Born This Way? Trigger – Self Harm talk.

First I’d like to say thank you – so much support and kindness has been poured out to me through this blog and your comments. Your words DO make a difference.

Today I thought I’d just do a quick, short post – or my version of short, which seems to be other people’s version of ‘normal length!’

Reading Gel’s recent update on her chicks, and how they are adapting to being able to go outside after being weaned inside – I had a sudden light-bulb moment.

Gel’s chicks have never had a chicken ‘mamma’. Instead, Gel is their mamma. And she’s done a good job. But Gel can never teach them chook things like a chicken mamma could. Like dust-bathing. Dust-bathing seems to be a behaviour that chickens are born just ‘knowing’. It’s natural to them. It keeps their plumage looking good, and free of mites (and looks like fun, too!)

Let’s have a bit of a demonstration here!

 

What does this have to do with my blog?

Well, nobody taught Gel’s chicks to dust-bathe. They just instinctively did it. They were born with the instinct to perform those behaviours.

The first time I ever self harmed, I didn’t know that people even did such thing. I’d never heard or read about it, I had never encountered the term ‘self harm’. The closest I had come to that, was knowing that people did commit suicide – and thinking of wrist slicing – but apart from actually actively trying to kill oneself, I never imagined that anyone would harm themselves on purpose.

I still don’t understand what led me to do it. If I remember correctly the trigger was piercing my finger on the sharp edge of a tin and seeing the blood. But I don’t think I will ever understand how from that, I had the idea of actually causing harm to myself.

It freaked me out! And I hid it. From that day on, long sleeves became part of my daily clothing. Nobody would have ever known, had I not at some stage blurted it out to a counselor at uni. I was freaked out by what I was doing and asked her if I was crazy. To my shock and surprise, she calmly asked me how many stitches I had needed! I hadn’t needed medical care – I only scratched at that point – but to realize other people did that nearly blew my mind.

I wonder, looking back, why that lady didn’t bother to seize on that admission as a way in and ask me what was actually wrong. She brushed it off as though people did all the time and we never spoke of it again. It went secret again for years until it got to the point where I had to get stitches and no longer could keep it hidden.

Likewise, nobody ‘taught’ me to starve or not drink enough. It’s a behaviour that came naturally too, aside from my mother’s own abuse of food as punishment, I remember feeling some sort of inability to eat despite being ravenous and liking the food at age 4, and hiding the food to get out of eating it. At 5, I had weekly IV’s due to being so severely dehydrated from my refusal to drink, even when it was a green rehydration solution that I actually quite liked.

I was a very ‘goody-two-shoes’ sort of kid, so I wasn’t doing it to be ‘bad’ or to get attention. I only wanted to please my mother. Refusing to eat or drink definitely accomplished the opposite of that. So it wasn’t something I was doing because I wanted to, either.

I do think that many of us are born genetically ‘wired’ to develop these behaviours. I believe I was born with the eating disorder, which in turn, was then triggered by events during my life. It’s also been found that starvation can itself trigger an eating disorder – and I can see that being possible since I had a history of difficulties from childhood.

Maybe eating disorders are leftovers from a day when we needed to adapt to survive times of famine? I think  Shan Guisinger‘s  theory is very interesting.

From Adapted to Flee Famine: Adding an Evolutionary Perspective on Anorexia Nervosa:

Anorexia nervosa (AN) is commonly attributed to psychological conflicts, attempts to be fashionably slender, neuroendocrine dysfunction, orsome combination ofthese factors. Considerable  research reveals these theoriesto be incomplete. Psychological and societalfactors accountforthe decision to diet but not for the phenomenology of the disorder; theories of biological  defects fail to explain neuroendocrine findings that suggest coordinated physiological mechanisms. This article presents evidence that AN’s
distinctive symptoms of restricting food, denial of starvation, and hyperactivity are likely to be evolved adaptive mechanisms that facilitated ancestral nomadic foragers leaving depleted environments; genetically susceptible individuals who lose too much weight may trigger these archaic adaptations. This hypothesis accounts for the occurrence of AN-like syndromes in both humans and animals and is consistent with changes observed in the physiology, cognitions, and behavior of patients with AN.

Also check out a letter she wrote to Harriet Brown – some good reading.

I’d love to know what you think!

Honesty Amidst Setbacks

I find it incredibly difficult to be completely honest about how I’m really going. Especially on such a public forum as this blog.

There are perhaps a couple of people I’m always totally honest with – and that is because they are part of my treatment team. Being honest with them is obvious to me. They can’t help  me unless they know what’s happening! Scarily enough there are many people with eating disorders who cannot be honest with their treatment team – in fact, it seems to be very common in the earlier stages of being so unwell, or when the person is lacking in insight. Insight makes a huge difference in this fight – being able to understand that you are unwell, and why, and that the people around you are trying to help you, not persecute you.

It’s quite obvious in the blog world, actually, to come across people who blog about their supposedly ‘healthy lives’, but don’t have the insight to acknowledge the elephant in the room, their eating disorder – and the fact that they are becoming more and more unwell and more people every day are speaking out in concern for them. I can never understand some of these people when they so blatantly ignore the concern and pretend they are fine, or worse, they are well - and it’s often hard to find respect for them. There are so many people, especially younger and more vulnerable people – who read these sites and take on board the messages these sick bloggers are putting out there. If there is one thing I would absolutely loathe myself for, it would be inadvertently causing or triggering someone else’s eating disorder.

But despite it being so easy for me to stand in judgement – we often forget that eating disorders are by nature, an illness in where the person suffering from it often lacks that insight or is in heavy denial. That they often act in ways that infuriate, irritate, frustrate, people around them. That deceit is a classic behavior  born of shame and fear and the need to hang on to their disorder. Being sick doesn’t make someone bad. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve been thought of and told that I was a bad person, because I was too unwell to just eat and keep it down and behave. And I would have done anything at those times to ‘behave’ so that I could stop hurting, worrying or frustrating people – I tried with all my heart to do that. It wasn’t something I was capable of doing at that stage.

