PrittPack

Just a girl with BPD & PTSD training her service dog

[prittpack]

If you think your friend needs help with their mental health:

DO NOT DIAGNOSE THEM.

DO NOT ACCUSE THEM.

DO NOT FORCE THEM TO OPEN UP.

DO NOT GIVE THEM ULTIMATIUMS.

DO NOT MAKE IT ABOUT YOU.

DO NOT TRY TO SOLVE THEIR PROBLEMS.

Be supportive. Listen to them. Let them take control and make the decision to get help themselves. Change will not happen if they don’t recognize the need for it. You’re not going to bring about change by spilling your thoughts to them.

[brackenfur]

i remember??? those dog stuffed animals that you’d get in happy meals. i rly miss those omg

[brackenfur]

hell fuckin yeah

[prittpack]

[prittpack]

We finally got a ChuckIt stick!

[prittpack]

Summer time!

[prittpack]

Today was a difficult day regarding my BPD. Had a lot of extreme emotions I had to try and keep in check, all because my memory issues made me completely forget where I set my wallet down in the truck. Having to deal with the quick cycling of anger, frustration, and sadness, and then go back to normal and get my errands done.... it doesn’t happen often but when it does it’s exhausting.

[prittpack]

I was proud of her heeling today in PetCo, even dealt with a fair amount of distractions.

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Rosie and I practicing our nonverbal cues for DPT.

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Pup in a truck

[prittpack]

Holy mother of victim complex

When a facility tells you that your party is the only group of dogs that got kennel cough, why do you kee insisting the facility is responsible and not one of your friends?!

[olearypoetry]

[thegoodvybe]

[iglovequotes]

https://iglovequotes.net/

[prittpack]

Confessions of a Subconscious Anorexic

Something I don’t talk about very much but has been heavy on my mind lately is my eating disorder. I don’t talk about it because I have such a hard time finding people with an experience like mine. I went through treatment thinking: I don’t belong here, I can’t have an eating disorder.

I’m going to preface this essay of a post with there is going to be talk of anorexia, hospitals, and numbers, as well as mentions of suicide. This is going to be a real life look into what I went through for recovery as someone who didn’t realize they even had an eating disorder. The image below shows just what mental illness is capable of doing to a person. It shows my recovery journey.

The first photo was a year prior to diagnosis. I had things going for me and I was happy. I was smaller, but a healthy small considering I was learning to play roller derby. The second photo is 2 weeks prior to Reasons Eating Disorder Center. I was in a partial hospitalization program, recovering from a severe mental break. I didn’t have exercise to blame for a lower weight or smaller frame. The third image is 2 months after my discharge from treatment as I tried to get my life back on track. The last is a recent photo.

To start to explain my recovery, I’ll have to explain what pushed me to go there.

In June of 2017 I had two suicidal incidents. I had had a mental breakdown that was caused by a then undiagnosed personality disorder, which was caused by a narcissistic parent. The first incident was a plan for later that day that I let slip to a close coworker, who had my boss push me to go get help. I went through military medicine to receive that help, but because I was a civilian dependent, my care wasn’t held to the same standard as our service members received. In fact, they told me during processing they don’t really have civilians on the unit and had no idea what to do with me. I stayed in a military hospital for two days (as opposed to the standard 72-hour psych hold), and was given no resources upon discharge. I had no followup care planned, no medications, no resources. I felt even more lost and helpless in life, which triggered my second incident: an actual suicide attempt. I was subsequently put into a better care. I was hospitalized in a civilian hospital for 10 days and then stepped down to a partial hospitalization program near home. It didn’t take long for that partial hospitalization program to tell me, “In the past two weeks you’ve been here, we’ve seen you shrink.” I was given a list of higher levels of care and upon researching them all, I realized they were all treatment centers for eating disorders. This is the start of my recovery journey.

I want you to let something sink in for a minute. From the time my the picture of me from two weeks prior to treatment was taken until I left for Reasons Eating Disorder Center, I got smaller. I lost more weight when I already had barely any weight to lose. It took me until recently to realize how severe my case really was.

When I mention to people that I battle anorexia, people tend to jump to thinking I purged and thought I was fat. That’s one side of this disease. I lived a different side of it. The DSM-5 diagnosis criteria is much more vague compared to the stereotypical idea of anorexia. You see, I restricted my food intake by being too anxious to eat, that same anxiety influenced my ability to put on weight, and in the end I didn’t see myself as unhealthy and insisted that I was fine. I never made conscious decisions not to eat, but it happened over and over again. I never recognized that visible bones, poor health, or even the weigh I was totally aware of were all a problem. This too, is anorexia.

The reality was I had an eating disorder I wasn’t even aware of.

But the thing on my mind more than acknowledging my eating disorder for what it was, is the actual treatment I went through.

