Therapy 22.08.22 // Ending Therapy Q1
What do you remember about yourself before you started therapy?
My life was over here [I drew a big circle shape in the air to one side with my hands] and from the outside everything looked great. I was being everything to everybody, doing all the things, fixing everyone’s problems, and looking like I had it all under control. People commented on how I never seemed to get stressed.
I had grown up with the idea that everything had to look perfect on the outside, and it didn’t matter what it cost you inside, as long as no one saw that. So I just ignored all my negative feelings. They were still there but I barely registered them or paid any attention to them. In fact, another idea I had grown up with was that the more difficult you made your life, but managed to keep it all still looking perfect, the “better” (on some arbitrary scale) you were doing. So I pushed myself relentlessly and the more things I managed to juggle and the more it cost me internally, the more my inner voice congratulated me.
Then in order to subconsciously deal with all the negative feelings, I had the eating “issues” (that’s all I would say they were), which were a completely separate bubble over her [I gestured a smaller bubble to the other side]. The restriction - well that wasn’t really an issue, I had grown up thinking that was normal and everyone did it. But the bingeing and throwing up, even I knew that wasn’t normal. And what happened before I started therapy was that the two bubbles -life and eating issues - were starting to collide and I couldn’t keep them apart no matter how hard I tried.
I didn’t think the two bubbles were related to each other. Life was just life and had to stay looking super organised, efficient and under control, and the eating issues weren’t really that bad, they were just a quirk I had had for years that I didn’t even want to acknowledge. I was not at all connected with the idea that they were an actual eating disorder. I was relentlessly setting higher and higher standards for myself, while also not having (but maybe longing for) any sort of nurturing inner voice.
That was where I was when my friends took matters in hand and booked me into therapy.