One of the main reasons I find it so difficult to be honest with people about how I’m really going, is deep shame. Long before I had the foggiest notion that I actually had an eating disorder, I saw people with anorexia on current affairs shows on TV and just was heartbroken for them, and frightened for them that they were so fragile and that they would die – and I couldn’t understand at all why they were doing that to themselves. It shocked me to think they had actually chosen to do that to themselves and then to continue to do so in the face of imminent death and the pleas of their loved ones. I just could not get my head around it.  I thought they were also incredibly vain, to be killing themselves to just be skinny – I didn’t even see the appeal of being skinny. All my life, I had found skinny quite ugly. Instead, I strived to be strong, and to be able to dance. I was extremely proud of being able to dance at the level that I had gotten to, and at what my body could do. Even as a young child, It had been obvious to me that the worst dancers in my class were the skinny girls, who just couldn’t get anything right and always looked gangly and out of place. Conversely, the biggest girl was also the best dancer and always front and centre. She was bouncy and full of energy and personality.

And I have to admit – I thought they were brats. Sick, scared, lost, hurting brats, but brats nonetheless. I thought they were selfish. I thought they were manipulating everyone who cared for them in order to get attention and mollycoddling. I truly did.

So when I finally had to admit just after my first hospital admission for anorexia (spent protesting that I had needed to lose the weight and that I wasn’t at all like the ‘real anorexics’) that I had anorexia too, it brought incredible shame and disbelief down on me. I couldn’t believe I had an eating disorder. I who had been overcome with fury when other class mates had whispered “That’s what Fiona has” during a biology class discussion about anorexia, who had disgustedly retorted “that’s what spoilt vain brats do, and I would never do something that stupid” had indeed, done exactly that. Talk about irony!

Now I know better. I know that’s not true at all. I’ve never wanted the attention having an eating disorder has brought me. And I didn’t have anyone to mollycoddle me – my family has never cared. My dad, when he tracked me down a few years into my hospital admissions, tried his best, even offered initially for me to move in with them in the Far North – but I was too scared to, at that stage he was a complete stranger to me. And I didn’t want to impose on him and his family. I didn’t want to bring my problems into their world, they didn’t deserve that. He persevered with me – and I stayed with him a week or two here and there over the eight years I knew him – it was such a blessing and a privilege to be given a second chance at having a real family. I loved my stays with them – I was made welcome, treated with kindness and respect, and my little sister was always all over me which warmed my heart – I loved her dearly. (Still do.)

Unfortunately, despite wanting more than anything else to be able to just ‘stop’ being unwell when I was with them, I couldn’t. I tried so hard! I usually lasted at best a few days. In those years, I wasn’t even really able to eat ‘normal’ food, so great was my fear, so I usually had my own food and created meals to eat with them, mostly dinner meals. I tried to make these meals look large and as close to ‘normal’ as I could – hoping that my family would just think I had other preferences and was feeding myself satisfactorily and not worry or be sad that I couldn’t enjoy some of their delicious meals. I wanted them to believe I was happy. I didn’t want them to worry at all. I failed.

A huge pile of lettuce, tomatoes, cucumber, and a million carrots (nibbled mostly during the evenings when I just badly wanted to EAT everything in sight) does not look like a good nutritious meal to anyone. Neither does a pile of brown, terribly overcooked cabbage. I only fooled myself. It was plainly apparent to anyone that I was sick, and even when I wasn’t staying with them, my dad worried. He would phone me (in the days I was still trying to communicate via phone) and ask me how I was doing, and I’d tell him I was going okay, hanging in there. Unfortunately he could tell just by my voice that I wasn’t well at all, he later told me, and instead reached out to someone he thought was a friend of mine – who had given him her details at a time he’d visited me in hospital and she had been there. She wasn’t a friend – I thought she was too for a while, she turned out to be an enemy – she fed my dad the nastiest of lies – told him my eating disorder was to hurt him, to ‘get back at him’ for not being around when I was younger. That it was for attention. That I was dying, when I was very sick but definitely not on my death bed (she also tried to force me to make a will once visiting me – and got promptly kicked out, who does that?!) She also contacted my sister, who was in her very early teens at the time, perhaps even a tween still at that stage – this forty-something year old (really)parent’s basement-dwelling woman, friended a kid. And fed her lies about me too. Told her that if I loved her, really loved her, I wouldn’t be doing this to myself, and that my dad died of cancer – melanoma – because of the stress I had caused him.

I have deeply regretted that I wasn’t honest with my dad about how I was really going, no matter how unwell I was. If I was honest, he wouldn’t have felt the need to ask someone else how I really was, and he might never have been fed such a pack of lies that probably coloured his views of his own daughter, nor would my little sister have been fed the lies that led to her gradually hating me more and more until the last straw was me actually doing something deplorable – shoplifting binge food and getting caught on the morning of dad’s funeral – for which she cannot forgive me. She hates my guts now. What’s more, I just reinforced the lies by what I did. Shoplifting is the thing I hate perhaps most about me. I haven’t done it for a while now – but I haven’t let my guard down and I never will. There have been so many times in my life that I have stopped, for years sometimes – and then fallen down that hole again. The urge to grab food is always, always so strong, even more so when I’m upset, stressed, unwell and definitely, hungry. And the bingeing and purging is the most horrible thing ever, I wish with all my heart I’d never started down that road, a road I feel unable to break free from now. I would never have struggled as much as I have, and I would never have shoplifted food – something so, so wrong to me.

I fear judgement so much. All my life, I have been harshly judged, by my own family, and by society. My own family (apart from dad) never made any attempts to understand me. When I got out of there  they didn’t know me. They had had nearly 17 years living with me from my birth to get to know me – and they didn’t have a clue. This was because they simply did not care.

Everything in my life was something I was judged for. My mother spent my life berating me for all the good things she did do for me – telling me endlessly that if only she didn’t ‘have’ to take me to ballet, the car wouldn’t be wearing out, she’d have more money for other things, she would have more time to spend with my brother and sister. She would have been able to finish her studies and be working now. She would have been a successful artist. She would have fixed our filthy, unfinished house up.  It didn’t matter that she took me to ballet perhaps 3 times a week, which took about 2 – 3 hours at a time tops. That is not the lions’ share of the week. She had all day that we were at school to be an artist, to do her schoolwork, to clean up or fix things and so on – and she instead would sit around watching soapies on TV or working on the growing pile of receipts she kept to create another bill to send our dad of money she wanted to demand from him. She spent all day with my older sister who was home all day too, they were like best girlfriends rather than  mother and daughter. She had time to take my brother to soccer and martial arts and basketball. They weren’t starving for attention or time with her.

