Reasons to recover: cats

CSA, eating disorders and stuff

[inside-my-gay-mind]

[healingkittens]

I miss you so much every day.

[recomvery]

This is your sign to stop hurting yourself. No more self harm, physically, emotionally, no more staying awake until 3am, no more starving yourself or crazy diets, no more going days without a shower, no more talking badly about yourself, no more villainizing yourself, no more punishment and cringing about every word you said, no more overexercising and toxic friends and abusing substances, this is your year of healing, this is your sign for change.

[mirithebrave]

me: “but maybe if I just get onto myself more and push myself harder I’ll be able to do this better.

"therapist: "lindsay, you cannot bully yourself into recovery. It requires, and I know you hate this, *gentleness* towards yourself." 

I do hate that. And I can’t stop thinking about that idea that I’m often attempting to use the same framework for recovery that I used in my eating disorder – a rigid, pull-yourself-up-by-your-boostraps and tough it out to beat this mentality. I talk about this a lot, but the rhetoric around recovery that I encountered pre-2019 was very much of that mindset. I wonder if yelling at ourselves to Stop Doing the Bad Thing (aka the eating disorder) is really all that different than yelling at ourselves to work out more or eat less calories. I wonder if my body really knows the difference or if it just sounds like more yelling, more anger towards myself for doing something else imperfectly. 

I don’t want to bully myself into recovery. I don’t want to yell myself into doing well. I’m not even sure that *is* recovery if it requires rigidity and keeping myself in line via self-judgment and internal criticism.

So here’s to softening.

[mirithebrave]

eating disorder treatment is truly like hello and welcome to

[mirithebrave]

Christian fundamentalism and diet culture: a Venn diagram

[mirithebrave]

Most of the eating disorder treatment I experienced focused on pulling myself up by my bootstraps & will-powering myself into recovery. If I couldn’t do it, I was told that I was unmotivated.

I kept relapsing.

(Fifteen years worth of relapsing.)

Recovery has come (a continual process, of course, and something I’m wary to use in the past tense) from feeling safe and understood enough to set down protective survival mechanisms.

Dr. Stephen Porges says that “safety is the treatment” in regards to trauma, and I firmly believe this about eating disorders as well. Safety and compassion and gentleness are approaches more likely to produce lasting change.

We don’t change because someone yells us into recovery.

We change, in my not-so-humble personal opinion, when we are met with someone who tells us we make sense in light of our stories. That our behavior is not wrong or bad, but adaptive to what we’ve experienced.

[it-wasnt-that-bad]

"Victim" is not a dirty word

There's been a push to not use that word over recent years. This post was inspired by my therapist telling me today that I'm "not a victim" in the context of discussing the abuse I experienced as a child and me explaining how that actually felt invalidating.

First of all, if I told you that years ago I had my identity stolen and that "I was a victim of identity theft" would you stop me to tell me that actually I was a ~survivor~ of identity theft?

People throw around phrases like "playing the victim," "victim mentality," and "victim complex." They're used derisively to refer to those who wallow in self-pity and frequently believe they've been wronged. The problem is, to many people who experienced abuse, "basic self-compassion" can seem like "wallowing in self-pity." Allowing yourself to acknowledge your pain and to grieve is seen as "playing the victim."

Hot take: feeling sorry for yourself is not inherently a bad thing. You're allowed to feel sorry for yourself and take time to acknowledge your own pain before being ready to move on to the next part of recovery.

Yes, empowerment is good and all of that. Taking charge, taking positive steps, working to make changes, all good things. But you don't have to be ready to do that immediately. You're allowed to (and I would argue it's usually necessary to) actually feel those feelings, and you may need to let yourself acknowledge that pain and show yourself some compassion first, especially if you didn't let yourself feel your feelings at the time.

I would never tell anyone that they have to identify as a victim. If you find identifying as a survivor or some other word to be more helpful, go for it. But if you experienced abuse or neglect you're allowed to call yourself a victim. You're allowed to stop and process and grieve.

[theselfcarelifestyle]

The book (available on amazon): I Have to Tell You Something

[notabled-noodle]

heaps of people talk about autistic people struggling with verbality when they’re stressed, which is fine because it is a thing that happens… but something I see a lot less is people talking about autistic people becoming less verbal as they become more safe and comfortable (which is also a thing that happens!)

