The most fundamental aggression to ourselves, the most fundamental harm we can do to ourselves, is to remain ignorant by not having the courage and the respect to look at ourselves honestly and gently.
Made a huge (successful!) effort to not walk today and although it felt okay this morning because I was in a good mood (I woke up to good news!), I feel awful about it now.
(If you read the next bit, you need to read till the end!)
It seems pointless to rest enough for my legs to heal when I am so unable to cope with my dance classes at the moment anyway.Everything feels like it’s falling apart and I just don’t want to keep up this facade of caring anymore. Except I have to because I am too lazy and greedy to lose weight so I need to pretend it’s because I care about my future and having a life, when the reality is that I don’t, I just don’t have the willpower to do anything about it.
I know this isn’t true and that right now I am tired and it’s been a long day and there’s been some stuff that’s come up that’s making old thought patterns kick in and making me feel like I am stupid and worthless and question the point of what I am doing. I am not good at separating these thoughts and counteracting them with a healthier voice because I don’t yet HAVE that.
But I can just acknowledge that I do not always feel like this, and I understand why I do this evening. Feelings and thoughts aren’t facts, nor are they permanent. I understand the way the events of today have wound up with me thinking/feeling how I do- and it has nothing to do with how much or how little I have walked. That’s just an easy and tangible thing to place blame on. But it runs deeper. And just like NOT walking hasn’t caused this, going for a long walk right now isn’t going to bring me the relief I actually need.
It drives me crazy that everyone lives as if there's always going to be another day, another week, a “later”, a "someday" to get things done. All the things you always wanted to do, all the people you wanted to see, all the books you wanted to read, all the places you wanted to visit,
We live as if there's another part of life that comes later when we are in a better position to take advantage of it, but life is now, here, today. This is all we have.
Did an imagery exercise with my T today about creating a “bubble” to retreat to; a safe space I can have in my mind that is mine, when things are intense and overwhelming, that I’ll need on days we don’t speak, or when I am away, or when we are on our break, or when we start EMDR and difficult things come up.
Looking back at old photos and increasingly thinking that I was happier then. My quality of life was not much different to now (that’s the problem), but I was happier with my body. I DESPISE my body at the moment. I don’t know how much it has changed since I don’t weigh myself, but when I look in the mirror, I see a monster. I am embaressed to be seen, to go out, to exist. I feel like I can’t anymore.
Things are rubbish lately. Beyond rubbish. I feel like I have thrown away my future and instead am having to settle for some sh*tty half-life that I don’t want. And the worst thing of all is that as I try to build it up and piece it together, it literally crumbles in my hands.
I started my course to bring in more things into my life and instead, everything else has fallen to the wayside. I had a plan of the things I was going to start doing to move forward from where I have been stuck for so long, which is what I WANT. And I need to do this now because I have this deadline of my therapy break so I want stuff lined up in time.
So there was the course, and dancing, and mindfulness group. None of it is going to plan. I went to mindfulness once, had a flashback, and haven’t gone back. Dancing… it’s complicated. I am just finding it too much with my course too. I am annoyed at myself for not managing both, annoyed at myself for finding these “fun” things stressful, annoyed that my plan isn’t going to plan, and now it’s almost time for the break and I am no closer to “bringing more into my life” than I was when I was when it was first discussed.
I feel so incredibly hopeless. There is nothing left to do/try. There’s nothing left for ME. Why am I even here? What am I doing? (Coincidentally, that is exactly what my consultant asked me last summer when he said I had wasted all this time in therapy).
I just want to go back and start over. Do recovery properly and not get stuck here, again (and again, and again). And if I can’t do that, then I don’t want to be here at all because what is the point?