The last couple of years I lived there she didn’t even have to take me to ballet or pay a cent for me aside from absolute basics – food and clothing. My ballet was paid for by scholarships and sponsorships I’d won, and I got myself there using public transport. My days were long – a school day for me was up at 5am, chores, breakfast, cold bath, try to iron dry damp clothes I had to wear. Catch bus at 5.55am. Transfer to train, for nearly an hour. Transfer to another bus to school. We started dancing at 8am with Limber, followed by usually ballet class, then jazz or tap or repertoire or pointe or contemporary or something else afterwards. I danced during the class breaks, and danced afterwards til everyone had showered so that I was in there mostly alone to avoid the bullying that was happening all those years. Showered and caught our bus to school to begin academic work at about 2pm, going through til 4.30pm. Then reversing the transport home, at 6.30pm where there were more chores, homework, and endless family battles to navigate. I would practice most nights and end up either lying in bed all night exercising or falling asleep at about 3am at my desk, to repeat the next day. This was six days a week, there was no time for me to get a job and between the ages of 14 to 16, I was still extremely immature and probably wouldn’t have been able to find anyone to employ me anyway. (I did try – volunteering during my holidays and canvassing local businesses for work with my resume.) My mother, who was paid a single parent pension, an allowance for me for my disabilities, and maintenance from dad – refused to supply most basics for me aside from food – and very cheap food at that, usually buying food for the family and cheaper food just for me. She even refused to buy me a school uniform, and the school supplied me with one out of their spares cupboard, kept for accidents, four sizes too big and stained. One of my school teachers helped me tape the fronts of my shoes together and paint over the tape so they stayed on my feet. I also tried to keep my shoes together by nailing nails into the sole from the inside – and ended up walking painfully on them all day as they worked themselves upwards. (And I was grateful – it was a uniform, just like everyone else had.)

My point is, my mother was not only needlessly cruel, she seemed to blame everything on me. I was just a kid, and one who had been tightly controlled too, so that I was very emotionally immature, and she was my mother. My PARENT, who was meant to feed me, clothe me, look after me. Instead, she taught me that I was some horrible, unworthy and inherently wrong creature not worthy of what other people took for granted, and the bullying I suffered due partly to  my constant scruffiness (especially during ballet school where most of the others were from affluent backgrounds) and partly due to my ineptness socially, just reinforced this. I grew up deeply ashamed of myself as a person in every way.

My own family never cared enough to really find out who Fiona was, and they made it clear I wasn’t even worthy of being understood or accepted,  and so they certainly didn’t even try to learn about or understand eating disorders. They believed every stereotype there was – to them, my eating disorder was a sign of me being the spoilt naughty selfish girl they’d always told me I was. In later years they accused me of using a ‘made up illness’ to basically be a lazy bludger, never working, never achieving anything but sponging off the taxpayer, and this stung deeply. They of all people, knew how hard a worker I was, and how I surpassed all expectations, winning a local Australia day award among other acknowledgements for my striving and perseverance. They used their words and their cruelty to basically ally themselves with the eating disorder and strip me of the last vestiges of self – invalidating my past, and stripping me of even being able to hang on to knowing I was a hard worker and an achieve who was capable of better things than this, or that it wasn’t laziness that had stopped me in my tracks. That my whole life hadn’t all been a complete failure.

It makes sense to me that if your own family judges you so harshly, what can you expect from people who don’t know you? I went straight from leaving home into the arms of the man who raped and stalked me for years. It was a very familiar situation for me – and it felt like all I deserved. I’ve met quite a number of people who were more than happy to feed my insecurities like the so-called ‘friend’ who lied to my dad and little sister, and a certain number of ignorant people who don’t seem to realize that not everyone is born with the privileges they take for granted, that some of us have to really fight to even survive let alone enjoy the milestones that they are assured of achieving. In my own heart, I feel like the biggest failure ever, I reflect on my life and see missed opportunities, on so much hard work thrown away, and so much support and belief from people I failed in some way – let down, failed to meet their expectations, or cut off. I feel as though at 35, I haven’t even achieved as much as most teenagers have, and that there is no way I will ever be able to catch up to them, let alone those of my own age group.

I’m just so deeply ashamed.

I’m reminded constantly by those who have taken the time to get to know me, and who genuinely care, that I have come a long way, that I can’t afford to compare myself with anyone else, because nobody else has had to fight the same things I have in my life – same as there are so many people out there who have faced circumstances I have no idea of and for me to judge them on their face value at any point of time that I come in contact with them would be so wrong, and totally belittling how much they HAVE achieved – just in a life completely different and therefore with different milestones and measures of progress to mine. And yet, I am so scared of others judging me harshly and finding me a failure, a loser, that I judge myself the most harshly of all.

And here is where honesty comes into the equation – I’m already ashamed of the fact that I have an eating disorder. My shame when I am struggling more than usual or I relapse is many times greater than that. Throw in the harsh judgement towards people with eating disorders that I often come across online, particularly if they blog about it, and the shame of having fallen from my position of being able to say “Here I am, I am proof that a chronic severe eating disorder doesn’t have to kill you or mean you can’t turn things around.” and most importantly of all – “There is hope” – and it’s extremely hard to face up to people and be honest with you all about the fact that I’m not doing all that well any more.

I don’t consider myself to be fully in relapse – but I’m borderline. I’ve slowed down, perhaps stopped the weight loss, but I can’t seem to get it to go back up again – and what’s more, am sitting just above what used to be my discharge weight from hospital back when times were bad. And as always, ED brain has taken over – I struggle to keep hydrated, struggle to eat, struggle with bingeing and purging. Physically I have lost a lot of strength and the chronic pain I worked so hard to rid myself of is plaguing me again. And I’m so angry at myself – I know how hard I worked to get where I was – and now, I’m no better than I was on leaving hospital during those bad  years again. I am so disappointed in myself, and so scared not only for myself, but more so, for Shalimar. What if I get so sick again, what will become of her? I don’t want to send her back to the pet motel all the time – she’s getting old now. She deserves so much better than this. And I don’t want to miss out on sharing a single moment of her life with her. I missed too much of her life when I was in hospital. I’ve let her down, most of all. She depended on me and I am not living up to those responsibilities.