[zombie-from-mercury]

*winks at Autism Speaks*

[starry-dove]

disney needs to give us an episode of the new baymax series where he helps a nonverbal autistic child whose communication tablet broke.

like imagine him putting the communication options on his tummy.

and recognizing the child’s sensory overload and taking them somewhere quiet.

i need it

[susiephone]

possible explanations for Baymax being able to get 10 bags full of menstrual products:

Hiro updated his programming so he can have a bit of money linked to a debit card or something

Baymax has no money but found an employee instead. Baymax politely and calmly told them that he needs to get a small city's worth of pads and tampons right away, you see he has a patient and it's very urgent, and the cashier who does NOT get paid enough to argue with or explain the concept of capitalism to an 8 foot tall crimefighting robot was like "man, just go"

Baymax knows exactly how money and capitalism works but thinks it has no place in medicine, and regularly just straight-up shoplifts in the name of free and effective healthcare

[mirithebrave]

My therapist says that with complex trauma, our child brains couldn't allow us to fully see what was happening because attachment to caregivers was survival. As adults, we say "it wasn't that bad" or minimize trauma because of that protective non-realization our brain had to do.

Now, healing is a process of acceptance - lifting the veil. Coping strategies like substance use or eating disorders are protective. They disconnect & keep us numb. The phrase, "my survival is no longer dependent on me staying in denial" has been so important to my recovery.

[mirithebrave]

“Sometimes our greatest healing comes in seeing our ‘dysfunctions’ in less pathologising, more compassionate ways.

Sometimes the eating behaviours we’ve been taught to believe are ‘disordered’ and ‘dysfunctional’ are actually responses to threat, survival strategies, deeply human reactions to adversity.

After 5 years of being hospitalised for anorexia in my teens, my real healing came when I started to question my diagnosis. Maybe I’m not crazy? Maybe my self-starvation serves a function? Maybe, instead of trying to fix myself, instead of fighting the anorexic part of me, I need to befriend it, to honour how it has served me and to develop the inner resources — distress tolerance, self-compassion, autonomic regulation — so I can leave it behind?

Maybe our ‘dysfunctional’ eating functions as a distraction from other life challenges that we don’t feel we have the capacity to face?

Maybe we binge to numb our emotional distress and make life more bearable?

Maybe we starve ourselves to protect us from the pain of being in our bodies following trauma?

Maybe we maintain a low body weight to communicate our distress, to say the things we cannot find the words to say?

Maybe we use food restriction to regulate our nervous system and blunt the somatic elements of anxiety?

Maybe our rigid food rules are a form of rebellion against oppression, giving us a sense of control in our disempowerment?

Maybe dieting give us a sense of purpose and meaning. An identity. Something to cling to when we lose touch with the essence of who we are?

As we discover there is nothing wrong with us — that we aren’t crazy or sick or broken — and honour the way our eating behaviours have served us, we can develop the skills and inner resources we need to heal.

With curiosity, compassion and courage we can transform our relationship with food. We can discover our deeper hungers. We can reconnect with our bodies, our emotions and intuitions and fall back in love with being alive”

[youmakesenseproject]

INTERDEPENDENCE: Maybe the goal isn’t to become completely independent and rely solely on self-regulation: In a talk Bonnie Badenoch gave called “The Myth of Self-Regulation” (available on Youtube), she talks about how societally, self-regulation has a sort of moral value to it, and people who need “too much” co-regulation are judged. We are told we need to be emotionally self-sufficient and therapy often focuses on that as the end goal. Western culture also emphasizes left hemisphere dominance and the individual rather than a relational, integrated culture. But get isolated from a “core source of nourishment” and our own neurobiology – relationships. 

Badenoch argues we can never be emotionally self-sufficient; we need others. That’s literally how we’re built! Even when we are self-regulation, we’re using internalized co-regulation (she talks about “taking in warm others” to be with us / accompany us, and layers of support within us.) 

“We are forever interdependent and that’s a GOOD thing.” 

[themadcapmathematician]

All abusers are cowards but shout out to abusive parents for preying on fucking children who were their responsibility and can’t escape them and then, when they realize their kids are gonna move out and move on and don’t have any real obligation to spend time with them or be there for them, typically acting all buddy buddy and trying to backpedal and say “what abuse” for the rest of their kids’ lives, even if sometimes they continue the same shitty behavior just at a distance lmfao I hope you all choke you weaklings, all of your children are ten times as strong as you’ll ever be

[labella-instagram]

@jule.popule