The book my T lent me is really good. I ordered my own copy because I feel guilt about borrowing it when I am sure there are other people that need it more, and I am feeling increasingly guilty about being such a leech on services in general so I want to give it back as soon as I see her next. BUT it’s been really helpful to read and it explains things really well (all the things that I have been too stupid to understand in all the years I have been meeting with my T). So I am glad that I have my own copy to look back on. Because now I can reference it and pretend I understand it better than I do, which seems to be my way of getting through life. This way nobody finds out how stupid and damaged I actually am. They can keep pretending to themselves that I am actually quite clever and competent, and I can go along with it, and nobody has to deal with the fact that there’s something very wrong with my brain that I don’t understand this therapy and for some reason, things aren’t changing and I think it’s because everything is too messy and complicated and my brain is just broken, and it’s just too late.
//
I DIGRESS.
I’ve made quite a few notes of bits to come back to and discuss with my T, none of which will be a surprise to her, I don’t think, but the whole book has confirmed to me that I am REALLY far behind where I need to be at this point in treatment*, and what I should be able to do in terms of tracking what “modes” are around and how best to respond to them. This is where I have been really stuck and I think I am getting better at it at times (?) but then there’s the “coping modes” (obsessing, planning, walking) which are really entrenched and part of my routines that they don’t feel like “coping modes” (as in, they aren’t reactionary; the problem itself is the routine/rigidness, which is, in itself, the coping). But it doesn’t feel like a “mode” that I dip in and out of as things happen. I am sure that they ARE, but ways of coping, but they are different because the things that I struggle with that really make me feel so hopeless/awful (lists, routines, walking) are CAUSED by long-standing patterns of thinking, rather than being knee-jerk behaviours are so rarely affected. Am I making sense? Like it’s not like something happens, and I react by going for a walk or making a list. My behaviours and patterns of behaviour have evolved as a result of the way I think and the patterns f thinking I have.
*The tricky thing about this “being stuck” thing is that we can’t have an open discussion about this because on one hand, we are taking this therapy break over the summer to try and move things along because I have been stuck in the same place for so long. But on the other hand, if I try to raise this and try to talk about it, I get told that this is my “demanding/critical” side and I need to push back against it because I am where I am and things are moving, albeit slower than my demanding/critical side would maybe like. I feel like I am getting mixed messages and I am not sure what is actually happening when one thing is being said, but another thing is being done, and it’s hard to “read” the signals I am being sent. I’ve been having quite a few conversations in therapy lately about situations where I feel like I am expected to follow rules that I don’t understand, or don’t know, and the pressure that comes along with that, and how terrifying it is to be stuck not knowing if anything I am doing is right or wrong, and feeling like it’s both/neither at the same time.
I feel like I am standing in the midst of a lava flow and need to jump onto a different rock to move forward but I can’t tell which ones are going to get me closer to safety, and which ones are going to leave me stranded, with no way out of the molten lava.
//
The book talks about the “healthy adult” mode, and the “happy child” mode and strengthening these is the most important part of the recovery process. This isn’t new to me. But I am failing miserably to manage to do the imagery exercises in the book, let alone incorporate my ACTUAL “healthy adult” or “happy child” into everyday life. It also talks about the importance of role models and I can’t think of a single healthy adult that I have had as a constant in my life, nor can I remember ever being a happy child.
The other few things I noted down were about having an “inner safe space” which was something my T and I tried to think about last week which didn’t go well but I think we’ll come back to, and also “coping modes” in general. I always kind of thought that my ways of coping were avoidance mechanisms but now I am wondering if I am over-compensating for how messy I feel inside. I spent Thursday in floods of tears thinking about stuff and remembering things so I haven’t come back to it but I don’t know what I think anymore. Maybe we have it all wrong.
Did I say this book was good? It’s honestly just made me feel a million times worse. It’s magnified where I am going wrong, what I am missing, what I am not understanding, what I am failing to do/understand. All the things I keep asking my T (I keep asking, “What am I not getting?!”) She probably gave it to me for this reason. Because I am failing therapy and now I know why. I have successfully fattened up, and failed at everything else and now it's clearer.
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