And I’ve let you down, the people who read my blog. It was supposed to be a journey of hope, reclaiming a LIFE, of proving that just because everyone has expected you to die, doesn’t mean you have to.

Here is where I am going to take on board my own message. I am going to believe in hope, and I am going to remind myself that it is always within our power to change our behaviors and our thoughts, if we desire to enough. The more I walk on my chosen trail in a forest, the more worn and visible that trail becomes, and the less visible the trail I’m no longer walking on becomes as nature reclaims it and grows over where it used to be. Same with my mind – the more I practice new ways to think and new behaviors, the more natural they become to me, and the less natural the old ones will be, too. It’s called creating new neural pathways. It’s also called not giving up, being stubborn, and fighting to live – all things true of me.

I have so much to live for – even more now. I have less than two months to go until I am officially a uni student again. And I’m finally realizing that my hopes and dreams and goals these days  might be vastly different, but they are still things I’m able to be passionate about, and my life still can be for good, rather than have been pointless.

I’m not going to live up to the expectations of the people who taught me I would never be anything more than a loser.

I’m going to fulfil my own expectations – and those of the people who truly care and want the best for me. I’m going to fight and make this life truly count.

Thank you for reading, I hope to be able to bring a more positive post next time.

 

(Image sources: 1, 2)

Deep In A Hole

I’ve fallen into a hole since I got home from my holiday. A hole I can’t seem to climb out of – although I’ve never stopped fighting to escape it.

I suppose that what goes up, must come down. The holiday was such a high for me. I didn’t want to come back to my life. I couldn’t keep the eating disorder out of the holiday completely, but it was still a break, such a refreshing break. A glimpse of what could be a much better life to live.

I have come to believe that even though I still am adamanant that people do and can recover from eating disorders, depression, and other mental illnesses, I am not one of them. Depression is something I have fought in all my living memories – and was first diagnosed with at age 9, after I supposedly wrote a suicide note. It’s as much an organic part of me as my brown hair and my hazel/green eyes are. And like my eyes used to be blue, and my hair used to be white-blonde – I have hoped that as I grew older and wiser, the nature of the depression would change.

In many ways, it has. Twenty years ago, every emotion I felt threatened to burst me, inside out like a sausage splitting on the barbecue. I could not contain that pain, or that ecstacy when things were going right for me. Betrayal felt like literally being speared through the gut with a knife. These days, that has mellowed to some extent. The highs and lows are still excruciating – but they usually do not feel like they are physically killing me. Usually.

Because there are still times I could claw my own skin to shreds with the agony of it – and lately it’s been a lot like that. I’ve resisted, lying still under the heavy covers on my bed, pretending I’m buried under cool dark earth, contained, unable to hurt myself. Unable to be found or hurt by others either. But shards of anxiety and piercing distress still worm their way through the earth to nibble at me, relentlessly. I open my mouth to scream and eat dirt.

It hurts. Depression hurts. It feels like more than a human being can bear.

My eating disorder is intricately linked to the depression – it does make it harder to fight, when you cannot even bear to be. It’s easy to stop caring whether you live or not, or wish you would just die now and get it over with. It’s easy to forget there are so many reasons to live, so many people who are everything to you, that you have a beautiful cat who adores you nearly as much as you adore her, that your life is much better now, so much better than it was twenty years ago, and it’s getting a little bit better all the time, slowly but surely. It’s easy to forget that depression always ends. It will always get better. I know that, because I have been through it so many times before – and it always did get better. My question is – how do I make it stay better?

There is no easy way out for me. I’ve lost friends to suicide in the past, and it hurt so much to lose them – still hurts so much, more than it hurt to lose people through other means in many cases. I swore I would never put anyone through that myself – and never again attempted to kill myself. In the past couple of weeks, two people who were dear friends of dear friends of mine – have killed themselves. And witnessing the grief my dear friends are experiencing – is a reminder of my vow. I cannot cause this pain to another person. No matter how much pain I am in, myself.

Life has been all about pain for me. In many ways, I’ve courted it. As a dancer, more pain meant I was working harder and therefore becoming a better dancer. As a daughter and sister living through domestic abuse, as a student being bullied, and as the victim of the man who raped me, I bore it expressionlessly because I didn’t want to give them the satisfaction of knowing they had hurt me. And it reminded me that I was still alive, despite them. As someone with an eating disorder, I cannot remember a time without pain, physical or emotional – it is my every moment’s reality. I think I would not know what to do with myself were I not in pain of some kind.

But no matter how great my tolerance is to it, that does not mean it is not eating me away inside and damaging my ability to live.

These days, much of the pain I feel is from the past abuses. I wish it would go away, shut up already. Get out of my life! I’m free now. I’ve been free of them for ages. My life is my own to live now. To live as I believe, without hiding or changing myself so as not to draw more violence. To discover who I am, and be true to that person for once. I have rejected the past and the people who were part of it, and moved on. Except the pain didn’t cooperate and my days are haunted, I relive the violence and the taunting constantly. And I fall into holes of despair.

I’m working with the best therapist I’ve ever met. I have hope we are going to get through this. I just don’t know if I can hang on until we get through this. And I don’t know if it’s possible to ‘get through this’ and have it go away for good.

Do you believe that the pain from the past, can be over and left behind permanently? How did you manage to do this, if  you have?

If you or someone you know is suicidal, please get help now. 

Lifeline Australia

Suicide Help UK

Suicide and Crisis Hotlines USA

(image source)

Ugly Beauty Whinge

My eating disorder is an ugly beast of an illness. It’s made me old, dried out my skin and hair, ruined my teeth. Sucked my bones of nutrients, damaged my organs, and stolen the light from my eyes, the smile from my lips.

When I’m acutely ill, there is absolutely no point in painting my face, or dressing with style. Instead I dress to camoflague a body that shocks and disgusts and incites passerby to stare and spit. I don’t believe that clothes  ’look better on the hanger’ than on a fleshed body – as many claim they do – but the hanger sure beats my body. My body makes clothing ugly.

I don’t want to stand out in any way. I seek to hide. To slip by unnoticed. The hell I live is beyond the imagination of most who haven’t been there, and I don’t want them to glimpse my shame and despair, lest I infect them in some way – pull them in and drown them with me.

