think there’s only YOUR way. There’s so much to learn, so much to admit to yourself. There’s accepting what happened. Accepting that you are a mess. Accepting that you need help. Getting off your high horse and realising it won’t kill you to stop pretending you are fine, but it’s sure going to kill you to keep on doing it. Dignity can be so overrated.

So here I am, I came to the crossroads and I chose the uphill path. Chose the path I should have taken every time I came to this crossroads before, every time I insisted “No, I know that’s not the way I need to go, THIS way is” despite having been down that path before and coming to the cliff edge that it led to, requiring me to go back. I wore that path bare with my constant cycling. And now, I stepped off it. 

I don’t know if I’ll be okay from here. But I do know I have a chance to be, now.

Can you see ways that you have used unhelpful ways to cope with feelings or escape from reality in the past? Do you still do this now?

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Kath’s Wisdom On Tackling ED Bit By Bit.

A couple of days ago, I reblogged Surviving Anorexia’s post about how our eating disorders (or whatever coping mechanisms are your way) are our armour, that they do serve a purpose for us, and that when it comes to taking that armour off, we need to do it one bit at a time. Because it’s too overwhelming leaving ourselves totally unprotected and floundering with no new ways of coping to fill in the gaps left by it!

Two of my readers had a really insightful conversation in the comments section – Gel  and Kath of My Funny Little Life discussed how one would go about peeling that armour off bit by bit – how do you tackle a little bit of your eating disorder at a time? I know I’ve always been an ‘all or nothing’ type person, and I know I’m not alone here – so just changing a little bit of something is actually quite a challenge

I was blown away reading this comment of Kath’s, and just as I replied to her saying I wished I could reblog her entire comment, I saw an email from her suggesting the same thing. Great minds hey? I don’t know about that – I totally think Kath is in a class of her own when it comes to that

I’ll let you read her wise words for herself.   

Okay, I’ll try to write a helpful response to this. 

From what you write, I read that you tried to tackle the ED mostly on the behavioral level: stopping the bingeing and purging by means of self-control and discipline. I’ve tried that many, many times, and always failed. I used to make “healthy eating plans” for myself (like, 1800 cals a day, nicely dispersed on several balanced meals), and the longest time I managed to stick with them was 5 weeks. Those were some of the most terrible weeks of my whole life, because I was at the edge of a panic attack 24 hours a day, and my allergy symptoms skyrocketed. (This was before I knew about my allergies, and I ate lots of “healthy” whole grain bread and dairy products.) When I couldn’t bear it anymore, I would always throw my well-meant plans out of the window and return to my chaotic eating patterns, immediately feeling emotional relief.

An ED is so much more than what you can see at the behavioral level! It also manifests itself at the level of thoughts and feelings. Looking for ED functions is a very good idea. For me, the main functions were these:

-emotion regulation: obsessing about food and being busy with ED rituals keeps emotions at bay
-stress regulation: if everyting got too much, I could just “give” myself into the ED, and didn’t have to pull myself together anymore (temporarily)
-tolerance of unpleasant body feelings: feeling “clean” after purging or by not-eating
-self-esteem: “I’m more valuable when I’m thin”
-general coping: “I’ll feel better when I lose some more weight”
-security needs: tragically true, but the more I got used to living with an ED, the more it gave me a feeling of security, because I knew what to expect

So you can already see some other things that are part of the ED armor: unpleasant emotions and feelings, dysfunctional coping strategies, self-esteem and body-image issues, insecurity in life, plus dysunctional thoughts, like the ones you described (I call them mind monsters): “I’ll never bear life when I don’t have the ED as an outlet” / “I’ll lose my mind and go up the walls” / “I won’t make it anyway, so I’ll just give up” / “I can have some more binges and purges before I stop ultimately” etc etc. These parts of the armor have to be put down as well, besides the behavioral changes.

What has helped me to tackle the ED at its multiple levels of manifestation were these things:

- mindfulness meditation: a meditation technique that works without a mantra, just by focusing on your breathing, and letting thoughts and feelings pass by without judging them (sounds easy but is not, haha) – this has helped me incredibly with emotion and stress regulation (I still don’t do longer sessions but countless short – a few seconds or minutes – practices during the day, to keep the bad stuff from building up, and I couldn’t bear doing longer sessions at first anyway)
– mindful eating: eating as an active mindfulness practice, i.e. doing nothing but eating your food and experiencing it with all your senses (how it looks, smells, tastes, etc) – *crucial* for me to develop a good relationship with food and eating again, although it was *very* hard in the beginning (I couldn’t do it longer than for the first one or two bites and then needed to turn on my laptop and read while eating, but it got better within a couple of weeks) – DON’T EAT WHILE DOING OTHER THINGS!
– learning to enjoy a moment and activities: mainly by means of mindfulness (see above)
– starting activities to improve crappy body feelings: everything that makes you feel more comfortable in your body is fine, but it should not be related to or aiming at weight reduction – for me: yoga, walks in the nature to catch sunlight and fresh air, bubble baths, sauna, massages, gym (I still have to work on the gym)
– improving self-esteem: learning or doing something that you find valuable and that is *not* ED related (for me: piano, now also guitar, and I’m starting to learn improvisation, songwriting, and composition – so everything that has to do with music, this also serves emotion and stress regulation purposes)
– social life: spending time with friends or family (people you like and who like you as you are and make you feel good when being in their company), also internet friends (great support for me to exchange thoughts with these lovely girls  )
- time management: setting aside me-time (schedule it if necessary!), planning breaks, organizing unstructured time (evenings) by filling it with (planned) activities or relaxing time
– joyful activities: necessary to make your life worth living and to have something to look forward to – you’ll have a lot of spare time when you don’t engage in your ED, so you need something to do in that time (I find it helpful to do something creative, other people like gardening or so)
– changing my diet: since my ED behaviors are triggered by feeling unwell in my body, it was crucial that I learned about my allergies and sugar addictions, and stay away from those foods to get better – this means no dairy, no soy, no grains (except a little brown rice on occasion), generally carbohydrate-reduced, very little sugar, balanced meals with lots of veggies, protein, healthy fats
– cooking: related to changing my diet, because I can’t rely on what I get so easily, and have to prepare most things myself, and this has helped me as well to develop a good relationship with food again, and to see it as something nourishing and a source of energy – it also helped me to do something good for myself by putting effort and devotion into creating a meal
– being a friend to yourself: being kind with yourself and forgiving relapses and imperfections, caring for yourself and saying nice and encouraging things to yourself – imagine you were a good friend of yourself, and then treat yourself accordingly

I guess there are more things, but those are the ones that come to my mind at first. If you work on those things, you gradually deprive the ED of its functions. The idea is to build up alternative behaviors that serve the same funcions, but not in a destructive way. Then, it gets easier to tackle the behaviors.

But of course, the behaviors are still there. The strategy is to reduce the relevance of those behaviors to the minimum, so in the end there’s nothing left, no function, just plain, conditioned (during many years of “practice”) behaviors. Finishing off the rest of them *still* is a challenge, but much less of a challenge when those behaviors are the only ones that help you to get through your day. The last step is absolute and honest ACCEPTANCE – acceptance that there will be fear, there will be insecurity, there will be unpleasant emotions and body feelings. If you embrace and anticipate that, you’re equipped for what is actually to come, and you won’t be surprised anymore. You should learn to (literally) sit through those feelings from mindfulness practice.

Another thing you can do (a strategy my therapist has told me, and it works well with anxiety in general) is not to get carried away into an anxiety spiral by your thoughts and worries! The trick is to draw your attention on your *body* as soon as you feel the slightest sign of anxiety, away from your mind. It’s crucial to do that as early as possible, before the anxiety is getting too big, because then the chances are the greater that you can calm the anxiety down. Go through your whole body and try to locate where the anxiety is (in your stomach, your throat, your chest, etc), and how it feels there (tense, pulsing, etc). Then look for parts of your body where no anxiety is (if it’s just your ear lobes or the tip of your nose – anxiety is never in your whole body), and observe how it feels there. By doing so, the anxiety should already decrease. You can then actively try to carry the feeling from the non-anxiety regions of your body into the others, so you decrease the size of the anxiety regions starting at the periphery. The goal is *not* to reduce the anxiety to zero, but reduce it to a level that you can bear and that doesn’t trigger you into ED behaviors.

Just be aware that all of this is a process that takes time, and it won’t be linear. You’ll have relapses, and it won’t always be easy. The impulses to binge and purge will still be there, but you can learn not to act on them anymore, and then they’ll get less. And it won’t work every day, but the important thing is that it *does* work, and things get better overall. And it’s possible to get out of it completely.

Also, this is written from my personal perspective, and your way may look different. But probably you find something helpful in this response.

I think Kath’s insight is amazing and I’m so thankful that she’s shared it with us – top points from me. This has been one of THE all time most helpful things I’ve ever read about challenging the eating disorder behaviours – not by ripping them away and leaving yourself vulnerable, wide open to all you found it hard to cope with before, and without any positive strategies in place to take it’s place, but by working as much on what you are ADDING to your life as you are on what you are taking away! How many of us have the idea that our eating disorder is something we have to ‘stop doing’? I know this is how I’ve seen it for a long time. But it’s more important to build up your life, build up your supports, your activities, your coping strategies, your hobbies and passions, build up a foundation to keep you steady when this disease – something that HAS had a very real function for you in your life – is gone.

I hope you all found this as helpful as I have. Any thoughts?  

And thank you to Kath for her smiley pictures! I couldn’t help but add a little bit of her unique flair to this post