WARNING! This may be a long post! But it will be full of good information!
I had my back to back sessions with Anna and all we talked about was my phone calls with my parents. I was so missed up emotionally by what they said to me. I'll tell you briefly what happened and it will blow your mind. In December my Dad called and told me that "We have decided not to talk to you until you heal from your past". You can only imagine what I have gone through emotionally being a child who grew up not feeling loved by her parents. This was total confirmation of what I have felt all my life. My parents are a big part of my healing, how was I going to be able to heal with their help? When we talked I found out that I misinterpreted what they said. They said that they felt like I took that statement wrong because they hadn't heard from me and they figured I was mad and was going to show them. If they only knew how many times I though about ending my life. Their words to me when I called were "This could have ended a week after it started if you would have called. We had to use some tough love on you." O.M.G.!!!! Anna, Mark and Kathy all flipped out on this one. Let me tell you it totally flipped me out since I was so upset to the point I wanted to die because of the rejection I felt! There is so much more to this but that is the jest of everything. I don't want to spend write about 3 months of pain! Just trust me. I will say this and I told both my parents and team "Our relationship will never be the same. I don't trust my parents, I don't know what I can say or can't say because of fear of setting them off and I'm also scared of them." I have even more to work through now. So you can imagine the tears and crying that happened during that 2 hour session. I'm still working through it.
On to Kathy's visit...
Of course she wanted to hear about my visit to Anna and where I was emotionally. I ended the last blog stating that I was starting to play around with what I was doing. I was eating a few chips when I packed Mark's lunch and not recording it and I told Kathy what I was doing and I told her that I was getting bored with it all. She asked me if I had turned it into a diet and I sat there for a few minutes and realized that was exactly right. Eating the same breakfasts with dread, bored with the sandwich and chips, starting to eat out again too much and it felt like a cycle. She then gave me an analogy of being on the yellow brick road. She said that I had come to a split in the road and I had a choice to make. I could either go on the road leading to the right which would circle all they way back around to where I started or I could choose to take the left path and continue on. Let me tell you how my brain locked into that picture. It really caused me to think hard that next week as to where I was at and where was I going to go. What path would I chose? I knew down in my heart that I didn't want to go and have to do this same work all over again. That is what I hated about every single diet that failed me. I knew deep down in my heart that I wanted to continue on but what would I really do. Take the road most comfortable and cycle back around? It blew my mind for the week.
Another thing that she did was to get out a graph of the stages to recovery to a eating disorder. She wanted me to feel better and this is what she told me:
Stage 1 is the jagged line going up and this is where the eating disordered begins. She told me that she has no doubt with the history of my parents mine started in my childhood.
Stage 2 is Denial. This was all the years that I was in denial about my weight. I told her I can remember telling everyone that I couldn't understand why I was overweight because I just didn't eat that much. These were the years that I hid my binges and in my mind these episodes really didn't happen.
Stage 3 is all the years of dieting, gaining and losing weight, trying everything to get back to being normal.
Stage 4 is the jagged line going down and Kathy says that this is where I am at in my recovery. She said that the jagged line is accepting this disorder and realizing that dieting doesn't work and you need something more. She said this started when I called her and told her that I lost the same 100 pounds 3 times and I was one my fourth and that I didn't want to ever have to lose this same 100 lbs again! The jagged edge represents the journey of learning, of binging, of getting back on track and working hard till the process becomes second nature to me and the lapses of binging become very few and far between and I know exactly how to recover. She again told me that I would binge again and that I won't be free from it but I will learn how to manage the disease. She also told me that where I was at was totally up to me as to how hard I wanted to work to get to full recovery.
I just sat and cried as I couldn't believe that I was actually on the road to recovery. I'm telling you that was a big eye opener to me. I will never forget the graph she showed me out of a huge notebook that she called "her bible". This graph above was the closest I could find on the web. I wanted you to see it. Is that cool or what?
I left her office motivated. That night Mark and I went out to dinner and then to the grocery store to pick up a salad that Kathy told me about along with a tomato and a avacado for a different lunch and some things for some different snacks. It is still just so hard to lose that diet mindset. It's coming but I have to admit that I struggle with it. Kathy says that I have so much to undo and that I will make it. my weight has been stable and that is a good thing. She promises there will be a time where I will start losing it at record speed when I learn what mindful really is. I'm working on it and I have come a good long way. I will tell you that I love it more than dieting and fretting and "being bad". Kathy wants that word out of my vocabulary. I am NOT BAD!
I thought that I would catch you up over 2 weeks but I can see that it would be a novel. I am going to write during the day about this past week's visit and I will publish it tonight before I go to bed and we will be caught up again and continue this journey to recovery!
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