It is not a glamourous life.

I have quite a number of friends with eating disorders, severe eating disorders, just like mine, who have modelled, or do still model. Or aspire to model. I see their facebook pages every day – I see the continuous stream of photographs. Smiling, laughing, posed to perfection.

Here the wind whips my hair. Here I shake my hair as I laugh joyously. There I sink my teeth into a huge dribbling wedge of melon. I sip delicately from a glass of wine, or twirl on pointe shoes. I am glamourous in evening gown, or I’m an adorable pixie in a summery dress that shows off every single rib. Even in the dark emo shots, I am a glorious ethereal creature. Everyone wants to be me. 

Yes, even me. I have lived with my eating disorder for most of my life.  I know first hand the utter hell they live, even without having read their cries of utter distress on a daily basis – and yet, I want their lives so badly. I want to look like that. To be so beautiful. So glamourous, so perfect. To have people want to photograph me, to make inspirational posters from my own likeness. I want to look amazing in every single thing I wear no matter whether it is a hessian sack or there not be much more than bones to hang it on. I want to go to parties.. and I hate parties, I freaking hate them.

We are fighting the same illness – and yet we are so completely different. I know the majority of this I see is a sham – it’s a mask. A carefully maintained and perfected facade that hides the fact that these girls have shattered bodies, shattered dreams, shattered lives and shattered psyches. There are many ways of hiding – hiding in full view can be as successful as being completely out of sight.

I don’t understand these girls. And I doubt they understand me. But they make this monster look desireable. They make me want it – someone who has been there. What must those who have not yet experienced the reality of this think? I’m not talking about taking care of one’s appearance. I’m talking about flaunting something deadly, fully in the knowledge of what message is sent to others.

It is sweet deadly poison.

 

My Experience Of Body Image

I do a lot of pretending.

I pretend a lot that I’m going better than I really am.

I pretend that I’m happier than I am, or at least, not as unhappy as I really am.

I pretend that I have a lot more hope than I do in reality.

And I pretend that I don’t really want to be ‘thin’.

I don’t know what to say to explain that one!

No, I really do NOT want to be emaciated, or even ‘too thin’. I feel like such a failure, and that everyone can SEE it when it’s that obvious. It’s not a nice look at all, in fact, it can be quite disgusting. Have you ever seen someone who is emaciated’s bottom? There is this big… concave HOLE there. And the anus that is usually hidden by flesh is.. stretched out in the middle of that hole. Too much info right?

Grossed out yet? Imagine LIVING WITH THAT. Still want to be thin?

And yet, I would give anything to go back to being almost 15 kilograms less than I am now. I don’t care how gross it might be. I don’t care about people looking down on me or treating me horribly because of it. I don’t even care that it might kill me. I am too much, and I will always be too much. At least in my mind, I am too much. I know in reality I am not, far from it. But to me, always too much. Always. And even at my lowest weight, I never even started to not be too much.

My body image is SO distorted. Even when I was at my lowest weight, on a good day I would see a normal, maybe rather fleshy person. On a bad day, I’d practically be able to roll myself around. And yet, under all that, my wise mind was constantly saying “But I’m too thin. I know I’m too thin. The ‘numbers’ say I’m too thin. And yet what is this incredible fleshy hulk I’m hauling round with me every day?”

Every now and then I’d catch a glance of what I called “Michael Jackson” in the mirror – a glimpse of how I truly was – and scare myself terribly. But that lasted for a glimpse and a few moments post-glimpse – before “too-much” loomed over me again, threatening to squish the ‘me’ right out of myself.

Okay, I know my nose is bigger and it’s REAL, but yeah. Scary stuff.

One of the common myths is that people with anorexia and/or bulimia enjoy their disease, enjoy the ‘thinness’ that many of them achieve. I think the reality would be closer to we don’t even get to experience it let alone ‘enjoy’ it.

How do I really see myself?

Imagine your body is SO heavy and huge that you find it hard to move. You find yourself very weighed down. Sluggish. One of the reasons my dancing started to fail in uni was because, yes I’d gained some weight initially, but after that, even though it was plunging DOWN, I felt heavy and unable to MOVE properly due to having so much flesh stopping me. It was a complete utter delusion.

You can’t walk with your legs together because your thigh rolls prevent that.

You can’t put your arms down properly to your sides because the rolls of fat under them and on your torso are too huge.

And it all feels SO REAL. So completely utterly REAL.

It’s not just about the body image way of being ‘fat’ either. It’s about being that aforementioned ‘too much’.

I experience the world as though I’m towering over everyone around me. I am more tall than I am short, but I’m not THAT tall, and I still feel this way when the person next to me is actually a lot taller than I. The same with width – I feel monstrous next to everyone else, even if the person beside me outweighs me by 100 kilos.

Even without the comparing of size, I just feel too much ME.  I’ve spent my life trying to squeeze myself out. Trying to disappear. To be invisible. Apologising for taking up too much space, for being so wrong, for being so grossly overimposingly massively HERE.

The way I experience my own size against that of the world has also see-sawed along with my actual weight, except that it’s strayed ever further than reality each time. The first time I ever lost weight, I felt tiny, I could feel myself and see myself shrinking. The world became huge, but only in relation to my own size.. Then I was refed, and although I grew, oh boy did I grow bigger, the world seemed to stay the same size. Each time I went down after that, the world got bigger while I stayed the same size. And each time I was refed, I grew bigger and the world stayed the same size. Can you understand that? We were becoming more and more skewed the more I lost and gained, I growing ever bigger, the world ever smaller.

Whoever invented those carnival mirrors, I wonder if they knew what this was like to live with?

This is just how I see my own face! My brain stretches it out so that it appears smeared.

So my problem is, I guess, that it’s so hard to live in a body that you feel so wrong in, one that you constantly wish you could literally unzip and step out of.

And while I struggle so much with my body image, I guess I have had to get to a place of maturity – listening to my wise mind and rationality over my discomfort and my desire to strive for something I find more pleasant to both see and be. 

Not everyone has reached that place.

