My therapist this week said I need to work on learning to accept situations and events. To learn to accept that things will happen, but that it doesn't have to change my life for the worse. To spend less time concentrating on how I can control everything that happens to me and more time controlling my reactions to what happens. She said to focus on the idea that I am not events. I am not a disease. I am not a circumstance. She said "you are not it, no matter what it is." And that because of that, I can control how I let it affect me.
I really wish it were so easy.
In fact, what's easiest for me is to just stop eating. Yes. Let's throw a little anorexia into the mix. Late last year I dropped a little over 30lbs in the space of 2 months. I honestly didn't know what I was doing at the time. I never really equated not eating with gaining control, but looking back, it's exactly what I was doing. My marriage was quickly dissolving, my friends were choosing sides (not mine), work was a never-ending battle of short staffing and homicidal patients, and I was basically torturing myself by getting up in the morning, either doing intern hours or ride-along hours for school for 8-10 hrs, then going home, changing, and going to work for 12. My depression was also back in full force. I made the excuse of just being too stressed to eat, or even forgetting. Sometimes it was that I was just too busy. In truth, I had started to develop a system. Starbucks coffee and Lifesaver candies. Once I knew I could sustain myself on it, it was almost like a game. How little can I get away with? All I really need is to keep my blood sugar up, stay awake, and stay hydrated. Candy, water, and coffee. Then the worst thing that could have happened, happened - my jeans were looser. I was able to wear tighter shirts and not feel gross about my stomach. The scrub pants that I used to have to wear my slimming underwear to get on, now fell off if they were untied. In short, I had accomplished in 2 months what I had tried for 5 years to do in all of the "convential" ways. Without realizing it, I had dropped from 160 to, at the lowest, 127 in less than 60 days.
It was a very conflicting time. I was finally becoming happy with how I looked, people were commenting, and yet I was terrified at what I may have been doing to my body on the inside, and was scared at how far it might go. It took a while to get back to being healthy. I started trading candy for Boost shakes. Eating the only meals that seemed appetizing, and many of them (Amy's Cheese Enchiladas). I also had a couple of diligent watchers, reminding me now and then that it was lunch time or dinner time (thank you, Ife & Georgi).
I worry about getting in that frame of mind again, and yet sometimes, I miss it. I had a focus and I was succeeding. While everything else crashed around me, here was something I was becoming good at, and seeing results that, superficially, made me happy.
Georgi laughs at how opposite we are. She eats when she's stressed out, I tend to try and starve myself.
So I guess my therapist's whole take-home message was this: my old ways of dealing with shit have obviously not worked for me. With all that I'm facing now, and with all that I will surely have to face in the future, it is in my best interest to find something else to control. I can't control the world. I can't control what happens to me. But I can control how it makes me feel, and how I let it make me feel. So we'll see what happens.
Until I get to that point, she taught me a little relaxation technique where I take deep breaths and hum Happy Birthday. Something about scrambling my brain.
I really wish it were so easy.
In fact, what's easiest for me is to just stop eating. Yes. Let's throw a little anorexia into the mix. Late last year I dropped a little over 30lbs in the space of 2 months. I honestly didn't know what I was doing at the time. I never really equated not eating with gaining control, but looking back, it's exactly what I was doing. My marriage was quickly dissolving, my friends were choosing sides (not mine), work was a never-ending battle of short staffing and homicidal patients, and I was basically torturing myself by getting up in the morning, either doing intern hours or ride-along hours for school for 8-10 hrs, then going home, changing, and going to work for 12. My depression was also back in full force. I made the excuse of just being too stressed to eat, or even forgetting. Sometimes it was that I was just too busy. In truth, I had started to develop a system. Starbucks coffee and Lifesaver candies. Once I knew I could sustain myself on it, it was almost like a game. How little can I get away with? All I really need is to keep my blood sugar up, stay awake, and stay hydrated. Candy, water, and coffee. Then the worst thing that could have happened, happened - my jeans were looser. I was able to wear tighter shirts and not feel gross about my stomach. The scrub pants that I used to have to wear my slimming underwear to get on, now fell off if they were untied. In short, I had accomplished in 2 months what I had tried for 5 years to do in all of the "convential" ways. Without realizing it, I had dropped from 160 to, at the lowest, 127 in less than 60 days.
It was a very conflicting time. I was finally becoming happy with how I looked, people were commenting, and yet I was terrified at what I may have been doing to my body on the inside, and was scared at how far it might go. It took a while to get back to being healthy. I started trading candy for Boost shakes. Eating the only meals that seemed appetizing, and many of them (Amy's Cheese Enchiladas). I also had a couple of diligent watchers, reminding me now and then that it was lunch time or dinner time (thank you, Ife & Georgi).
I worry about getting in that frame of mind again, and yet sometimes, I miss it. I had a focus and I was succeeding. While everything else crashed around me, here was something I was becoming good at, and seeing results that, superficially, made me happy.
Georgi laughs at how opposite we are. She eats when she's stressed out, I tend to try and starve myself.
So I guess my therapist's whole take-home message was this: my old ways of dealing with shit have obviously not worked for me. With all that I'm facing now, and with all that I will surely have to face in the future, it is in my best interest to find something else to control. I can't control the world. I can't control what happens to me. But I can control how it makes me feel, and how I let it make me feel. So we'll see what happens.
Until I get to that point, she taught me a little relaxation technique where I take deep breaths and hum Happy Birthday. Something about scrambling my brain.
This is your brain.
This is your brain on
the Happy Birthday
meditation.
the Happy Birthday
meditation.
Any questions?
1 comments:
You are a nut and I love you.
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