To me, every part of eating disorder recovery felt backwards for where I was at. As someone who didn’t even think they had an eating disorder, I felt the treatment made me act more like the stereotypes. It felt disordered while the actions that put me there were labeled as disordered. I was inpatient from the end of July until mid September, and in residential treatment for a month after that. I spent another month in an eating disordered focused PHP program as well. It was only a day before I admitted myself and started my journey to recovery that I was told I even had anorexia, and if I didn’t immediately go to one of the treatment centers on a list they gave me, I’d be viewed as non-compliant. I was quickly dropped into a world where every aspect of my life felt micromanaged.

Two key components for eating disorder treatment are meal plans and supplementing. Meal plans told me exactly what I should eat and how much I was required to eat. No more, no less. I was never allowed over my plan if I felt hungrier than usual. I didn’t finish because I felt full, I was still required to supplement. If I didn’t supplement when I was supposed to, it looked bad in my chart and kept me there longer. Inpatient was focused on weight restoration: a mystery number my treatment team aimed for me to reach. When I went to the outpatient program, they made me do meal logs of every single thing I ate, especially at home. Not just what, but how much. Never, in my life, had I put as much thought into what I was eating until these few months. This, I think, was the most frustrating part of my recovery because it felt like two steps back for each step I supposedly progressed forward. Things got worse as I slowly found out I was allergic to the supplemental drinks they were having me drink more and more of, but more on that later.

But program? The actual program? I felt like I had so much taken from me. I had been inpatient on a mental health unit twice before that, so I thought I knew what I was getting into, but I was wrong.

Every morning, I stripped and donned two hospital gowns (one forward and one backward for modesty) and walked to our group room to be weighed. Backwards. I never knew my weight despite numbers never being a trigger for me. It wasn’t until I had gone home that I found I had gone from sub 90lb to over 120lbs in three months. It was only after weigh in and having my vitals taken (standing and laying down) that I could start getting ready for the day.

For every meal, even planned snacks, we were given a list of exchanges and had to match it to our meal plan. I wasn’t free to eat whatever I wanted. Even something as simple as how many glasses of water or soda you drank per meal was strictly controlled. I felt restricted at first, because my basic meal plan wasn’t enough to satisfy me. I had to wait to meet a dietitian to add even a cup of soda to my meal plan. Little did I know adding to it wasn’t a walk in the park just because I was still hungry after meals. The ability to balance stopping when full and filling my tummy when hungry was taken from me.

The actual eating disorder unit was our own little caged off area where we spent our entire day, never being allowed to miss a group. It consisted of the staff‘s area, our dining room where we ate every meal and snack (which was a locked room with locked cabinets full of snacks and a locked fridge full of supplements, juice, and more snacks), the adolescent program’s group room, the adult group room, and the hospital gym. We had a courtyard with outdoor tables that overlooked the hospital’s pool, which everyone but us got to visit during the hot summer days.

We had dance movement/yoga therapy, but the movement was severely restricted. Exercise wasn’t allowed here. Even walking around the area too much could get you forced to supplement. It was so easy for me to feel like a rat trapped in a cage. I joked with friends at home that it was my own little prison disguised as help. I couldn’t eat, move or even pee freely.

On an eating disorder unit, you earn your bathroom privacy by being compliant. They didn’t have to worry about you on the mental health side where all we did was sleep, since no one ate recently enough to purge. But on the ED unit, a member of floor staff opens the bathroom for you, keeps a foot in the door to listen and talk to you, and they check before they flush for you. It took a long time to step down to “zero obs” where they simply opened the door and let you go normally. It was great, until it got taken from you. Remember how I got sick from my supplements? I was labeled as “involuntarily purging” and all my progress got reset. I was back to square one for bathroom privileges. I was legitimately sick from the drinks and I got punished for it.

Groups I did my best. It was difficult to connect when I wasn’t 100% sold on having an eating disorder. I fought so much along the way to recovery. When the groups would turn to body image, food rules, fear foods, and everything else eating disorder focused, I was lost. This was all new to me and not something I was able to understand. I felt like I morphed my life to fit their needs. I had to put everything under a microscope for them and if they found something they could work with me on, they ran with it. This is how Lance was made to come and have dinner with me and my dietitian once a week.

He, my team decided, was a trigger for my eating disorder. My anxiety skyrocketed with him around because he ate so much faster than I did, leading to me not wanting to finish. Their solution was have him come and eat with me and my dietitian would coach both of us.He’d be forced to slow down and I’d be forced to finish or supplement with him there. Getting his command to actually let him do this on a regular basis felt like pulling teeth. It was an ordeal despite being something so regular. We had family sessions on a separate day which caused us more trouble, since they didn’t understand the difference between each visit. Lance was under intense stress just to be able to help me recover. His command preached “we care about your families and will do everything to help you be with them,” but that was utter bullshit. They thought I was faking everything just to get him home from deployment. This didn’t help me feel better when I was already battling suicidal thoughts.

I will admit that despite all this, there were silver linings, or moments where things didn’t feel so bad. I was granted the privilege to go on lunch outings and leave the hospital with the outpatient crowd. We’d go to the mall, have lunch, browse the shops, and bring “home” a snack. Because the eating disorder unit was ran separately from the mental health unit, we got to have have and use contraband items during free time, even our personal electronics and cables when program was over. We were even allowed to shave, albeit it was with a staff member with their foot in the door and you did it out of a sink. Residential was an actual house in Pasadena where I slept in a real bed. I stayed in a beautiful area and my team cleared me for daily walks with a mental health worker. I got to see downtown Pasadena both with my fellow patients and by myself near the end of my time there. 