Eating disorders are NOT about food, shape, weight – that is surface stuff. That is the language of our culture. That is the language we fall to first, when we are not happy, worried, anxious, have problems, and have no other way to express them but “I hate myself, I am so ugly, I am so big, if I lost weight, my problems would be better.” But food and weight and body image issues are often triggers for eating disorders to begin – and for the malnutrition that they cause to trigger the cognitive deficit and irrationality that leads to it becoming a mindset and something that overpowers us easily.

It’s very dangerous to be constantly giving us images to which we are expected to conform when they are physically not even possible for most. So many of us are struggling to even accept ourselves, let alone find ourselves acceptable in context of the rest of the world… and we are bombarded by reminders that apparently we never WILL ‘size up’.

What do you think of this?

And here I will end my ranting and leave you. Do you feel you ‘size up’ or are you too much? Is your body image distorted, or normal, or can you even tell when you only see what YOU see? How do you know if what you see is the reality?

If you have an eating disorder – how much do you feel it’s about food, weight, body image? Do you find that if you take those issues away, you still are stuck with your disorder and the problems that are underneath?

Do you find yourself yearning for something that is forbidden and dangerous? How do you deal with that?

And – if I don’t get to post again before midnight tomorrow - HAPPY NEW YEAR!! May 2013 be the happiest and most positive year all of you have lived to date – with better things on the horizon. xx

(Image Sources: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 taken from Facebook.)

Frightening World

I wonder how many of you find the world ‘too much’? Just as many of us with eating disorders find ourselves to be ‘too much’. I do.

I have been thinking over this a fair bit recently. With all the violence and fear and pain in this world, I always find myself wanting to remove myself from it. To opt out. Not to be a part of it. I cannot cope with the feelings, cannot cope with other people in pain – wanting them to not be hurting and not being able to do a thing about it – and so I just cannot cope with ‘being’ at all.

It’s a fact of life now that we are completely surrounded by pain and suffering. People get killed, or die from horrible illnesses. Or hurt. Or betrayed. A multitude of things. There are people who suffer from going without. From loneliness, from poverty of both the heart and of things needed. There are people who spend their entire lives scrabbling to just get by and survive. Too much power is in the hands of those who do wrong with it, and too little in the hands of those who would do good. The actions of one person can kill millions of people.

And there is nothing I can really do about it all.

I feel so powerless.

And I feel so frightened and overwhelmed by it all. By the terror and pain everywhere I look.

This is a big part of why I step away from the world and bury myself in my own, in the world either of my own imagination, or I simply dissociate somehow. And the starvation of anorexia helped me to do that. The more I starved my body, the less I found my mind lived in reality – I flew away, I really did. I simply flew away from here and all that hurt. Left it all behind.

Being refed brings me back to reality with a thump. A thump of having a body, and a thump of having to deal with all that goes on around me. And I still don’t know if I can handle it.

But I have to. And so now, I strive to. It seems that a lot of what I’m learning in therapy to help myself tethers me even more strongly to this world that I often find myself HATING. And yet, if I keep ‘flying away’ I cannot live or survive. I have to choose – live or die. Tether myself or fly.

I’m choosing to live. And though that’s the harder of the choices, I guess that it’s important that we always remind ourselves – we are not as powerless as we feel.  So we might not be able to change the world all by ourselves and straight away! But every little bit counts.

Have you ever heard the parable about  how the constantly dripping water wore away the rock, but the bucket of water couldn’t? That is how our own actions work. Little bits over time – adds up to real, powerful change. We can throw all we have at a problem, all the solutions in the world at a problem, but it’s not going to make as much impact as little bits, constantly, over time.

And that’s something every single one of us CAN do.

Conclusion – we are NOT powerless. I am not hopeless or helpless. I can make a difference in this world – and I choose to stay and try. And so can you.

(Image Source: 1, 2, 3, 4)

Reflecting on Shalimar – My Angel

I realised last night that in early January it will be a year since Shalimar and  I moved into the apartment I live in now. We have had absolutely no regrets, either. It is a peaceful and safe place to live for both of us and I’ve never seen Shalimar as happy as she is these days, not in her entire nine years. Whoops – nearly ten years!

Yes, Shalimar will be ten years old on the 13th of December! Her ‘birthday’ was decided by counting back two months from her official Adoption Birthday – which was 13th February, 2003. I still remember that day like it was yesterday – picking her out from a cage chock-a-block with kittens at the shelter – and knowing on sight that she was the kitty I’d come for. Somehow we had bonded before I’d even left the shelter. I still remember waking up the next morning – Valentine’s day – having hardly slept from a night of having this little kitten crawl all over me. My first thoughts were “She loves me.”

For someone with a life history of rejection and abuse, that is an incredibly wonderful, precious thought and memory. I can’t imagine living without her. I don’t know how I survived before I adopted her.

I have come to believe there are angels on earth. And I’ve come to believe that animals can absolutely be angels on earth.

Shalimar has saved my life many a time, in many ways. She’s given me a reason to live at all. She’s given me so much love over the years, unconditionally. She’s been my constant companion, especially during the loneliest years of my life.

Before I adopted Shalimar, it was common for me to have periods of unconsciousness that lasted scarily long times – for example, having a nap on Sunday afternoon might lead to me waking up on Wednesday night, completely unaware that more than a few hours had passed. But Shalimar wouldn’t let that happen. She woke me many times by crouching over me and patting my face with her paw, not stopping until I’d dragged myself out of the black hole I’d been slipping into. Many times I woke with a face like mince meat – she never used her claws deliberately, but even with claws retracted, cat’s paws can be quite sharp.

Shalimar gave me a reason to fight to get out of hospital – thinking of her in a pet motel, despite knowing they knew her and treated her with the best care and a lot of cuddles broke my heart, and I missed her terribly.

I’ve heard of therapy dogs (or care dogs?) trained for soldiers with PTSD. Apparently, these dogs know when their soldier is having a nightmare, and are trained to gently awaken them, switch on lights, and provide companionship and comfort.

Shalimar definitely would make a good care cat for PTSD. In a way, she is one already. I realised this on Friday when she woke me up from a pretty terrible nightmare with her gentle patting. She then cuddled up to me, gently butting my face with hers and stroking it with her paw. (I think she tries to copy my stroking action, which used to hurt given cats have claws, but she’s learnt to keep her claws retracted. Smart cat!) She’s done this many times before.

These days, it gives me a lot of joy to see how happy Shalimar is. Moving here was her version of coming home to paradise. It’s like night and day compared to living in the gritty city area where, to a constant soundtrack of traffic and sirens, she witnessed probably thousands of drug deals, and thousands of weddings in the Church across the road from her little balcony.

Shalimar loves to stalk lizards, and to pretend she’s going to catch those annoying birds that sit in the tree next door and taunt her (they even swoop her!). She  loves to just sit in the sun, watching the kids next door scream and endlessly jump on the trampoline (more proof to her that these human beings are all nuts). Grass isn’t some heavenly treat that I bring a bunch of home when I find it. It grows all around, and she can walk on it let alone nibble it. She has developed rather discerning tastes, though – so far she’s eaten my climbing beans, my corn plants, all of my chives and basil, and now she’s started on my tomato plants.

I’ve gone from being too depressed to sit and just ‘be’, to being able to sit on my porch and watch Shalimar just ‘being’. To watch her being happy and contented does wonders for myself and our time outside has become the most calming and cherished time of my days.

I wonder what the next year will bring for both of us? I think the sky is the limit. We’ve both come a heck of a long way.

Tiger in the grass! Watch out, lizards!

Your Other Health Issues Are Still Important!

How many of you have ever brushed off health issues that aren’t related to your eating disorder (or depression, or whatever your most pressing thing happens to be?)

I know I have.

I can’t possibly count the times I’ve decided other health issues aren’t important, can definitely wait, or that it’s pointless to care for the ‘rest of’ my body if it’s just going to be killed by the ED.

ED has a field day with this sort of mindset. Add in the common beliefs of  ”I don’t deserve to be healthy”, “I can’t see a doctor because they might freak out about the ED stuff”, and gems like “I deserve to die so maybe neglecting my health will make it happen a bit faster”, and you start to see why many people with eating disorders don’t get the health care they need and deserve in other areas.

Also factor in the fact that it’s bloody expensive to have an eating disorder, and even more so to be in treatment for it – and looking after the rest of us is even less likely.

Last but not by any means making this list exhaustive – how many of you have hit a dead end the times you have brought up an unrelated health issue, in that your health care person has automatically assumed it must be related to your primary disorder? I know I have. There have been times when I’ve wondered if I turned up to emergency missing a limb from a shark attack, They’d tell me to go home and eat a sandwich so the limb might grow back! I have heard the line “Well if your nutrition was better…” in response to pretty much everything. Headaches, stomach aches, pain of any kind, colds and flu, skin problems, you name it.

Honestly, I’m not surprised. Severe chronic illnesses can completely take over your life, leaving no space for thought about other issues, putting everything including LIVING on the backburner. When you are in as much distress as these illnesses cause – you just want that to let you be, and other problems can pale in comparison. For caregivers, eating disorders can be frighteningly blatant to them, and they can be hugely fearful that it will kill their loved one or patient. Other problems might not be on their radar at that time. They just want to save your life.

obligatory cute photo pertaining to ‘balance’

Well actually, other problems do still need our attention. And they can still kill us. Imagine what a shame it would be if you put years of hard painful work into beating and recovering from an eating disorder only to end up dying from cancer, for example?

I am writing this today to remind you all that you do still need to look after other health issues. Still get your check ups and appropriate tests done. Still ask for treatment or advice and keep on asking until you get it when you find something that’s not right. You have a RIGHT to adequate health care, no matter what ED tells you. I know some of us have felt very guilty about the amount of care we have already ‘taken up’, but friends – it’s there for YOU. If you still are having trouble justifying things like ‘costs’ of taking care of yourself – it costs your country and yourself and your family far less to look after something earlier than to let it get serious and even fatal.

I can understand feeling this way – I’ve had a few nasty people tell me what a sponge on society I have been, and how I steal health care from other people by hogging it. People like that should be thrown to a pit of crocodiles, I think. They aren’t worthy of being supported by society in the little ways that they are either. We are ALL supported by our society at some stage in our lives, in some way, and that’s why it works the way it does. We  are human beings. Unless you are a robot or an alien (and then probably even if you ARE an alien) you will not be well for the entirety of your life, and you will not be completely independent for the entirety of your life – when you are well, you contribute to society, and when you are unwell or in a bad place, society’s contribution (hopefully) helps you til you can get back on your feet again.

I hope some day that all of us can acknowledge to ourselves that we are deserving of, and worthy of, taking care of our health and being able to access care when we need it.

This week,  I was reminded of how important looking after other health issues really is.

When I insisted that I needed more help, and finally was referred to a psychologist, it meant that my GP and I had to go through and fill out a mental health care plan and a GP health care plan. Both of these, especially the latter, meant that all the health checks that I had NOT gotten came to light. My GP was actually a bit shocked that I’d never had a pap smear or a skin check at 35. With a family history of cancer on both sides and my Dad dying of melanoma, that’s taking quite a risk.

So I had my first skin check of my life. It wasn’t all that bad. My doctor just put on a funny headpiece and looked at every inch of my body through it, including my scalp and under my feet. (Melanoma can occur even where the sun don’t shine!) She took down the details including measurements of a few of my moles and freckles, and one of them on my back was declared ‘better out’. I had it cut out last week, leaving about 10 stitches in my back but it wasn’t all that big a deal.

Yesterday the pathology report for that mole came back. Melanoma.

Thankfully it’s very early – Clark stage one – and it hasn’t spread. All of it seems to have been taken out, although I’m going to have to get a lot more cut out of the spot next week. But it means I’ve dodged a bullet. If I hadn’t had this skin check (if I hadn’t wanted to see the psychologist that truly might have been never) – I wouldn’t have known til it was too late. It was a very sobering realisation.

As far as I know, I’ve had that mole all my life. Nothing was different about it (not that I looked at it much, being on my back.) According to the pathology report, it had only very recently become cancerous. Your health can change in an instant – for real. My dad was fine and then he wasn’t. He had a hit on the head at work, suddenly had trouble seeing from that, and had it checked out. There was a melanoma in his EYE. Up until then, he had had no clue.