But it dragged on forever.

I felt stuck. Technically I was, because my weight plateaued. That wasn’t good enough for them. I HAD to be at a healthy BMI. I also didn’t help myself when I’d get frustrated and fight.

In my first couple days at the house, I remember throwing an absolute fit because I just wanted to go home. At that point, I had been over 75-80 miles from home (with California traffic on top of it) for two months. I’d been away from my husband for four months thanks to deployment. My friends and family were too far away to visit me. But the thing that broke my heart was leaving Athena by herself so many times I was certain she felt abandoned. I missed her so much. All of this compacted until I snapped one night. I went off on the therapist saying that I was only there to learn skills in a kitchen and that’s it. I was overly confident and over treatment cuz I had arrived at the residential house and completed a dinner outing no problem. What more could I have to do?

The more I fought, the more stuck I got. I was in serious denial throughout treatment. This made me fight with everyone. I fought with my treatment team. I fought with Lance. I fought with other patients. But most of all, I fought with myself. I wasn’t aware how serious things were to everyone until I stopped fighting. I was going nowhere fighting the process, but it took me a while to take the process seriously. There were times where I felt like I was simply playing their game, something I had done to get me out of my second mental health inpatient. Lance had to cut to the chase and tell me that I was wasting people’s time if I didn’t take it seriously and I actually needed that. In time, they got me to believe everything, to take it seriously, to accept what was wrong and what I needed to do. I left Reasons feeling confident in who I was and what I had done.

But Sharp Mesa Vista’s eating disorder program wasn’t for me. It was never a good fit for me. I should’ve know when one of my fellow Reasons patients came to join me and she bailed within the first day.

I struggled so much with every aspect of their treatment. Meals, processing, all their daily and weekly paperwork I had to complete and bring back. None of it felt natural. Again, I felt micromanaged because so much of what I ate and did during the day had to be tracked to the minute detail. I tried my hardest to fall in with everyone else, to make treatment’s requirement mesh with my home life, to understand what I needed to do. While I focused so much on the food, the rest of my mental health, my anxiety and depression especially grew into a bigger and bigger problem. This led to the suicidal thoughts I had managed to escape at Reasons being able to creep back into my life.

When I needed that program the most, they let me down. I was struggling more so than ever now that I was back home. Lance and I were trying to adapt to this new life we lived. We were both trying to recover. He had been clear across the world when he found out his wife tried to kill herself. I had just spent months away from home and now had to learn how to live a new life without the help I’d grown accustomed to. I tried to trust in the staff at my new program and talk to them about the things I struggled with. I tried to explain that while I was safe and I didn’t want to die, I still struggled with suicidal thoughts. They slammed the breaks, locked me in a nurses station after program and said I was being admitted because I was a danger to myself. “Wait, no, I’m safe! I won’t do anything, I’m just struggling with these thoughts. They won’t go away and I need help with that.” Nothing I said mattered. They heard “suicidal” and jumped to defcon 1. I called Lance and when he arrived, the program staff refused to let him see me. I could barely hand off some things for him to take home for me. I was trapped in a room with a staff member, being treated like I was an active threat to myself. I could hear Lance fighting with everyone trying to get me back and before I knew it, I was loaded up into an ambulance and sent to the very first hospital I went to when all my problems began. They were actually helpful to me. They had stepped up their game and I actually got a case worker who was willing to work with me and set things up for me to go home. After one night, I had a team meeting first thing where I explained everything and I was discharged same day.

In the end, what I needed was more focus on my mental health and less on the food. I needed to be able to live a normal life at home, something I couldn’t do when my life was ran by eating disorder treatment. My treatment team and I were both still concerned about eating regularly and not dropping below a stable, healthy weight, sure, but it wasn’t the only concern. My issue wasn’t the meals themselves, it was the anxiety that kept me from eating. When I went back to my original PHP, they helped me where I needed the most help. I was able to learn to apply coping skills I’d touched on at Reasons. I was able to address all of my mental illness struggles. Not just the food. As my world became clearer and more controllable, eating became less of an issue. To this day, I’ll still stay I struggle with an eating disorder. It’s not a lie. I can still catch myself restricting, subconsciously of course, and my weight dropping, but I know there is a deeper issue to address in order to fix that. I don’t need a meal plan, I don’t need exchanges. I need to understand what’s making me anxious and how I can cope. Nearly two years after I was first admitted, I’m still at a good weight. My mental health is being managed. I still struggle, but not as much. I haven’t had a suicidal thought in a year. It feels good to have my life back on track and preparing to start a new chapter in my life.

[gentle-reminder]

gentle reminder

please try your best to not be so hard on yourself - if you make a mistake, that’s okay, you’re human; keep growing and learning

[prittpack]

Can you guess who steals the bed after I leave for work?

[prittpack]

Yikes.