I also realised yesterday that I do want to live. For years now, pretty much every single day at some stage if not for all of it, I just want to die, because I’m in so much pain in the various ways ED, depression and PTSD cause it. Much of the time I’ve put off other health issues or waved them under the carpet, my thinking has been “Well I’m going to die anyway” or “Hopefully if there is something wrong it will kill me faster and it will all be over then.” ED had a field day with this sort of thinking. But despite the fact that my behaviours had largely been killing me all these years, I was terrified and shocked at the news and so incredibly grateful that my doctor had just saved my life.

I’m not going to let other health issues lapse from now on. Even if *I* can’t see anything valuable about my life, there are people who do. Even if I cannot see that worth at the time, I need to have faith in them and what they see. All of us ARE here for a reason – no matter what we believe in. And all of us are as deserving and worthy as anyone else here on this planet – and deserving of the same care. I found myself yesterday realising that “someone up there” (in my case, God) doesn’t want me dying yet. I’m meant to be here. I don’t know the reason, but I am.

So are you. So, have you been letting your other health issues lapse? And what will you pledge to get seen to today? Better safe than sorry. 

(Image Sources: 1, 2, 3)

Was It My Choice to have an Eating Disorder?

I don’t agree that it’s a choice to have an eating disorder. Nobody asked the little four year old me if I wanted one. Nobody gave me a choice. I didn’t want to hide my food or refuse to drink. I was hungry, and I liked to eat. I’d never thought about my body in terms other than “This is me playing!” and that it could wear dress up costumes, could run, jump, dance… I didn’t know anything about eating disorders or weight loss. I’d never even set eyes on a glossy magazine. I idolised my mother and father, and wanted only to be the best ‘good little girl’ I could be so they would be happy with me and love me more, so it wasn’t about having power over them or defying them, either.

As I grew older, still completely clueless about eating disorders, still without a care when it came to weight, I still never had a choice about the eating disorder. There was this thing that just was, in my mind. It was just there, as though it was born with me when I was, and grew as I grew, until it reached a point where I could no longer avoid being influenced by it. This thing told me, no, demanded that I not eat, that I exercise more. I didn’t even really hear the demands at first – later it was like something screaming inside my head. There never was a choice not to do those things – they were what had to be done, and there were no other options open to me. Not a single one.

And so, I obeyed it. It just had to be done, and I just did it. Hunger was unpleasant, pain was unpleasant, but disobeying this thing, that was far worse.

Have you ever felt like you are so trapped that you could thrash and beat at the walls, scream your head off, do everything you could to change your situation and you would be simply wasting your energy and breath? Known that for certain – without a doubt? That was what it was for me. And if I did try to beat it, the consequences always dissuaded me from trying again.

It wasn’t until I was at least 18 years old that I even began to learn about what eating disorders were, or accept that I might have one. You find it very hard to believe you have a disorder when you are just doing something you HAVE to do, that you have no choice not to do. A disorder should go against the grain. A disorder should cause more distress than it alleviates – this was the other way around at that time. To not obey caused instant, lasting, intense distress. To listen, to fulfil the demands on me – I found that soothing. Calming. It made me feel invincible. It reminded me that I was strong enough to withstand the hurt being meted out by the people in my life at that time, because I was used to pain. I thrived on pain. And pain made me stronger. This proved it to me, because my dancing went from strength to strength the more I exercised, and the more I exercised, the less time I had for eating. To feel I was dancing better left me on a high, along with the cognitive and physical effects of starvation, I was in a constant giddy, light headed state of ‘not being there’.

And I didn’t want to be here, there, or anywhere at that time. I’d been hurt so much, and the hurting never stopped. Every where I turned, I was wounded. Like a little creature seeking to just survive, I crawled away to hide best that I could while still being there amongst my abusers. I crawled away inside myself. They saw my shell, they no longer saw me.

 

Indeed, when I left that hell that I grew up in, not a single member of my family actually knew who I was. Not a single one of them knew the real Fiona, only the outer carcass, only the robot who simply humoured their demands and acquiesced to their ways, because it wasn’t worth the extra fighting to do otherwise. Who learnt to never show them what actually mattered to her, lest it became a target too, and used against her.

In all these years, I never chose to have the eating disorder. Not once did I consciously choose to lose weight. I never chose to restrict my eating. I never chose to not allow myself to eat or to drink. I never chose to force myself to overexercise. I did not have a choice at all – ever. Those things were simply things that were as natural and unconscious to me as breathing, as my heart beating. We don’t think about and choose every breath we take or every beat of our hearts. And yet, we breathe. Our hearts beat. The eating disorder ate away at me from the inside out. It was never something I thought about, wanted, or chose.

There are six year old children needing treatment for anorexia in growing numbers. Eight year olds. Nine year olds. Ask a six year old why they want to lose weight? Will they tell you they want to be a model, or on the cover of the latest Vogue magazine? Will they tell you that it helps them to cope with an uncertain world, or with fear or pain, or that it makes them feel strong and in control? That they do it to manipulate people around them?

I can pretty much promise you they will say none of those things. Because they never chose to have their eating disorders either. For them, as it was for me, the eating disorder was something that they were born with, a pre-existing predisposition, determined by genetics, not by them. And it lies there, waiting, under the surface. It lies there like a crocodile under the skin of a silent lake, only its eyes above water, waiting for something tasty and alive to wander into it’s path. A menacing, hidden danger, no less a threat for its temporary invisibility. And at some point, life conspired to throw them into a set of conditions that triggered off that lurking monster, brought it out of hiding and into full battle.

All that waiting made for a very hungry monster indeed.

At about 18, all that had happened – and was happening still to me – came to tipping point. I simply was no longer able to stand up against the tide, as I had fought so hard to do all those years. It knocked me down like I was nothing at all, swept me over the edge, and then I was falling. Falling into anorexia.

And I fell hard.

It was never a choice.

Years later, when I finally accepted my anorexia, accepted the bulimia that had come with it, accepted that I needed help, was out of control, was dying – then it was my choice. I had an army on my side to fight it, and it was my choice whether to join them, or to fight against them as enemies. And too many times, I did see them as foes. It took years for me to realise they came for me, not against.

I never had a choice about having an eating disorder.

But I do have a choice to fight it.

Did you choose to have an eating disorder? Or another illness or disorder?

** I will likely not be around online much for the next few days so please excuse late replies to your comments, I’ll get back to you as soon as I can – thank you for reading

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